AI-generated transcript of Mystic Vallery Voter Forum

[Kevin Harrington]: Check mic 1, 2. Mic 1, 2. Check mic 1, 2. Check mic. Check mic 1, 2.

[SPEAKER_04]: All right, can you grab the other one of these?

[Kevin Harrington]: Welcome to the Mystic Valley Voters Forum here in the Bonsignor room at Medford Public Library. The event will begin shortly, so please make your way to your seats as soon as you can. And we'll be with you in only a few minutes. Thank you.

[Meghan Searl]: Testing. Okay, if everyone could get settled and take their seats. There are a few reserved seats in the front if you'd like to see or hear more clearly. And before we start, just a note, looks like we have a few people still in the hallway. There are a lot of people still coming in. Okay. Just wait another few seconds as people make their way in from the hallway. OK, so just a quick note before we get started. You may notice that there are four people up in the front here, four candidates, and there are five candidates in the race. And we just wanted to say that Tom Hopcroft, the fifth candidate, was unable to commit to participating when we were planning this event. But we look forward to working with him after the forum is over to share his responses to tonight's questions. and I'm going to hand this over to Alan Jalen.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Thanks. Thank you. So I'm Alan Jalen. I want to welcome you, welcome the candidates and welcome the audience to this first, apparently first ever Mystic Valley Voters Forum. The sponsoring organizations are the NAACP of Mystic Valley, Medford for Palestine, Mystic Mashup Indivisible, Our Revolution Medford and Safe Medford. Thank you all. Oh, and I've also been asked to say that there's water backed by the entry over there, if anybody wants some. We have four candidates here. I'm going to read their names in alphabetical order. Cambridge City Councilor and Vice Mayor Burhan Azim. State Representative Christine Barber. Somerville City Councilor Matt McLaughlin. And State Representative Erika Eiderhoven. You know, during most of a campaign, you only see one candidate at a time. And that candidate probably is not going to get a chance to respond to what other candidates are saying. Also, in a campaign, and I've been in many, you talk about your strong points, right? But voters may have other priorities besides what you are mostly, what you have mostly accomplished. So that's a strength of coming to a forum. They're all going to be here. They're going to be talking with each other. And they'll be talking about the topics that the sponsors feel should be the strong points as opposed to whatever they happen to have succeeded in doing. I do want to be clear that I'm moderating this forum, but my role is limited to that. I mean, obviously, I am the current senator's husband. This is not Pat's forum. It's not my forum. I didn't write the questions, none of that. I'm just glad it's happening. Oh, one more thing, flash photography permitted during the introductions at the beginning of the forum, which is coming up in a couple of minutes, and also during concluding statements at the end, or near the end, but non-flash photography, you can do that at any time. Okay, we're gonna start with two minutes for each candidate to introduce themselves and to say why people should support them. And the order is being chosen randomly by this online wheel spin program, which I have never seen before. To me it kind of feels like overkill, but it's fun. So who is it? Yeah. Okay. Erica, do you need this mic?

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: Sure. Are we standing or sitting? Stand. Yes, the people say stand. I will stand. Awesome. Okay. Good evening, everyone. I'm Erica Eiderhoven. I'm excited to be running for your next state senator to fight for Beacon Hill that prioritizes our community over corporate interests. Growing up, I learned from my mom to fight with courage and clear convictions. She immigrated to the U.S. on her own as an immigrant, as well as raised me as a single mom, and I witnessed her and her union fight vigorously on behalf of aviation workers and flight attendants against corporate greed. This is where I learned that we do not win by asking nicely. We win by organizing and building power and making it so powerful people cannot tell us no. And that is the fight that I've brought into the legislature as your state rep. We have one of the least transparent, least productive legislatures in the country. Until our recent win, the vast majority of votes that lawmakers took were behind closed doors. I, alongside many of you, believed that that was wrong. That is why almost 10 years ago I organized across the state with community organizations and unions on the outside and with my colleagues, with state reps and legislators on the inside to fight for make all votes publicly available regardless of where they're taken, regardless if they are in committee. And we've won this. This is something that I was told was not possible on Beacon Hill. we were able to win because we organized. And because of these changes in transparency and more accountability, we are able to put more pressure to ensure that we are passing legislation to protect immigrants, to lower our energy bills, and invest money into a clean transition, as well as ensure that we are getting the funding we need for our schools and the MBTA. But our work here is not done. In this political crisis that we are living in, we here in the Massachusetts legislature, we are the last line of defense against Trump's cruel, racist, and inhumane policies. We need to be doing everything we can to ensure that we are fighting for affordable housing, child care for all, universal health care, and a livable climate by making sure that corporations and the very wealthy are paying their fair share. so that we can ensure that all of us, all of us in our community, belong here and are able to live with the dignity and respect that they deserve. And with that, I humbly ask for your support. Thank you.

[SPEAKER_13]: We're ready to go? Cool. All right. Hi, guys. I'm Burhan Azim. I'm the Vice Mayor of Cambridge. A little bit about me is that I was born in Pakistan. My parents and I moved here when I was very young. My mom worked at a deli basically my whole childhood, and my dad worked at a deli basically my whole childhood, and my mom worked at Dunkin'. And then I feel like I won the lottery twice, which is that, you know, when I was born in Pakistan, my youngest sister was born, she was born premature, and my parents got very, very desperate. They were like, how will we ever pay her medical bills? And then we got the visa lottery, which was actually a vestige of the civil rights era, of something that was really predominantly pushed by black Americans, but ended up helping our family, you know, get a trip to the U.S. And then later, I was just naturally pretty good at math. And then I got a full scholarship and a stipend to MIT, where they offered me $3,000 a semester to attend. And it was very, very generous in the way that I attended there. I've always been focused on, how do you pass that generosity forward? It almost feels like when you've won the lottery ticket twice, that you owe it to do good work. And so I worked as an EMT. I ran for city council. I became then the youngest city councilor ever elected, and now serve as vice mayor. And I would say that I'm really, really different, I think, than most politicians. And I'm kind of hyper-focused on a few big things, which is I like to say my priorities are your budget line, which is housing, transit, child care, and utility costs. And if you watch my videos, you see I maybe talk too much about some of those. But I would say that by focusing, we've made a tremendous impact. We're on all four of those areas. We've made profound changes over the last three terms in Cambridge, where whether you love my work or you don't in Cambridge, everyone says, no one is upset. They're like, Burhan, you haven't done enough in City Hall. If anything, people are like, you've done a little too much. And wouldn't that be a nice problem to have in the State House? Like, I really, really believe that we have all of this wealth, opportunity, and Massachusetts is a wonderful place to live. If only we could fix a few big problems, we could really get it unstuck. And I'm too disappointed sometimes that we're going to have a great Democratic administration next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. And do we really believe that it will solve these big challenges? I feel like we can.

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: Hello everyone, my name is Matt McLaughlin. I'm your cousin from Somerville. I grew up fairly close by here. I grew up in a family of five in a single-family household where my mother cared for the five of us growing up. Fourth generation Somerville resident. I grew up in a time that many of you who grew up around here as well referred to it as slummerville. It was not an easy place to grow up. It was a tough place. I lost a lot of friends from substance abuse, from crime and violence. People that I grew up with who did succeed in life still could not afford to live in the community that they wanted to grow up in. These struggles forced me to join the army in 2003, where I served two tours in Iraq. And while I was gone, I lost more friends to opiate abuse and crime and violence than I saw in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I came home to serve my community and overcame these obstacles, put myself through Harvard and Tufts University, the first in my family to graduate from college. And I've been serving East Somerville and the city of Somerville for the past 14 years, serving three years as the council president. Some of you know me, some of you, a lot of you probably don't know me at all, but you have been impacted by my work, and my work has impacted this region. I introduced the Welcome in City Ordinance to Somerville, which codified sanctuary city status and ensured that ICE and the Somerville Police do not cooperate with ICE. That legislation was copied by Cambridge and Medford. I introduced Narcan to Somerville and the first responders when people had no idea what Narcan was, and elected officials didn't know there was an opioid epidemic. You can now buy Narcan over the counter anywhere in Massachusetts and anywhere in this country, and it has saved thousands of lives, the lives of people that I know personally. I started the charter reform process, which overhauled our 100-year-old constitution. Took me five years to do it. Cambridge and Medford did the same as well. And I've been a leader and champion to address affordability, which is the number one issue of my campaign because it's been the top issue in my life that has affected me personally and affected the lives of people I care about. I'm running based on a movement to change this state. I've changed the region. I want to take it to the statehouse and make sure everyone can afford to dream in Massachusetts.

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for organizing this forum and having it here. We love this library and all that it represents and the community coming together to help build this a few years ago. So thank you for having all of us here. I'm Christine Barber and I'm a fighter. So being a progressive leader doesn't just mean being the loudest one in the room or having the right values. It means being able to deliver for our communities. And I've done that work. I led and passed the Work and Family Mobility Act, which allowed people to get a driver's license regardless of their immigration status after a decades-long fight. When Trump was elected this last time, I was the first one to file the Dignity Not Deportations Law, which stops ICE from working with our police departments, and we've gotten that passed in both houses. I work with Senator Jalen to pass pay equity and salary range transparency, so workers actually know what the salaries are when they're applying. I led and I wrote a law that passed to get rid of co-pays for insulin, inhalers, and heart medication to make sure people can get the care that they need. And as chair of the Environment Committee, we just passed in the House a $3 billion bond bill, which is the largest climate resiliency money Massachusetts has ever invested, and I'm really proud of that work. And here locally, I led the effort and got funded and built the Green Line Extension, which is the first expansion of public transit in decades in Massachusetts. But the threats are here now. Families are being targeted. Immigrants in our community are at risk. A federal government is coming after our schools, our healthcare, our basic rights. This is not a time, this is not a drill. It's not a time for a talk, it's time for a senator who can actually deliver. Everyone in this race has progressive values. I'm the only one here who has passed statewide legislation at the state level, and I'm ready to do that in the Senate on day one, and I'm ready to deliver for Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, and Winchester. Thank you.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Thank you. So now we're going to have discussions among the candidates about five topics. And here are the ground rules for that. Each candidate will have up to two minutes to talk about each topic in the first round. And the order is going to be chosen randomly by this wheel over here. Except that no candidate can be asked to be the first on more than two topics. When everyone has spoken then candidates can choose if they want to to speak for another 30 seconds on that same topic. For example if they want to respond to what somebody else said and I will pick the order for those follow ups and I hope I'll be able to do it probably as randomly as that. No personal attacks, please. I don't think we need to say that. But if somebody, you know, directly criticizes another candidate's record, then I have the option to give that person another 30 seconds to rebut or to explain. At most, I can do that once per topic for any one candidate. I don't think it would happen more than once. The co-sponsors also asked me to list a few rules of etiquette. No interrupting speakers. Respectful and courteous language and tone, please. No side conversations. No personal attacks or offensive language. We do have marshals, but I'm sure none of this is going to be a problem. And then after, yeah, after we've gone through all five topics, each candidate will have up to 60 seconds for closing remarks. But that's not the end of the forum, because after that we'll have a short break and then we'll go to a public Q&A. So now let's start with the first topic, which is affordability. And this topic comes from Mystic Mashup Indivisible. There's an affordability crisis sweeping Massachusetts and the nation, from housing to utility bills to universal child care and beyond. Each election cycle, candidates and elected officials talk about the need to tackle this problem. But it only seems to get worse. Can each of you please speak to why we have not been able to solve this problem? And what specific actions will you take at the Statehouse that you believe will make a real and equitable impact on tackling rising costs in Massachusetts? And our first speaker is... What?

