[Danielle Balocca]: Hey listeners, this is Danielle. And Shelley. Shelley is a radical Dravidian and racial equity activist.
[Chelli Keshavan]: And Danielle is a community mobilizer and change maker. And this is the Medford Bites podcast. Every two weeks, we chew on the issues facing Medford and deliver bites of information about the city by lifting the expertise of our guests.
[Danielle Balocca]: Join us in discussion about what you hope for the future of Medford. And as always, tell us where you like to eat. All right, thanks so much for being here with me today. If you don't mind just introducing yourself with your name, pronouns, and who you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome, thanks for having me. I'm Erica Eiderhoven. I use she, her, hers pronouns, and I am running for state senate here in Medford, and I'm also a current state representative in Somerville.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. So we're going to talk a lot more about your current campaign in just a second, but before we do that, we'll just ask you to answer the question that we ask everybody, which is, what is your favorite place to eat in Medford and what do you like to eat there?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's definitely a tough question because I will say during the several months I've been campaigning, I've eaten at a lot of wonderful places, but I will say I am a sucker for a yummy sub, especially because I'm always on the go. You know that I really love Bob's Italian food. Their eggplant parm is off the rails, highly recommend it. It's also family owned business, which of course too, I just love that. So yeah, multi-generational family owned business that makes incredible subs. And also they have all these really lovely side foods, like little cookies and salads and all that. So yeah, I just highly, that's where I love to get food right now.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, I hear a lot about Bob's, especially from South Medford people. I haven't actually been there, but I think it's a great place for people to bring something for a party or a gathering. I've heard they're so cool. All right. So yeah, we are here to mostly talk about your current campaign. And so as an introduction to that, if you could tell us what led you to this moment to decide to run for this seat right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally. I think the thing that brings me and where I am so passionate about state government is that we are really the last line of defense between what is happening in Washington, DC and what happens in our communities. And so state government is this incredible institution that can do so much good. But it has also been an institution, particularly in Massachusetts, that is one of the least transparent, least productive legislatures in the country. And that's what brought me into the work of transparency and my work prior to running for state senate, which has been to fight for a more transparent, more accountable but also more progressive legislature that can really advance these are communities needs over the demands of corporate lobbyists that get a lot of their asks fulfilled behind closed doors and so. That you know just to give a few concrete examples of what I mean by that, particularly with ice in our communities, we did not pass I mean we I was not in the legislature at the time but prior during Trump's first presidency we didn't pass a single bill to protect immigrants from ice and this was during all of Trump's first four years and that's what really drew me in was like how are these. incredibly popular common sense bills that have wide support just die in committee without a vote and without any sort of explanation as to like what to do next and especially like as an organizer. It's like, well, what levers do we pull if we just have just know what you know it's just the whole institution is telling us no with no explanation. Another piece, too, is I know affordability is another top issue for me, and I'll just highlight Massachusetts. We have some of the highest utility rates in the continental United States. We have some of the highest child care costs in the country, and we have some of the highest health care costs, both insurance and out-of-pocket costs combined. in the country. And then you add on, of course, housing, which is its own affordability crisis to tackle. All of those combined is why Massachusetts is the state with the highest number of economically insecure older adults. People who are over 65 years old and are single, 60% of them do not have the resources to cover their monthly expenses. So they are choosing between eating getting their medications or you know fulfilling their medications or paying rent and so that's the context that we're living in a Massachusetts is what drove it drove me to run was I really do believe we have the ability in Massachusetts to have a state government that is responsive to our communities and it's not elusive not non transparent non accountable. And I want to continue that fight that I've been leading as a state rep for the past six years, as well as just the campaign for more transparency for nearly a decade. And so that's what drew me to run for state senate and to really, again, push the needle forward and what is possible. Because I think people are just tired of having their expectations managed rather than putting forward true leadership that we should see in our party and in our government.
[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. And so in your opinion, so in your experience so far and kind of your hopes for the future if you were to win this seat, what do you see as like the barriers to transparency and how would you, like how would you approach that?