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: All right. Why hasn't this problem been solved? One, it's a difficult one, and two, there's so many obstacles in the way, and we as residents and citizens and as a government get in our own way lots of times. There's a hundred ways to solve the affordability crisis. Everybody wants to do it their way, or they don't want to do it in their neighborhood, or they don't want something to happen. There's so many ways to address the affordability crisis, and I also think there haven't been enough true champions at the statehouse who have focused laser on this particular issue. It has been my laser focus for decades. A lot of the things we've done in Somerville, I would like to do at the state level. We created an affordable housing overlay, which guarantees that affordable housing can be built as of right, because even in Somerville, Massachusetts, where everyone now values affordable housing, there was always an obstacle, a lawsuit, a variance that got in the way of building affordable housing. I think we should do that statewide. I introduced the triple-decker ordinance in Somerville, which was very difficult for me to pass even there. It took me five years to pass that, because people didn't want to allow three-family housing as of right in their neighborhood. We're now doing that now. It's the top housing that's being built in this community. It's a historic structure that's unique to New England. And I'd like to get up to the statehouse and allow more three-family housing and change the building code to make it cheaper and easier to build housing. I'd like to explore social housing, which I'm sure some of you know, many of you don't. European style affordable housing that's affordable for all income levels and eventually helps pay for itself over time. And I also do think there's room for dense market rate housing close to transit. We need to do all of these things. We need to take every approach. Nothing should be off the table. And we can look at cities like Austin, Texas that got an 18% drop in their rental rate. You can look at cities like Vienna that have housing that's affordable for all income levels. This is a man-made problem. It has solutions, human-made solutions that we can address. We need someone who has lived experience, who understands that this is a true struggle for people, and I'm that candidate.

[SPEAKER_13]: Do we change colors every time?

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: No, I'm blue. Yeah, that's how I can tell. OK, so with the issue of the affordability crisis, this is something that relates to all of the issues that happen on Beacon Hill, which is that corporate interests get prioritized over you. We see this with the health care lobby, which is the biggest spender in terms of supporting campaign finance funds to House leadership and Senate leadership, as well as the governor. You also see that with housing, with particularly some of these mega landlords, which, by the way, just this month announced they're going to merge. to make a almost 200,000 unit owned landlord that is pushing to impact the laws that are passing on Beacon Hill. And finally, the biggest one that's really clear, we just saw this year, is around Eversource and National Grid driving up your energy prices. We had a bill come forward, and it was thanks to the transparency that we were able to stop, both with the caucus on the inside, as well as with climate justice groups on the outside, to stop a bill that was full of poison pills, but also ways for Eversource and National Grid to keep getting more profit from your energy bill. That is just frankly wrong to do that, but it's also wrong to call it an affordability bill when it wasn't doing that, and it was gutting all of our climate commitments that we had. We were able to remove all except for two poison pills from that bill. Thanks to that fight, we were able to engage around, again, this was a bill that I've never seen before where if the House leadership supports it, it gets stopped. That happened for the first time thanks to transparency. And that's how all legislation should be, is that we should be able to influence what's happening with our community groups and with climate justice groups and environmental justice groups leading the way alongside lawmakers. That's the kind of fight that I've been fighting, and we need to ensure that we continue this, especially with what happened with the rent control ballot question. It was sued for spurious reasons, and they were throwing everything at the wall, and they are going to try to throw everything both in the legislative chamber as well as in the judicial branch and the executive branch. And so that's the kind of work that we need to continue to do to fight, to build up the people power, to change these policies. With respect to, how much time do I have left? Can I see, okay. Okay, okay. We'll keep talking. Thank you.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Oh, what happened here? Oh, because there's only two people left. Okay.

[SPEAKER_13]: So I have a little bit of a different take on this, which is that if you want to talk about the affordability crisis and you look at the biggest expenses, some of the ones that I listed before, which is housing, transit, either it takes forever to get anywhere or it's super expensive, utility costs, childcare, they actually have something in common, which is they involve the physical world. And you think about it and you kind of see it pop up time and time again, which is the Green Line expansion. We actually got money for it. But it was also the most expensive light rail project in world history. And then we had to shut it down a few weeks after, because they put the gauges on wrong. And you talk about housing, and it's like, we passed the MBTA Communities Act, and we passed all these pieces of legislation that are going to build housing. And then you look at the metrics, the census data for this year, and we're ranked 50 out of 50 for building housing. We could not be 51st, but if we could, we might be there. And you look at utility costs, and it was like we pride ourselves on green and renewable, and yet 75% of our electricity produced is from natural gas and fossil fuels. And so it's not just about writing good things happening, it's also about making sure the details actually work. And I think everyone sees the world through their profession a little bit, right? And I'm an engineer, and I look at the state house, and I see basically zero scientists or engineers just writing, let there be transit, and then you look at it, and there's no transit. And so I think that a lot of the details really do deeply matter. There was an article published when I got elected that said for 30 years Cambridge tried to do universal pre-K, and then it just happened. And you would think that universal pre-K is just a money problem, but it's also like finding the classrooms, figuring out how do you not put zero to three K providers out of school or out of business because they also provide pre-K services, right? And so there were all these details, and then it just happened. But it wasn't the money that was the difference, it was the details. And I really do think you can make a profound difference by learning to love the commas and the grammar and these little things. And it's my love letter to policy.

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: No, the wheel's great. Don't worry about it. So affordability is obviously incredibly complex, but I agree that it is because these are policies that have been written in our state and federal and local government, and we need to make sure that when they are rewritten that the right people are in the room. Housing is the biggest crisis in affordability, the one that hits home for most people. It's personal to me. I'm a renter. I rented in Somerville for over 25 years. I'm the only renter in this race. And it is very rare that renters are there when we are writing policies about displacement, about affordability, and about who gets what piece of the pie. So I'm working on real protections for renters and homeownership opportunities for people who have too often been locked out. So what that looks like is making sure that we have laws that take these things into account. So I doubled funding for Homebase, which is a program that gets people out of shelters and into supportive housing, which has made a huge impact on thousands of people's lives. I delivered fair housing protections and a law that I wrote that stops discrimination. There's a new office that looks at fair housing discrimination. I authored the ADU or the accessory dwelling unit by right law at the state level. So now homeowners can add units in their property to quickly bring on more units and there are studies that that has been successful even just in the last two years since it passed. And I did file and work on the MBTA communities law and that is also making inroads. Communities that have not built housing for the last 20 years are starting to do that and looking at building housing near transit, which is exactly what we need to be doing. The fight right now, especially, is on rent control. And what happened at the ballot was excruciating, but I just filed an amendment to an economic development bill we're working on this week to do a task force to take what we learned on rent control and move it forward. And I'll keep fighting for it in the Senate. Thank you.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Thank you. Now, who wants another 30 seconds?

[SPEAKER_13]: So I started Abundant Housing Massachusetts and Welcoming Neighbors Network, which are state and national orgs that do housing policy, very involved with the Road to Housing Act that's hopefully gonna get signed by the president. I wanted to talk a little bit about the details. Like the MBTA Community Act is a great example of something that was meant to maximize conflict and minimize impact. I had someone who spent five years organizing in Milton and all these towns, in Marblehead, you might have seen the Marblehead guy, that was Abundant Housing who got that screenshot and posted it, right? All these communities have done malicious compliance where they don't actually build units and the starter homes ballot question I put forth in comparison will probably build more units than all of the MBTA Communities Act just by legalizing smaller single-family homes. The MBTA Communities Act basically asked Cambridge and Somerville to do basically nothing, asked a lot of, well, more details you can ask me about later.

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: I'll add to what you were saying, and I agree. I would say, you know, being city councilors, we see what happens on the ground level when it comes to affordable housing, and the MBTA Communities Act was a great step forward, but cities are finding out how to not build housing, and that's not what we should be doing. I also see on the ground level, dealing with inspectional services, how often you can't even make repairs to your three-family house without having to get a sprinkler system and get all these bells and whistles, things that weren't needed 100 years ago when this housing, very same housing stock was built, we should investigate the building code. Those are the small things that we could change that would dramatically increase the productivity of housing.

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: Yes, so something that I think gets left out of this conversation a lot is actual affordable housing. So not just building housing, but housing that is reasonably priced and affordable. That's something I delivered on in Somerville and Medford. So the Clarendon Hill project, which is public housing, but also new working units, I've gotten a million dollars for those projects. Millions of dollars for Walkling Court, which we're moving forward on rebuilding. housing for people with disabilities and new housing there that it will be deeply affordable and a project in Winter Hill, the old Star Market site, which I've got money for to also have that be affordable housing. So really being intentional and getting state resources to make sure we are building and making it affordable and having a senator who can deliver that.

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: I spoke a lot about utility bills, which is regulated by the state, and we have the third highest utility bills in the country, which, again, is a statehouse decision. I also want to say a few words, because with housing, child care, and health care, it is about austerity. It is the fact that in Massachusetts, we have cut taxes more than any other state except for Wyoming and Alaska since the Reagan years. And that is why we are always struggling to cut corners, figure out where to put money, when really, we as a state, as one of the richest states in the richest country in the world, can't afford, if we had a progressive tax system, to pay for universal childcare and pre-K, pay for ensuring that we have healthcare for all, and as well as investing in affordable housing. Thank you.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: All right, thank you. The next topic is racial disparity, which comes from the Mystic Valley NAACP. While the second Middlesex district includes some of the state's most diverse communities racial disparities in housing criminal justice education health and economic opportunity persist throughout Middlesex County in terms of housing. Black applicants for home loans in Middlesex County are 138% more likely to be denied loans than their white counterparts, and that's from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act dataset. These disparities also show up in arrest records. Since 2020, black individuals who make up about 6% of the Middlesex population have comprised 16 to 18% of annual arrests. And the data for that is provided by the municipalities making up Middlesex County. These are just a few examples of the ways in which racism continues to operate. So, as candidates, are you aware of these disparities? And what's more important, what specific steps would you take to reduce them? And the first person?

[u1Dt2VrL-v4_SPEAKER_13]: I've gotten word from the organizers, we're ditching the wheel.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Oh, we are.

[u1Dt2VrL-v4_SPEAKER_13]: I love it, but it's okay.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: I love it.

[u1Dt2VrL-v4_SPEAKER_13]: I'm going to start with a statement from Christine Barbera, and we're going to work our way down towards it.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: I think that's a pity, I like that.

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: So throughout all of my work, whether it's in public health, on climate, on transportation, the disparities felt, especially by black and brown folks in our communities, are where I put most of my focus. And it's here right at home. So whether it's the children who have more polluted air because they live next to I-93, or the families who have to choose between medication or groceries, These are all equity issues that I'm very aware of and I appreciate bringing it up at this forum. On health equity, I drafted a law that ends co-pays for insulin inhalers and heart medications and we worked with groups to choose those because those are chronic illnesses that disproportionately impact black and brown and low income communities and are ones that prevent people from staying healthy. And that is a law that I'm proud that it was not easy with the pharma lobby, and we got it passed last year, and it is making sure that people can get the care that they need. On air quality, I drafted a bill on making sure that areas that are pollution hotspots, so like in my district, the Mystic Housing right next to 93, they have much worse health outcomes because they live next to a highway. And I have a bill that would work on remediation and look at hotspots around the state, especially areas that have been overburdened by pollution. These are equity issues. I was proud to work on police reform a number of years ago to start to really make a change in how we look at policing and how we police certain communities and there is much more to do there but this is all part of the work from transit to policing to health care that I want to continue doing as a senator.

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: All right, you can visibly see racial disparity throughout the second Middlesex, from west to east. I've been knocking the West Medford neighborhood, historically African-American community, talking to the elders there who told me how their families were able to afford this housing because they lived in a floodplain before the Amelia Earhart Dam came there, and that's the only reason they were able to have a community. that dam is now making it harder for people to live there because people want to live there. I represent East Somerville, which is bisected by I-93 and McGrath Highway, the heaviest concentration of immigrants in the community, highest respiratory rate issues in the state, traffic fatalities, air pollution. It's the only place remotely affordable in Somerville because of these issues. And when I grew up in Somerville, it was a place no one wanted to live. So poor people, people of color, working class people could afford to live there. Now people want to live there, and we have to leave. So you see this everywhere across America, the economic disparities that's happening. It's always affecting low-income people the most. And we need to do more to address these issues, to answer the questions directly. Something I did in Somerville years ago was help introduce the core program to Somerville, which was the early precursor to alternative responses to police, jail diversion programs, making sure that we find a way to get people to not go through the prison system and to get help that they need. That's something that I care deeply about, seeing what happens in my own community, seeing friends who have been locked up in prison because they were desperate and because they had no hope and they had despair. economic equality, raising people up, giving them hope, giving them the opportunity to live their own lives, that will address a lot of these issues.

[SPEAKER_13]: So I think that there's a lot in there, but I'll just start with my general experience and then go to it, which is that, you know, I feel like you see it all over the place. You know, when I moved here, it was, you know, me and my two little sisters and my parents and the five of us moved in with another family. It was the 11 of us in a three bedroom. Whenever the landlord would come over, we'd hide in the basement because it was too many people illegally in this apartment. But you know, you kind of have to make it through. And we moved every year. And it was really, really hard. And so when I got elected to the city council, we get one direct staffer. I hired a tenant attorney. And the cases you would see come through our office were crazy. There was one case that we had recently of an elderly guy, 78, who finally got a place in housing. And he was very religious, a Muslim guy who didn't speak perfect English. And then every month, the housing authority had to come in and clean their apartments, check inspection, right? And then they took his Quran, and then they tossed it on the floor as part of this cleaning, and they were like, we're just moving it. And that might sound very small, but if you're a very devout Muslim, putting the Quran on the floor is a big deal, so he's freaked out. And then they said that, oh, he was being unsupportive, and they put in an eviction order, that he's not letting his room be cleaned. And then once I explained it, we did the translation, it was very easy to get past that. But you see that all over the time. And I think that my general philosophy has been, if you're thinking about downstream effects, it's actually to have a strange thing, a universal program. In Cambridge, we just had a conversation two Mondays ago about should we make universal pre-K means-tested so we can expand more people. I obviously support expanding it to more people, but I actually think it's really important that it's universal, both because it increases political support among people who are wealthier and benefit as well, and everyone is struggling with childcare. But also, it means that the program quality has to be high enough that people who are higher income also want to take it. And it means that your kids are going to go in there with kids of all different backgrounds and get to experience each other's lives. And I think that the biggest problem is not actually that we're malicious, but we're just ignorant. We don't see the struggles of other people. So universal programs are really important in that way.

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: We don't bite. Yeah, come on down. Yes, so with respect to racial disparities, we know this intersects with every issue that we deal with in the legislature, whether that be education, healthcare, mental health, housing, transportation, I could go on. I think one of the most jarring ones is that these racial disparities are getting worse. The gap between life expectancy between a white person and a black person is almost 10 years more, and that has gotten worse over time. Every three years, white individuals have a higher life expectancy of one year, and black individuals lose a year of life expectancy. And these are all policy decisions. And I also want to uplift that we do, as a society, use this knee-jerk reaction of using the criminal legal system, prisons, and jails as a response to solving social problems when those are not the solutions. We know that the solutions are investing in affordable housing, investing in education, in mental health, and removing and taking away money from public safety and putting it into these needed programs that we need for everyone. And again, this is why it has to be not just universal, but equitably funded. This is why I fought to increase funding for our public schools by $1.5 billion, where a vast majority of that is going to gateway cities and low-income communities that need that funding, because before, we had been funding public schools by property taxes, and that just is inequitable in itself. I also want to uplift to that another racial disparity is the wealth gap, that the average white household has $250,000 and the black household has zero. And that is why I filed legislation, passed an amendment, and got it into the tax bill to ensure that we reduced that estate tax cut that Governor Healey proposed that was the largest regressive ticket part of that $1 billion tax cut, we were able to bring that price tag a lot down because that is something that is going to exacerbate racial inequality, especially around wealth. And so we have to continue to ensure that we're fighting to put and address austerity issues in our state because that is what is going to actually build up generational wealth for everyone and for ensure that we have housing, healthcare, education for all of us. Thank you.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Thank you. Anybody have a few more things to say for 30 seconds?

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: I want to continue the conversation about where we find ourselves with inequality, where so much of the racial inequality does come down to wealth inequality and corporations not paying their fair share. So I filed a bill. We call it GILTI, or corporate fair share. And GILTI stands for global intangible low taxed income. It's kind of cute that it stalls out guilty. That is a real thing at the federal level that taxes corporations that hide their money offshore. And we can tax that more here in Massachusetts and bring in significant income and revenue to pay for the things we need in our communities.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Anybody else? Don't have to. OK. Do you want to? Yeah. OK.

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: I guess I wanted to uplift, because I spoke about austerity twice now, but I often get asked as a democratic socialist, how are you going to pay for it? And I want to add on, in addition to the bill that I was happy to file with Rep. Barber on Guilty, we also need to push for more progressive revenue, because we have fought and won the millionaires tax, which is a 4% surtax on every dollar earned over a million dollars. But even after that tax increase was passed, people making over a million dollars still pay a smaller share of their income in state taxes than the rest of us. And so we need to change that to have it be a more progressive tax and that can bring in billions of more dollars if we had an actual progressive tax code.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: So we're going to do one more topic and then we're going to take a short break. So the next topic is. Palestine and Local Policies, and this topic comes from Medford for Palestine. On June 23rd, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel is deliberately targeting children in Gaza to destroy the Palestinian group in whole or in part. Additionally, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Amnesty International, and human rights organizations, including Physicians for Human Rights Israel, have characterized Israel's military campaign in Gaza as a genocide. American voters have increasingly made candidates' positions on this issue a deciding factor, as seen in recent elections in New York City and, I could add, in Denver. Last fall, the city of Medford passed a values-based investment ordinance to end investments in fossil fuel, private prisons, war manufacturing companies, and in companies complicit in human rights abuses, including genocide. Similarly, the Somerville City Council is debating a bill that's in line with a ballot measure passed by Somerville residents, calling on the city to end investments in companies that are complicit in Israel's genocide, apartheid, and illegal occupation of Palestine. There are similar efforts at the State House. So here's the question. Do you believe Israel's actions in Gaza constitute genocide? And how does that belief inform your position on investment policies like those being debated in Medford, Somerville, and at the State House? And are you going to bring back the wheel? No? No wheel. No wheel. Okay.

[Unidentified]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_13]: Um, well, I usually focus on local issues, but I'll make an exception this time. Um, which is, I, I think it's undeniable at this point. I mean, 75,000 Palestinians have been killed, and you see the fastest settlement expansion in, uh, I think Israeli history at this, uh, point. And, you know, I think I saw, like, um, Ben Gavir on Twitter being like, for every Israeli woman that cries, a thousand people in Lebanon have to burn. or a lot of thousands of Lebanese women have to cry and Lebanon has to burn. And so I think that, you know, I think that, you know, my experience has been that like, you know, I was born in Pakistan and like, you know, immigrated here. And many times I'm a very proud American. I don't have my other suit, but it has like American flags in it. But also it's been, you know, seeing, you know, the U.S. and Afghanistan, and then move out, and then the Taliban still in power, and you see all the horrible things happen there. In Iraq, I think both it was, like, started on illegitimate terms, and then 500,000 people in Iraq died because of it. And I feel like I sometimes wish that we could just, like, leave the Middle East alone a little bit. I would say in the State House, you know, I think that the priority for me is, like, thinking about, like, how can we really dramatically increase democratic power? Which is that for 40 years, Democrats were unbeatable in the US House of Congress. And this year, we might have a blue wave. But we are going to win the House by 5 to 10 votes. And I think that should really scare us. Because if this election was in five or six years from now, we wouldn't win the House. And that is horrifying. And you look at it, and Florida, in my life, in a generation, went from having eight congressional votes to having 28. And Massachusetts has barely budged. And what I would love to see is that the way I think I can enable us having really great policy at the federal level is by building so much housing that Massachusetts goes from nine congressmen to having 29 congressmen. Imagine having 29 out on a press lease in Congress, right? I think that that is what a permanent majority is made of, and I think that is my focus in the State House.

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: Who's going? Who's up?

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: Okay, yes, so I believe that the ongoing genocide, illegal occupation, and apartheid in Palestine committed by the state of Israel is real, and it is something that we all as citizens, residents, taxpayers need to do everything we can to stop what is happening, because we know what is happening would not be possible if it were not for our tax dollars being sent to fund this, as well as our own investments being sent to fund what is the atrocities that are happening in that region. I believe this is also a state and local issue. That's why I filed the bill to divest our state pensions from any company that is providing weapons to the state of Israel. And I believe that I'm the only legislator to support or any candidate in this race to support what has been happening and speak out at the press conference with Medford's values-aligned ordinance, which we know this model of divestment and And boycotting is something we've done with the climate movement, with fossil fuels, with prison labor, and it should absolutely be applied if there's an ongoing genocide. I also want to uplift, too, that Somerville for Palestine's yes on three ballot question got more votes than votes for our current mayor. It was the most popular thing on the ballot, and that's something that we need to ensure that we're fighting to make that ordinance become law and that we are not watering that down. And that's something I will continue to fight and push for because it also informs what we need to pass at the state level. I am struck that I was the only candidate in this race to go to the Somerville for Palestine forum and to answer questions. We know that this is a direly important issue to our communities. We see that in the election results. But it's also direly important for Democratic voters. And we've seen time and time again Democrats who are in elected office not be in touch with their voters in terms of the issues that are most important to them. I will keep engaging with my constituents on this issue and with voters across the board around this ongoing atrocities happening. Yeah. Thank you.

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: So to me, the worth of human life does not depend on where that life is lived. The principle does not bend from one country to the next. So if we look at the world right now, in Gaza, tens of thousands of civilians, children have been killed, families starving, hospitals gone. And the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu. In other parts of the world, the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the internment of Uyghurs in China, ethnic violence in Darfur. I don't apply a loyalty test based on one region. I'm looking at atrocity in any part of the world. But as a state legislator, I can say plainly that our country has laws that govern military aid. We have the Foreign Assistance Act, and these laws bar weapons from going to forces that commit violations of human rights. And they also ask that Congress authorize what is being funded. So we have not followed our own laws. So I do not support more funding going to military aid in areas that are violating human rights, and that includes Israel and what they're doing currently in Gaza. But I hold two things at once. I can grieve for Palestinians, I can call on what the Netanyahu authoritarian government is doing, and I can refuse to accept the rise in anti-Semitism that is making Jews in our communities less safe. Those two things are not in conflict. The topic is, what do we do here? Both in Somerville and Medford, as you heard, there's been a democratic process, and I respect that process and the people who've organized to pass those. Medford's ordinance keeps public money out of weapons makers, prisons, fossil fuels, companies tied to human rights abuses. It is one standard applied to any country that is doing that. I won't pretend to settle the legal challenges going on, but our governments should not be funding atrocities around the world. Thank you.

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: I think whatever you want to call it, it is the worst thing humanly imaginable. And I am a person who has witnessed this. I have seen women and children killed in front of me due to war and conflict in the Middle East. As an Irish-American, I've always identified with the struggle of Palestine. There is a historic parallel between the struggle of Irish liberation and the struggle of Palestinian liberation. As an Iraq war veteran, I've been opposed to almost everything the United States has done in the Middle East for the past 40 years. And if I were in Congress, I would not be voting to send any military aid to Israel or to fight in the war in Iran or any of these conflicts that have weakened us as a country and has shamed us internationally. As a city councilor in Somerville, I am being asked to go over an ordinance that will divest from a constantly changing list of companies, and I have questions about their role in genocide and in Israel. Some of them, I think, if we divest from them, will harm the city of Somerville more than they will harm Israel. So I'm waiting to see what happens with that. It's in the Legislative Matters Committee. I'm confident that my colleagues will come to a good solution on this order. As a state senator, something that I would do unequivocally with moral clarity is to divest our pension fund from all weapons to anyone, anywhere in the world. And I think if this is something people want to see in this room, I think I'm the person who can make it happen. Because I can go to the statehouse and I can talk to my colleagues, and I'm not going to approach them with shame. I'm going to approach them and say, I served my country. I saw what these weapons do to people. I don't want my retirement money going to killing innocent people anywhere around the world, anywhere. And if I am elected and I get to submit this, it will be the strongest legislation at the State House to date, because there are many loopholes in the current legislation we're discussing that would allow people to continue funding war across the world.

[SPEAKER_13]: So I had a hopefully a little bit of a light hearted follow up to that question, which is I'm a little bit, I think you can't be too glib with it, but a little bit sad that the position of the most conflicted ethnic conflict was stolen from us in that I'm from Pakistan and my wife is from India. And, you know, it's really funny, like, going through it in my own family, because I'm Muslim, as you might know, and my wife is sick. And so my parents did not talk for us for a year after it happened. And I think that, you know, it's not the most friendliest border, but at least it's stable and people aren't dying. And, you know, hopefully you can solve it one marriage at a time.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Anybody else want to say anything else?

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: I just wanted to add because we, you know, there's how this belief informs your position and what's happening in the statehouse. So I wanted to just uplift two more things and why these ordinances are so important. While these ordinances were being passed in Medford and Somerville, our state government and the most powerful elected leaders in the statehouse were welcoming Sheba Ark into our state and providing $5 million in tax incentives for an institution that has direct ties with IDF and Elbit Systems that is a weapons manufacturer. So this boycott, these divestment ordinances do matter. I also want to uplift, too, that the IHRA definition has been something that's been ongoing in the statehouse. I believe it is wrong to conflate antisemitism with criticisms of the state of Israel and what is happening, and so that is why we need to continue to advocate to adopt different definitions of antisemitism, certainly not this one, and that's what I'll continue to do. Okay.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Anybody else want to say something?

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: I just want to finish my final statement there. There are two bills that I'm aware of at the State House. One is Erica's, one is Senator Jalen's. Senator Jalen would divest from all weapons of mass destruction. I would go even further than that and say all weapons, period, whether it's going to Israel or it's going to shoot someone in Cambridge or Somerville or anywhere else. I don't want my money associated with weapons anywhere. Erika's bill would allow companies that sell weapons to Israel to continue to draw from the pension fund as long as they absolve themselves of Israel within 30 days. I would give them no such exemptions. They're weapons manufacturers. I don't want my blood on my hands with my pension money. but on a happy note. I know, right?

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: When he was like, I'm going to make this, I was like, don't try to make this.

[u1Dt2VrL-v4_SPEAKER_21]: Just a quick two-minute warning if you guys want to start taking your seats or grab a sip of water, that'd be great.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Okay, people, come on back. Come on back, sit down, and let's do the rest of these five topics. Okay, everybody sit down please and let's get going because we want to have as much time as possible for the Q&A at the very end. Okay, we have two more topics. Here's the first one is immigration. It's relevant for Safe Medford, Mystic Mashup Indivisible, and Our Revolution Medford. And here's the topic. Many of our community members are impacted by the federal government's immigration policies. Most notably, ICE raids, arrests, and deportations. Just last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could end temporary protection status for up to 1.3 million immigrants. This will affect many Massachusetts residents, including thousands of healthcare workers. Other Trump administration policies have stripped some Massachusetts immigrants access to mass health and other basic services. So here's the question we'd like you to answer. As a state senator, what steps would you take or policies would you support for protecting immigrants in our communities? And how are we going to do this?

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: Okay, so this is actually the issue that brought me involved with the state advocacy world to begin with. During Trump's first presidency, for all four years, our legislature did nothing to protect immigrants from ICE. This was during the time of the Muslim ban, and it was a time of great violence with ICE, and it has continued over the years, and has, of course, escalated in the past year. This is why I fought for transparency, because these bills would die in committee without a single vote, and there was no way for us to put pressure as a community to insist that this is a priority for us. After passing transparency this past spring, we are not passing just one, but we are passing two pieces of legislation to protect immigrants, and assuming that both of those pass, which include the PROTECT Act and the Data Privacy Act, I will continue to fight for these gaps that we've left behind in these pieces of legislation. I want to uplift three that are particularly of importance. One, we are the only blue state in America with a 287G agreement. This is a formal agreement with ICE that coordinates with the Department of Correction to literally call ICE when people are wrapping up their bid and then they get sent to detention and deportation. That's something I've had to help individual constituents to get out of detention after they've served their terms, including a mother of five who was eight years old when she came here. This is a cruel and horrific contract that we need to get rid of, and we need to do much more because we've continued to maintain that 287G agreement in Massachusetts. Number two, we also need to make sure that we have universal legal aid for immigrant cases. I cannot tell you how many times we've had to help immigrant families find legal aid and free legal aid or go bankrupt because they have to cover the costs of legal aid. And that's something we've made some really good inroads around housing legal aid, but we need to be universal for both. The last thing I'll add, is around the fact that even though we have certain protections around what police officers can do to contact ICE, which is in the PROTECT Act, we still let ICE have the access to the same databases that our polices use, including BRIC. This is a database that has led to the deportation and detention of high school students in Massachusetts because a school police officer wrote up a report on the student, and then ICE read it, and then came and picked them up. So these are all things we need to continue to fight for and address in the coming term. Thank you.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: It's okay. Thank you.

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: So immigrant families, they're our neighbors. They live here in our communities and are an incredible part of our lives here. At this moment, as they're under attack, our state needs to build the strongest firewall we possibly can. I have been leading on that work for years before Trump was in office. So in 2018, I filed the Work and Family Mobility Act. That is the bill that gives people a driver's license regardless of their immigration status. That was politically risky. It had been around for almost two decades and had not been passed. I worked with an incredible coalition of labor, immigration leaders, faith leaders. And I did this because constituents said it was their top thing. And I said, I'm happy to work with you in getting this passed. The fight took years and we won. And that winning, filing the bill is the easy part. Getting it out of the committee took actually negotiating with, there's 160 legislators. I talked to 159 legislators to try to get them on board on that bill. It was slow organizing, meeting them where they're at and getting them on board however we could. And working with people who don't represent communities like ours and getting them on board as well. And we won that fight. We had to override a veto by then Governor Baker, and then we had to also help to organize to stop it from being repealed on the ballot. So it took a lot to win that, and I'm proud of that. When Trump took office this time, I filed the Dignity Not Deportations Bill, which stops ICE from working with our local and state law enforcement. I was the first one to file that bill, again, working with some of the same advocates I had worked on with driver's licenses. And then the Black and Latino Caucus in the State House began putting together a package of the most needed things we had to take on to protect immigrants. And I was really grateful that my bill, dignity not deportations, was one of those. And I was able to work with the Black and Latino Caucus to get that passed in the House and now the Senate. It is not enough. There is much more we need to do. But getting these protections into law is the most important part, and I have been leading on that.

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: Thank you. Both the state reps have highlighted some really good bills that I would also support. Those bills don't extend beyond the borders of Massachusetts, and we need to make sure that people can afford to actually live in the state to be protected by the state. I represent one of the heaviest concentrations of immigrants in the community. I talk to people all the time. I go to their churches. I go inside their homes. I've offered legal services to the city of Somerville. I've helped local businesses maintain themselves. I've been on the street when ICE has detained people and have bared witness to that and made sure that people got the legal services they need. When I talk to immigrants in my community, lots of times they don't talk about ICE. They talk about their landlords and they talk about the fact that they're afraid to go to the city of Somerville or to go to the state to get protections that they're entitled to because they're afraid they're going to get snitched out to ICE or they're going to lose their homes. I've been in homes where people have cockroaches and mold and they're afraid to speak up for themselves and they know that they can come to me and I'm gonna be the liaison between the city and them to make sure that they get the resources they need. I think I have always focused on what needs to be done, what people actually need. People need food, they need shelter, they need clothing, they need to know that they feel safe in this community. I've done that as a city councilor, I will do it as a state senator, and I just wanna make sure that people know that they can come to me in their time of need. and make sure that they can afford to live in the state. Because if they can't afford to live in the state, we've lost 30,000 people last year who left this state. The only reason it wasn't higher was because of immigration. And that affects not only immigrants, but it affects the jobs they have. It affects the people that we serve. It affects the people that need labor and need assistance from immigrants that make the state great.

[SPEAKER_13]: All right. To take this serious topic with a little bit of a funny story, when I was a kid, I got my driver's license at 16 years old and two days, literally the earliest day I could get my driver's license, I got it. I was so excited. And you will see here today, I came in totally drenched on my bike. And that's because I was very excited. I got my license at 16, the learner's permit. Six months later, I had my full license. I would drive around. And if you know anything about South Asian people, we love our tea. And so my dad was like, I don't need medicine. I need this herbal tea that your aunt goes and makes. And so we went back, and we got that. And my sister was in the backseat with the tea. And then we got pulled over by the cops. And it was the worst experience of my life. I went from being super excited to drive to now being, you know, 29 year old and biking here in the middle of the rain. Cause I'm like, you know, I prefer not to drive if I can avoid it. You know, I rode an ambulance in Cambridge and Boston, Somerville, so like I can't drive, but it's not my preferred mean when I can get around other ways. And that's just to say I think that minimizing interactions that can escalate is really, really important. I think that it's a big way that we can invest in transit and other ways where you can just get around feeling safe and secure that you won't get pulled over. And I think my general philosophy is that it is really hard. Cambridge also banned ICE agents from public buildings. We did all the things. But I think that we can't stop the federal government, at least at the state level. But what we can do is just draw out every interaction. And the way I would say, you know, putting my little math hat on is like, if every interaction with ICE takes twice as long, right, you know, you make even getting the bathroom breaks they need a little inconvenient, that's half as much abductions they can take between now and the day that Donald Trump gets out of office. And I think that's the way we need to look at it, is that slowing down is really meaningful. It doesn't feel like you can completely stop them and it's not satisfying, but actually slowing things down, making it takes twice as long, it's a pretty big impact.

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: Yeah, I appreciate Councilman Goffman for bringing up the intersection of immigration, so I just want to uplift a few more Schools, we've lost thousands of immigrant students in our public schools 300 and Chelsea alone because families do not think it's safe to bring their kids to school and that's why it's so vital that The current, again, the PROTECT Act is in conference committee right now, but we need to make sure that schools are not just safe spaces, but we also have that buffer zone around school so that there's a way for people to get to school. The other piece I want to uplift to is labor. We know that immigrant workforces are always abused by management, by boss. Oh, I'm out of time. We need to put in place labor protections because it applies for immigrants as well. Thank you.

[SPEAKER_13]: Two quick points. One, as I realized, I forgot the punchline to that joke, which is that the reason we got pulled over is because they thought that the herbal tea was weed tea, and they were like, do you have drugs in this car? The second part is, you know, there's also other creative solutions. Like in Cambridge, we took all of our federal housing watchers from mixed status families and just paid them with city funds, and then took all those vouchers and gave them to other people. And so keeping that information out of the federal system has been a really effective way to also protect people in Cambridge when we can.

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: Just to highlight a couple other things City of Somerville has done, we passed a surveillance oversight ordinance which oversees all data and all surveillance that police have in the City of Somerville to address issues like this. One of the first things I did in 2014 was request that the Office of Immigrant Affairs get doubled. They had three part-time people. I insisted that they become full-time, and now we've got an entire staff doing all the legal services, all the things that the state is doing. We're doing it on the local level, and I would expand that at the state level.

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: I just want to, as we're talking about the PROTECT Act, which is a very significant bill that we're working on in both the House and the Senate, and uplift the work of the Black and Latino Caucus who put that package together. I know my opponent claimed that it's because of the transparency measures that we passed that we're able to now do this. But that erases the work of the Black and Latino Caucus who spent months putting together a really comprehensive package and working with lawyers and others to say, how can we best protect immigrants in our community and immigrants we're talking with every day to get this bill across the finish line? And passing a bill takes so many pieces of work to do that well. And I just want to uplift the work that the caucus has done.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: 30 seconds.

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: I think there's both and here. I think you need both the public pressure and the pressure of the communities, and you have to have the work on the inside. Just as recently as December of last year, we had legislative leaders saying that we're not going to do anything on immigration because that's a federal issue. It's not a state issue. You can look it up in the Globe. That was where things were moving. And so I believe that a lot of the public pressure, along with what is happening inside the building, that's how we get things done. It's not either or. It's both and. You need to have inside and outside. pressure to make things move forward and make sure that those details get worked out in the bill process. Thank you.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Okay, our fifth topic is digital security and it comes from Saif Medford. Technology and tech companies play an increasing role in our daily lives, from artificial intelligence to data mining to surveillance cameras and body cameras and social media. Some people point to the positive impacts these technologies have on our lives, and others are concerned about their negative impacts, including a disproportional negative impact on historically marginalized communities. This topic is wide and deserves more time than we have, but it's important that we allocate some time to it tonight. So can you describe your position on the increasing role of technology and tech companies in our lives? And what steps will you take as state senator to either promote tech's rising role in our lives and or to protect Massachusetts residents from it? And who is starting this one?

[u1Dt2VrL-v4_SPEAKER_13]: Of course I got this one first.

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, where to begin, it's a broad question. I will say that whenever I look at my phone, I'm constantly rejecting all cookies, and I know they're still spying on me. And I think that Europe is leading the way on this to make sure that our data is not being shared with companies, and we should be reflecting that at the state level. When it comes to AI, my concern is we're talking about this like it's a second industrial revolution, and talking about it in a positive way. And people forget what happened with the first industrial revolution. People died during the first industrial revolution. There was class warfare, people fought in the streets, people lost their jobs, they lost their families. If we're talking about a second industrial revolution, we should look to the past and prepare for that. Something that I am really interested in is Bernie Sanders is introducing the idea of sovereign wealth, or dividends for people, which would basically have a share of AI on the public sector, so that if this is truly going to eliminate jobs and eliminate a lot of the way of life in America, we would benefit from it personally. So that's one thing. I am just very concerned about jobs, making sure that people still have careers in this future. It's not good enough to just have AI do all our work for us. People want to have purpose in this world, and we need to protect those jobs. And then I'm also very concerned about data centers when it comes to our utility bills, which are continuing to increase. We need to regulate all of this. We need to make sure that we copy states like California, Connecticut, Illinois, as people who are leading the way on data protection and addressing AI, and that's what I would do at the state level.

[SPEAKER_13]: So I'm gonna have fun with this one. So I'm gonna geek out with you guys a little bit. So I think that there's huge opportunities. This is perhaps one of the biggest impact opportunities. There's been two states that have been really leading the way. Specifically California and New York. Specifically State Senator Scott Weiner in California and Alex Boris in New York really wrote legislation to regulate AI. And I think that there's a huge amount of opportunities here. One, we'll start with the scary stuff, right? There's really specific tangible harms that I think we should focus on. One is like, you know, AI, people use it for coding, right? You know, what's very similar to like coding is DNA, right? And so one of the things here is that we have a huge biotech industry. One of the things that happened before when you needed a PhD to write a sequence is that you would just, you know, there's companies that would make sequences for other companies and you would just order it online. And it didn't really matter because if you have a PhD, you're probably a pretty trusted person. Well, now anyone can make a sequence for smallpax, for anthrax, and just send it to one of these companies. And they're not required to actually check what the sequence is for. So specific, tangible legislation like that makes a huge impact in how AI goes going forward. And you talked about the Industrial Revolution. I actually think that there's an optimistic story there, too, which is, you know, AI can be dystopian. You imagine what some of the people are saying, 50% unemployment. That's horrific. No amount of redistribution is going to make that great, right? But if you said everyone only has to work 50% as much, well, we're going to have 20-hour work weeks. Like, that doesn't sound so bad, right? And the same thing happened with the Industrial Revolution is where, originally, a lot of people worked 60, 80 hours, and then lots of people went out of work because they worked on farms. But then eventually, we got labor unions and 40-hour work week. And it was a really, really painful transition. But we can get there. And I'd love to accelerate that transition so we look at a world where we have a 20-hour work week instead of 50% unemployment. Thank you.

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: Okay, so with respect to technology, there's some good things we've done and there's also some pretty horrifying things we've done. The good thing we've done is the data privacy bill that has just moved forward very recently. Up until this bill gets passed, ICE can buy your geolocation data on your phone and track down where you are and where you go, and that is, frankly, horrifying, but it's also harmful to our immigrant neighbors, certainly. That is one of the good things we've done. But we have taken two massive steps back where I have tried to. One, I'm going to uplift, which is the open AI contract that Governor Healey has signed. It is a sole source contract for all 40,000 state employees. When this contract came out, I was the only legislator to reach out to the governor's office and say, what is in this contract and what kind of data protections do we have? We know that OpenAI works with ICE to track, using Medicaid data to track immigrants down. I do not want those data, that our data in our state, particularly in our state government, to be flowing through without any of those data protections. And we found that safety was ranked, was scored at zero with their procurement. And so this is something we need to continue to fight, as well as ensure that there are collective bargaining agreements with unions in our state house moving forward. So that is something we need to ensure that we have protections around how AI is used in our government. And it's wild to me that our governor moved forward without us putting in place those protections, similar to how California and New York has moved forward. The second thing I'll add is a social media ban bill. This was a bill that was passed in the House. I was one of the very few Democrats to vote against it, and I voted against it because the ACLU and LGBTQIA groups strongly oppose this bill, partly because it's harmful to LGBTQIA youth, But it also requires age verification, which means every single one of us to verify our age would have to upload our government issued ID or submit ourselves to a face scan, which is invasive. And we know every time that that data has been collected, it has been leaked and taken out of the kind of private systems that they claim that were protected. That's something we really need to stop and we have really with again all the work we've been doing both inside the statehouse and particularly ensuring that the Senate and the governor's version of these bills we're not going to be similar to the House version is what I've been working on immensely and we need to continue to do that work to protect all of us especially with privacy. Thank you.

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: So your privacy is your safety. In 2026, your location, your health record, your immigration status, where you are can be bought and sold and turned against you by ICE and by many others. ICE is buying location data, as has been said, and finding people to deport. anti-abortion activists are finding people by their location data and coming after them. So I co-sponsored and pushed for the both Location Shield Act and Data Privacy Act that we just passed in the House a few weeks ago. So this bans the sale of precise data to data brokers. So exactly the kind of data that ICE has been using to find Romesa Osterk, that is the kind of data they found through location data, that will be banned once this becomes law. There's also in the House version a private right of action, so it allows suits and actually have teeth in that work. So this connects to work that I've already done. So when I worked on work in family mobility, we spent a lot of time in developing regulations with the Attorney General to make sure we're protecting undocumented immigrants when they were putting their data into the RMV. And in those data contracts, we were very clear about what could and could not be sold and what would have to stay internal. And we're continuing to follow that up as things evolve every day. This also links to work that I've done to expand access to abortion and make sure that location and sensitive information is not being used to stop anyone's needed care. And as senator, I'll continue to push the data privacy bill to go even farther and make sure that we're protecting young people here and that we have stronger protections to make sure that our platforms, we're not letting the corporations rule, but that the onus is on the corporations to actually protect our privacy, not on the consumers to have to police it ourselves. So it's not a niche tech issue. This is something that comes down to all of us, to immigrants, to working people, to people getting care. And I'm working to continue to make it stronger.

[SPEAKER_13]: Thanks. I was going to say, you know, I skipped a little ahead, but like part of the reason I care so much about this is it's not the issues I talk about because, you know, those are based on affordability where the biggest impacts for some most voters, but you guys happen to ask the question. is I think there's actually a huge opportunity here because Alex Boris and Scott Wiener, who were the two biggest people in the country pushing this policy at the state level because Congress wasn't doing anything, they both are running for Congress. And Alex Boris just lost in New York. You know, whatever happens with Scott, he won't be in the statehouse. But states can really lead on this. And it really helps to have a technical understanding such that the conversation isn't just ban or no ban, but it's like, actually, how are we going to make the details of this legislation work?

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: I just want to say a little bit more about artificial intelligence because this is something we really need to be moving quickly on. Trump signed an executive order essentially trying to make it as difficult to regulate AI at the same standard as freedom of speech. That's why I've been working on drafting legislation that I'll be putting forward. I've been working on with the American Society for AI, as well as with the UN and World Economic Forum, around making sure we have clear transparency requirements. If AI or a machine makes a decision about your life, you have the right to know that that decision was made and to be able to contest that decision. Those are the kind of guardrails I'm referring to that is not in place when Governor Healey signed this open AI contract. We need to make sure that that is in place, not just in the public sphere, but also private sphere, because we know AI is taking over housing application decisions, as well as your health insurance access, and I'm out of time. So thank you. Let's talk more AI later.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Anybody else?

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: Yeah? Just another area or wrinkle that I don't think gets as much attention, but it's cyber security, especially for government. So last year, I secured $100,000 for Somerville to beef up their cyber security. And I think we think about data as a very personal thing, of which it is. It is our data. But if communities are able to get hacked, that can have astounding disruption in provision of healthcare, water, city services that many of us depend on. So actually making sure that we are supporting our communities in cybersecurity is incredibly important and something that I have worked on.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Okay. Thank you, everybody. Now we are going to go to concluding statements. But remember, that's not the end of the thing, because we still have not done the Q&A. And we're actually pretty close on time. Who gets the first concluding statement?

[u1Dt2VrL-v4_SPEAKER_13]: You know, you always come crawling back. What I'll do is I'll do the wheel and then we'll just pass it on down to the right. Okay, good. Almost there.

[Unidentified]: I'm so sorry.

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: Councilor McLaughlin. Closing statement before an hour of questions. Thank you, everybody, for having me today. I have spent my entire life in the 2nd Middlesex District, with the exception of five years in the military. I've been involved in activism since I was a teenager. I've been involved in the day-to-day lives of people. I've been a city councilor for 14 years. I have dedicated my life to public service and helping people in this community afford to live here and afford to survive. I know there's something that everyone in the second Middlesex expects from their state senator is someone who is going to fight and challenge authority, but also get things done at the same time. I'm the person who's able to do both of those things. I have fought the system, I have challenged authority to do better, and I've also won them over and got them to work with me on the issues that I care about. My top priority at the Statehouse is going to be affordability on every level, whether that be housing, child care, utility bills, public health. These are the things that we need in Massachusetts. We live in a great state, and it's a state that not enough people see a future in. including my friends and family, people that I've grown up with, generations of people, seeing multiple groups of people having to leave this community over and over again. Started in Cambridge, bled over into Somerville, and now it's impacting Medford and Winchester as well. So I'm gonna be the candidate focused every day on people's day-to-day lives and trying to improve their lot in life and make sure everyone can afford to dream in Massachusetts. I thank you all for having me.

[SPEAKER_13]: These debates are always hard for me because they go wide, lots of topics, but I'm really interested in going deep into housing, into transit, utilities, child care, and really focused on those four areas. And I think that when you go deep, you can have profound change. And I could tell you about how we're going to get all these things done, but I just wanted to read you a quote. In the Globe, they said that it was the most transformative housing policy that I passed in the country. And this was a quote of it. Some cities have claimed to abolish single family only zoning, but it shifts it in degree, not of kind. Other cities have allowed greater density, but nothing like this that rejects American residential zoning practices dating back to the 1910s and 1920s. Cambridge, in its wholesale application, has liberalized housing policy in a way that challenges the fundamental aspects of American residential zoning practice. This is an entirely new paradigm. That's why my work has been featured in The Economist, The Daily Show. I think Cambridge is pretty important. Maybe you guys don't as much over here in Medford. But how much does local zoning policy make it all the way to The Economist, The Daily Show? We've been in The New York Times three weeks in a row. And I think it really, really impresses what you can do when you go deep into a few select areas. And I think that housing, transit, utilities, and childcare are the biggest areas.

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: So we're often told by the legislature about what we can't do what we can't pass. We were told that when we wanted to have all votes publicly available we were told you're touching a third rail of Beacon Hill when we wanted to push forward protections for immigrants in our state. We're told this is a federal issue not a state issue. And when we were demanding to have one point five billion dollars in our schools initially the legislature said we can only fund a fourth of that. Now imagine we did get the one point five billion. Imagine where we would be if we didn't. because we are already needing to update our school formula now. Whenever people are telling you they can't do something we know it's not true. There is a path forward and I am not someone who will tell you and explain why things can't happen. We are going to say I'm someone who is going to fight when it gets tough on behalf of you no matter what. We need that kind of leadership because we've had that kind of leadership in the second Middlesex with Pat Jalen who has been willing to rock the boat to stand up to leadership and say this is what we need for our schools and our communities and win it. That is the kind of fighter we need in this district. I am the candidate that has that track record of standing up to power but also making sure we pass these big monumental changes that we need for our communities rather than letting us take some crumbs and let the corporations take away all the rest of the pie. We need to make sure that our communities are centered in this work, which means that you all have to be engaged in this work. To me, that is what transparency is about. It is about you all being able to be part of this process alongside advocates, experts, unions, community organizations. These are all people with a lack of transparency have been completely shut out of the process, and we have changed that, and we have been able to grow so much thanks to those changes we've made, and we're going to continue to grow and put pressure on all the things we need whether it be housing child care universal health care and a livable climate for all. With that I humbly ask for your support on September 1st. Thank you.

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: So the threats to our district are here now. Families are priced out of the homes that they built in the communities that they built. Immigrant neighbors are afraid to leave their house. Federal government is coming for our health care and our basic rights. A moment like this doesn't need the loudest voice or more talk. It needs someone who can actually deliver on what the needs are. Everyone in this race shares our values. I'm the one who has already turned many of those into law and stayed on these values until that law was passed. So driver's licenses took years and we got it signed and tens of thousands of people have those licenses in their hands. Co-pays are gone and thousands of people are able to get medications that they weren't able to before. Pay equity is passed and more people are able to see the jobs that they're applying for and if they can actually afford to live off of them. The Green Line is funded and often it works. Pat Jalen was a trailblazer. She pushed hard and opened doors for so many people. She was honestly ahead of her time on so many issues and allows many of us to take that and push it even further. That's what I intend to do, and the stakes have never been higher. So I intend to deliver and to continue to deliver for our communities to make sure that everyone is protected and has those rights enshrined into law. From Medford, Somerville, Cambridge, and Winchester, I'd be honored to have your vote. Thank you.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Okay, thank you everybody. Now, we're gonna take a short, oh no, you have something to say, right? Sorry.

[u1Dt2VrL-v4_SPEAKER_21]: I'm thinking maybe we can ask the short break since it's almost eight o'clock and get us quickly to the Q&A. Before we do that though, I did wanna just say a couple thanks for putting this event together. Firstly, thank you so much for the candidates for coming and being so willing to participate. These are a wide range of topics and we appreciate all your responses and willingness to engage in the conversation. Mystic Valley Voters Forum was formed as a way to bring a coalition of community organizations together and give voters, all of us, an opportunity to hear directly from our candidates with questions from us, our community. So this has been an awesome event. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I do wanna just mention a really big thank you to our co-sponsoring organizations that played a large role in obviously formulating these questions, but also setting up this event today and being very involved in the lead-up of the planning. So that's the NAACP of Mystic Valley. Maggie is back there if you'd like to hear anything about their organization. Safe Medford, I believe Ellen Epstein is here as well, amongst other members. Mystic Mashup Indivisible, Megan Searle is here. Medford for Palestine, we're all here. And Our Revolution Medford, I believe there's members as well here from their group. Additionally, thank you so much for the Medford Community Media for broadcasting this for us on a very short notice. This event was live broadcasted and will also be recorded and available after the fact. So please share it broadly with everyone in our district. And then lastly, just a thanks to our planning committee. I am a part of that, but Chadi Salamun, Matt Aben, Megan Searle, Mike Ashlalom-Kesselman, and Simon Alcindor. We, you know, we are all members of our community and we've taken time to plan something like this and hopefully get to plan more events like this for all of us to hear from our candidates. So thank you very much. And then, so we're going to open it up to Q&A. We're going to forget, we're going to pretend like no one's worried about partiality. We're just going to do hand raises and have people ask questions. However, we do recognize that there's a lot of us in the room and some folks might need to leave or we may not get to everyone. We've printed out a bunch of sheets where you can fill out your name, email, the candidate for who the question is, and what the question is. If your question doesn't get answered live here tonight, we can commit to you writing that. We can take that back and give those to the candidates to get answered. So we'll start passing those around, but with that, I'll give it back to Alan.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Okay. And so here's how this Q&A is going to work. If you want to, you can ask just one person a question. But after that person answers, other people will be able to comment if they want to. And we actually didn't decide, but one minute answers, I think? Sure. Yeah. Okay. Or you can ask everybody a question. So who has a question for one of our candidates? I should say, everybody is here, right? There are as many people here now as there were at the very beginning, which means it's interesting.

[Josh Ekhart-Lee]: Not too cold. Thank you, Alan. My name is Josh Eckert-Lee. I'm a resident here in Medford over on Main Street and a volunteer with Medford for Palestine. As all four of you know, here in Medford we passed a really comprehensive ordinance calling for divestment from fossil fuels, weapons, prisons, and violators of human rights. As you also know, there is an active lawsuit against this ordinance challenging its validity and is being filed against us by actively Zionist legal entities. If it goes unchallenged, as the current mayor intends, it would, and if we lose, it would prohibit any community across the Commonwealth from being able to divest from things like fossil fuels, from prisons. Because it is comprehensive, its impacts that are negative will also be comprehensive. and I want to ask how you will all protect our rights to divest from all entities, but especially from those actively committing genocide, like the State of Israel.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Who wants to take that first?

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: I think the Medford Ordinance is going to be ruled unconstitutional. I think that's what's going to happen. It's going to go to a court, and they're going to say, you can't do this. Because there's a court case based out of Massachusetts, the Crosby case, people can look into that. And I think it's going to be ruled unconstitutional. That's why I'm taking the perspective of let's just divest from all weapons, period. And I think that would withstand constitutional muster. That would be the thing that says we're making a moral decision to not fund weapons, period. So I don't know how to answer the question, because I think it is going to be ruled unconstitutional. I think it has happened several times already. And I would just point out that Medford actually has not divested from anything yet, even with this ordinance.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Anybody else want to say something to that?

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: Yeah, I've been following this very closely. My understanding is that this ordinance applies to all weapons. And yeah, just to clarify, all weapons, also with fossil fuels, it's a values-based ordinance, and also with prison labor. And that is something we've passed in Somerville with prison labor. And as well as with fossil fuels, we've taken steps in that direction. But I think my concern here is this is about municipal autonomy to be able to decide where our city dollars go. And that is something, this is why the state house is so important. We can change the law around that. We can strengthen that if there is an issue in the court. I know I hear so much, too, about with these ordinances of will it stand in court, will it not. I just want to be very clear. Every bill that I've filed around raising revenue and taxing, especially corporations, will get sued a ton. And they do. And they have done in all other states as well. It does not make them bad laws. It means that they have to go through the system because we know when there is corporate money and interest, for example, with taxes, they're going to fight like hell and throw everything against the wall. It's the same thing that happened with the rent control ballot question. They spend money. They try every legal argument in the book because they have endless funds for attorneys. And that's unfortunately the reality of our legal system is that it works for those with money. And that is something I believe I encourage us continue to fight against this. And we can do things in the legislature to change the law if we have to. So that's what I would support. Thank you. OK.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Anybody else or we go to the next question?

[SPEAKER_00]: So I've heard a lot of conversation this afternoon. I'm a senior citizen, and none of you have spoken about senior citizens and what you're doing for us, okay? I really am senior, I have to tell you. flawless skin, playing soccer when I was a lad, fool you. So I am concerned about all the issues that Somerville's spending, and I suppose Medford, the oxygen is being taken out for dealing with issues overseas. I understand people's sensitivity, I really do. But on the other hand, we're living here in Somerville, and I'd like to see somebody talk about some of the issues, such as on the sidewalks. There's less police out there. You get these motorbikes coming along on the sidewalks. You get scoff laws all over the place. And you have seniors who have food shortages. I'm not one of them, I'm pleased to say, but I'm aware that I'm fortunate, but many aren't. So perhaps each of you could say something. What do you want to do about spending the money, the tax dollars which we pay for senior citizens? That's it. Thank you very much.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Okay, so... I'm going to start with the people who didn't speak last time.

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: Thank you for that question, and I appreciate the focus on seniors who too often are left out of the conversation in our communities. I have spent most of my career working on health care, and a lot of that has been focusing on access to health care, especially for seniors. So I work on tackling prescription drug transparency, getting under the hood of why drugs cost so much in this country, and negotiating more with pharma, and then making sure we're capping co-pays and doing more to get people the care they need. is one, and then housing is a crisis for many people, but especially for seniors and people on fixed incomes. And I've gotten a lot of money for walking court, Clarendon Hill, other places where seniors and people with disabilities live, and making sure that we have spaces that are safe for seniors, and that at the state, we are protecting, we have policies to protect seniors when they have healthcare needs, and when they have needs in their assets. So thank you for asking that.

[SPEAKER_13]: So I'll take a little bit of a different stance on some of this stuff, which is like, I talk a lot about Cambridge having universal pre-K. You heard that about that already. But I'll say the other side of it is that we also have the lowest property taxes in the state. And that's actually something I'm proud of, which is that I think that, especially if you're a senior, you're on a fixed income, property taxes are really huge. And your house might be worth a lot, but that doesn't mean that you made a lot of money beforehand. It's just like the house was appreciating in value. And I think that's really important that we spend responsibly, and I think that I support the millionaire's tax, but I also talk about how the Green Line expansion was the most expensive light rail project in world history. And I think part of it is that Medford gets a little bit screwed in this, is that the state has the unrestricted grants it gave. The last time the formula was updated was 1992. And there was a lot of communities that were poor then that are richer now, and they get more money than Medford does because of the way that this formula was set up. And I think that there's times that we can make adjustments such that you don't have to pay incredibly high property taxes to fix the high school or the potholes. And the amount of stories I've heard about people's suspensions breaking is, you know, kind of a lot.

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: So we have the highest number of older adults who cannot afford and cover their basic needs is here in Massachusetts. We are number one, and that's something we should not be proud of. I'm proud to have served on the Elder Affairs Committee alongside Senator Jalen, and this is something I care deeply about, so I appreciate your question. I believe that the reason for that, why we're number one, for something we shouldn't be number one for, is because of the extremely high healthcare costs and extremely high housing costs. We have the second highest healthcare premiums in the country, and that is why we are, again, when you have someone, and particularly in Medford, median income for older adults, $44,000 a year. In Somerville, it's close to $30,000 a year. I don't understand how anyone can live off of fixed income and cover those expenses of these rising health care costs. And with the one ugly bill that passed last year under Trump, we're at risk of losing 300,000 people to lose Medicaid. That is the reality that we're living in. We do not have time for small solutions. for affixing both the housing crisis and the healthcare crisis. And then to add on to that, the PCAs, CNAs, the support staff that help older adults be able to stay and live and thrive in their homes are paid less than if you work at Target. I mean, this is something we need to be changing at the state level and those wages need to be increased so that we can support older adults in our communities.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: One second. Okay, you'll be next.

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: So I grew up in my grandmother's house. She's 98 years old, still going strong. My mother lives there. She's 75 years old with my brother and his wife and kid. Something I learned recently actually talking to a senior on doors, there was a study done in New England that talked about how do people live to 100 years old. And one of the things they found was triple-deckers was a big part of that. And it was because you had multiple generations of the same family living in the same area. So this all goes back to affordability once again, is making sure families can stay together so they can actually look after each other. I talk to a lot of people in the community who say, I'm doing pretty well for myself, but I want to be able to see my grandson, and his parents can't afford to live here. That's a huge part of this, affordability all around for everyone, making sure people can actually age in place, like my grandmother, who still lives in the house she bought in the 1950s. On top of that, I do think we need to build more senior housing, and not just for 65 years old, but people 55. and allow people to move into a smaller dwelling if they so choose, which would free up a lot more housing that maybe people, there's a single person living alone, they want to be able to downsize and in turn can house another family there.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Okay, I think everybody has responded. Now, you wanted to say something, which is fine, but let's not make it too long because we want to have more questions.

[Ilene Lerner]: I didn't. What did you say? I just said it's fine to say something, but let's not make it too long. No, I won't. I'm not going to make a speech. As an elder, one of the greatest needs that I have and many elders have is transportation. I no longer drive, and I'm very active. And the ride, I understand the ride was a good program when it started, but I have to say it's not a good program now. There are so many issues with it. There is the Ride Flex program, which is a wonderful program, but it only provides 30 rides a month on the Uber or the Lyft. And that sounds like a lot, but it's really only 15 round trips, and that's not enough for me and for other people. Yeah, I would like to see the ride vastly improved. When I use it, I have to get places like a half an hour before I want to be there. When I want to go home on the ride, I either have to leave before I want to, or I'm sitting there after everybody left, Or they haven't even come to get me and I'm stranded, which has happened to people. So I would like to know what you all are going to do to improve transportation for seniors.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: That's a question, not a statement. You can start.

[SPEAKER_13]: All right. This was a great question. And I think my friend here also asked me this question. I was like, we'll get to it in the debate, and we didn't get to it. So let me strengthen the conversation, actually, which is like, it's really bad. The red line is going to shut down in a couple of weeks. The 94 that goes from here to Davis Square is also, you know, maybe it's safe for a moment, but it also used to go to Harvard Square. It might also still get cut. And we see this time and time again. In Cambridge, the 67 and the 69 were going to get cut. And the MBTA has promised better service on the ride, on the T, on the bus network for a long time, and it hasn't been able to deliver. And it's both like in 2000, we changed the funding formula that led the T from having a small debt to now having $30 billion between maintenance and operating debt, it's because we have a hiring shortage. And so we still don't have the amount of bus riders, drivers, and other people that we need to have more frequent service. And it's because we prioritize other things. Like, we build our trains out in Springfield. And, you know, I love Springfield. But it's not the world's hub for making trains. And that's why we still have older redline trains. And there's so many things of, like, prioritizing the T and making it an easier way to get around.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Anybody else have something to say about the ride?

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: Yeah, thank you for that question. So a world-class public transportation system needs to include people with disabilities, and elders, and everyone. And that is not the system that we have right now. I've worked with BCIL, the Boston Center for Independent Living, who do a lot of work on the ride and trying to get more just service. But they have sued because they have had so many challenges with this. And it should not take a lawsuit to get the state to the table to make these changes. There are Band-Aids that are, we've done in Somerville, we've paid for like a taxi ride for elders to be able to get to the doctor and take a taxi. But to me, this is a bigger picture about the T and how we're investing in our state needs and how we're serving elders in our community. The fair share, the millionaire's tax, helps us fund the T much better than we were able to. But frankly, there's much more we need to be funding and to be putting into making systems like this work. So it's a strong priority of mine to keep making sure that works.

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: I would support expanding the ride. I would also support more like mini buses in micro regions. We've contemplated this in Somerville, a north-south line, because everything goes east to west. Something I really want to do as a state senator is get buses in these bus lanes. Somerville, Cambridge, Medford, we've all invested in bus lane technology. You see it. I go down Mystic Ave, and you're sitting there waiting for a bus. And there's a whole lane dedicated to it, and there's no bus. I'd like to guarantee. This is the honest thing. You should not wait more than 10 minutes for a bus. And we're actually being punished by the state for having good infrastructure. We invested in the Green Line. The city of Somerville, we paid $50 million for that Green Line station, all of them. And because of that, they say, well, you don't need as many buses. And they've cut lines. They've cut lines to my community that relies greatly on it. And we're seeing these bus lanes that should have buses in them. We should be rewarded for the infrastructure improvements we have made so that we can show that we're a model to the state on how to deal with public transportation.

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: Yeah, thanks for that question. I want to uplift that under Charlie Baker, one in five bus driver positions were vacant. So that's 200 to 300 positions were vacant. And we should ask ourselves why. The pay for a bus driver was starting at $22 an hour at the time. Governor Healey has increased that to $30 an hour after labor negotiations. But we all know that is still not a living wage. And that is why there are still vacancies for bus drivers. And so again, this really comes down to the issue of austerity and our investments in our public transportation. And so I really am committed to continuing to fight that, because again, it's because we've cut taxes so much in our state, and we're not able to fund these sorts of programs that are for people, older adults, also people with disabilities, rely on. I also want to uplift, too, that we should have fast, free buses. That's something that we can very much afford as a state is $100 million, a little bit more, $100 million a year to make all fares free so that buses can come more frequently. They don't have to do the whole idling piece. It also makes buses safer. These are all things that, again, we see other parts of the country do. And even, in fact, within Massachusetts, we have fare-free buses in Western Mass. We should be having that here at the MBTA. Thank you.

[u1Dt2VrL-v4_SPEAKER_21]: We have a question over here.

[SPEAKER_10]: Thank you to the candidates for coming out tonight. My name is Laqueen Battle. I'm a worker for FIFA. As you know, the FIFA has brought over 60,000 to 70,000, 80,000 people per day to Gillette Stadium. And that's great. That's amazing. At the same time, though, the city of Cambridge in Boston has also experienced As you know, this weekend was the recent Fourth of July murders in the city, as well as, of course, the death of the public utility worker that just happened a couple days ago. So, to the candidates, how do you respond to the issue of, of course, you want to maintain public safety budget, as well as maintaining safety throughout the city. Can you just briefly give me a quick analysis of what your thoughts about protecting public safety for Cambridge and Medford and Somerville? Thank you.

[SPEAKER_13]: So I'll take this one. This is a very hard situation that happened. Xavier, who was 33 years old, died in Cambridge on Saturday. I was talking with his fiance. He has a five-year-old as well. And it was really, really tragic. It was a shooting at 430 in the morning. The body was not found till 530. There was questions of, like, how could we have gotten a faster response? What are things that can happen? And I think that this is where things get really hard, right? Um, there's posters all over in Cambridge right now that have my name on them, because we had a conversation about ShotSpotter, right? And ShotSpotter is a technology that, you know, detects shootings, right? And at 4.30 in the morning, no one was awake, a few people have testified that they kind of heard it, but, like, no one reported it in, and then he was there on the floor for an hour, and the people who conducted this were not caught, um, and we are still collecting Ring cameras from neighbors trying to figure it out. And so public safety is about trade-offs. People get nervous about police officers being get sent because you don't want a bad interaction with the officer. You talk about surveillance because you don't want to be surveillanced all the time. But then you talk about doing nothing, and there are consequences. And so I think that there is a balancing act, and we have to figure it out. But you have to take public safety very, very seriously. Otherwise, you get to spend a weekend with a widow, and that's not great for anyone.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Did anybody else want to respond to that?

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: Yeah, thank you for the question. First, my condolences, and it's a horrible thing of what happened this weekend with so much violence. And two areas that I have been involved in and want to continue to work on is, in Somerville, I sat on the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, I think is what we called it. We met for, I don't know, at least a year, a while. And it was actually really helpful because we brought in lots of researchers and met with folks from very different communities to talk about their experiences working with the police and just their general experiences of where they felt safe and where they didn't feel safe and why. And out of that came some of the co-response work that Somerville's now doing and leading on and looking at different ways of working with people in the community. Somerville has honestly a long history of youth programs that are incredible and going to support young people as best we can to get at the upstream of some of these challenges. And then the third is, when I was the vice chair of the Judiciary Committee, we worked on a very strong gun control bill that makes us the strongest in the country. That is on the ballot this year because people are trying to repeal it. And there is more that we need to keep doing here.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Anybody else want to say anything about this?

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: I'll just say, not going to have a great answer for this, but I want to express my sympathies because I got into politics, local politics, because a very close friend of mine was murdered. We had the 4th of July fireworks recently, and he was murdered during those fireworks celebrations. People should not be afraid for their lives to go to a soccer tournament, or fireworks, or any of these things. And there are institutional issues. My friend was murdered over drugs. He was not using drugs, but it was a drug fight, and he got killed over that. And I have sympathy for the aggressors, the people who ended up going to jail, and what they went through that got them to that point. But there also needs to be accountability as well. I think we can live in a country and in a city where we have appropriately funded police, where people are held accountable for violent crimes, and people can also feel safe and hold police accountable as well and make sure that they're not violating the law as well. So I can't give you a good answer, but I just want to express my sympathies because I was thinking about that this week and how that really got me started in politics as well.

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: Yeah, thank you both for sharing and for your question, I, I really believe that public safety cannot be dealt with in a silo, it's something that we need to work with across public health, mental health substance use education right housing also right there's all of these underlying factors that lead to these frankly horrific situations, as well as I really want to have a public safety system that centers on survivors and centers on their needs and supporting them rather than what our current criminal legal system does, which is to prosecute, put people in prison or jail. That is the only form of accountability we have. I think we have to think much broader than that. I'm a strong believer in restorative justice and having that kind of support in our community so that we can also heal from these incidences and these horrific acts that happen where harm is done. And that's why I continue to do the work with both formerly and currently incarcerated people as well as with practitioners on the outside to ensure that we're really setting up those support systems throughout our community.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Okay, they're telling me that we don't have time for more questions, but we can at least, we're collecting all the questions that people filled out. Sorry.

[u1Dt2VrL-v4_SPEAKER_21]: Just one more question.

[Chenine Peloquin]: Let's be brief maybe in our responses. My name is Shanine Pellequin. I'm a Medford resident and a vulnerable group that is nearly always left out. We've kind of obliquely responded or discussed this tonight, but are people with disabilities. The recent federal Olmstead decision paves the way to imprison our loved ones and neighbors. Back in the institutions that we've worked so hard to close, sorry. jeopardizes community supports. Massachusetts is grossly underfunded with over 700 people still stuck home without day services since COVID. Local schools are out of compliance and do not support students with disabilities. They are not included they are excluded and segregated and they are not in compliance with these laws that may or may not be enforced federally anyway. So how will you work alongside and protect the rights of people with disabilities in our communities.

[Erika Uyterhoeven]: Thank you for your question. To me this is the violence of austerity because we know that disabled people are the first to experience when there are cuts. That's where in our schools we see the cuts impact with lack of paraprofessionals and people who can support our students and actually fulfill their IEPs and we see it also in our healthcare system where we are not providing the support in an equitable way for everyone and that's why for me We need to continue to fund that. I'm aware of those wait lists. It is horrific that, again, we keep saying or we also have closed down facilities or push to close down facilities in our state in the sake of, again, saving money when really we need to be centering on the people who need our help and support the most. And to me, that is the role of government is to be supporting everyone regardless of your disability and your needs. And so thank you for that question. That's what I'll fight for.

[SPEAKER_13]: Sure, I'll go. Sorry, I had an 8 o'clock, but I'm trying to stay around to say hi to people. I was going to say there's a lot of pieces to it. One specific example I'd give is like people who are disabled and young mothers have something really in common and young fathers, which is once you have a stroller, you feel the pain of having a wheelchair. And one of the simplest things we can do is just like straight out our sidewalks. I know that there's a lot more deep stuff that you talked about, but I just wanted to mention that as like a concrete example of something that I think gets undervalued.

[F-zb2piBEb8_SPEAKER_01]: I actually just yesterday submitted an order to discuss the Olmstead decision on the city council and see what we can do to address this. My mother-in-law is a double amputee who survived and cannot walk and it needs assistance everywhere. I'm a disabled veteran myself, so I take it very seriously. Like Burhan says, there's a lot of things you can do on a local level to make things easier for people with disabilities. It's a shame that the federal government isn't respecting that, but the state and local government, we can do more.

[jsdIPdqDPt8_SPEAKER_12]: This is an issue that's dear to me and one that I've actually really focused on at the state level. I was named on the Autism Commission right when I was elected and I have learned an incredible amount from families and self-advocates and children through the Autism Commission and through the developmental disability community in my time who have made me a better legislator because they're incredible advocates. And through that, we've worked on expanding access to healthcare, keeping kids on healthcare when they get older. The ADU bill I worked on was honestly to create new units that families could put for adult children or for family members to actually be able to live with dignity next door to their families. So looking at housing, healthcare, education, and the many issues that we have to focus on. and center people with disabilities. And one story that relates to you is that in the playground at the McGlynn School, which Shanine designed and worked on, so we got money to redo the playground, and the goal was to make the playground accessible. And by centering the voices of kids with disabilities, The playground is like the coolest playground you've ever seen. And also I find it is welcoming to all of the students. So it's not a playground for kids with disabilities. It is a playground for everyone and really feels that way and feels different. So I think that's how we have to start designing our housing our health systems and our educational systems.

[WDlvELcdJa0_SPEAKER_13]: Okay, so I think that's a great place to end, especially since we're out of time, unfortunately. Everybody remember that if you have a question that you'd like to get an answer to, we can get you answers. Yeah, and I want to thank the four candidates, and I should say. Yeah. I should say, this is not an easy thing to do on, you know, sort of on your feet. I was thinking as people were asking questions, what would I say to those answers? And it can feel pretty awkward, right? I mean, in half an hour, you could think of something really great. But instantly, maybe not. So thank you very much. Thank you, everybody, for coming. And I hope you guys are going to do this again, because as I said before, it's clearly two hours. Everybody's still here. Thank you.