[SPEAKER_00]: For sure, I think some of the barriers is, of course, there's just the status quo, right? That is an institution holding itself in place. And so the question is, what do we do to address that? And it's exactly what I've done, again, during my almost decade of working in the legislature, is that we have to work both inside and outside the building. I call it the inside-outside organizing strategy. But essentially, just to give a concrete example of transparency, when I sought out to say, look, It's wild that most votes lawmakers take is behind closed doors. We have to change that. All votes should be on the record. That's the case with city government. It's the case with federal government. How is that not the case at the state level? And, you know, I was told, like, Erica, don't bother. That is, you're touching the third rail of Beacon Hill. The speaker doesn't support it. The leaders in, you know, on the statehouse don't support it. So I wouldn't even bother, you know, trying to climb up that tree. And I was like, that's nuts. I mean, I just don't agree with that kind of like, you know, our fate is already set ahead of us. And so that's where I started to build a coalition of community organizations, including Indivisible, as well as Progressive Massachusetts, and climate groups as well, because climate legislation was also stalling for such a long time. So they were also a really key partner in this. And finally, labor unions on the outside, we formed a coalition to make these demands for transparency. And then on the inside, and this was before I became a rep, but then continued this work as a state rep, but I organized 12 legislators who are willing to take a pledge, right, take a stand, stick their necks out, really try to like challenge how the system works on the inside, as well as work with their colleagues to say, look, this is something we can't be voting in favor of. We can't just say the speaker wants us so we vote in line, which actually that's another thing too, is that most Of the votes we take are unanimous across party lines occasionally you will get like a Republican proposal where it is split by Republican Democrat, but the vast majority of the votes we take it is nearly unanimous and certainly unanimous within the Democratic Party. That's where, you know, we were able to build up that political power, both inside the building and outside, made it an electoral issue, and also built up a, we had a ballot campaign that went across the entire state last year. We made all votes publicly available. And I will say that, and that has also shifted how we've been able to do things in the legislature. There are a number of legislation that has stalled for decades, have finally moved out of committee, thanks to transparency. We've also been able to stop horrible bills from moving forward. again thanks to transparency because legislators do not want to be on the record voting to raise your utility bills for example right that was a bill that we were able to stop and really pull out those poison pills but that is all to say um i will say all the biggest things that we've been able to accomplish in the legislature you cannot do with the 200 legislators alone it has to be with community with our various advocacy organizations working together with legislators on the inside. And that's how you know we were able to win transparency and I believe that's how we're going to continue to win things, including transparency but also again the affordability agenda right like we ought to have Medicare for all in Massachusetts, we know that it will save us. Up to 40% of our costs, $130 billion we spend as a state on healthcare, 40% of that can be reduced thanks to Medicare for All because we will take out all the administrative costs of the back and forth, insurance fighting with hospitals and the are you in network, are you out of network. We also have a lot to gain from the fact that we'll be negotiating on behalf of 7 million residents for the same pharmaceutical companies, the same medications, medical devices, right? That can also put pressure to lower the cost, which is how Canada and other places do this, right? That you negotiate collectively, you can lower the cost of healthcare. So that's just an example of something we need to be building towards. Universal childcare, right? We know that there are amazing proposals at the federal level. I say, let's move forward and make it happen at the state level. We have the ability to raise that revenue at the state level to make it so that people are not paying $26,000, $30,000 a year to raise their child here in Massachusetts. And the last thing I'll say is with utilities, our rising utility bills, there are some short-term and long-term things we need to do, but I do really, one model that I think is so clear is that we have to be making investments in publicly owned renewable energy. That's how we are able to, I mean, the towns that already have municipal light plants, they pay half the utility costs the rest of the state does. And so making those investments so that there aren't places for profit to be taken by these giant monopolies like National Grid and Eversource is how we move forward. So anyway, sorry, I'm diving into a lot of the different issues, but I think those are the things where we have to build up the political pressure to make them happen.
[Danielle Balocca]: That's really interesting. And I don't think I knew about, I think I've heard that phrase of like, all these votes happen behind closed doors. And I didn't realize how that was actually working. And I think that it's really disappointing. And it makes sense that that pressure is helping. And I would guess like, so this podcast mostly focused on local government. And I think Medford has had this issue in the past where it was like, we were lucky to get like a YouTube video of a past meeting, but now there's a lot more participation by residents. And, and like you know we're able to come to meetings and say what we want and like pressure elected officials. And I think in terms of the Medicare, Medicare for all all these changes that I think would help us would help save us all money when affordability is something everyone is talking about all the time. people don't like change and I think I think of some of my family members they're like I'll just pay the high cost because I know I'm going to get what I've always gotten but like this possibility of something could be better and more equitable right like I always think about insurance is like you have to know that you can push back to get things covered but if you don't know that and you don't know who to talk to and you don't know how the process works you're not going to get what you need and so yeah I think those these are really compelling arguments. I guess I'm wondering like if you have any, what your top priorities would be for change on the first day.
[SPEAKER_00]: Totally. I will say my top priorities are, well, I'll say my three big priorities that I focus on, right? One is the federal overreach piece, which is that, you know, we know ICE is in our communities. We need to continue to really stop ICE from being able to terrorize our immigrant neighbors. And so while I'm very proud of some of the really big steps we've taken in the past several months around putting in protections from where ICE can operate and all that, there's more we have to do, particularly around sharing data with ICE. And I'll just give two concrete examples right now, ICE can take, like buy your geolocation data of your phone. They don't need a warrant for it. They don't need a court order. They can just buy it from data brokers. And so that's something just should not, that can be completely banned at the state level. And we need state law to do that. But that's one, again, it's a, I don't want ICE to have access to that data. I certainly don't want anyone to have access to my geolocation data at any point in time. It's also why I mean the flop camera issue has become so big is because it's being abused and used to stop people and of course wrongfully accused and wrongfully arrest people so this is, you know, to me that data privacy piece is big, and then related to that as well I'll add that AI is here, we need to be proactive about how we put in place guardrails for a safe and ethical use of AI, as well as ensuring that AI is not used to target immigrants or wrongfully arrest people. Right now, there are proposals to build data centers across Massachusetts, which also can raise our utility rates because of the high usage. And we are leaving our municipalities to fight these battles one by one. rather than putting in place real guardrails at the state level, both in terms of, again, how AI is used, and also how we're using these data centers, and how they're being built, and the environmental justice impact of those data centers. That's all something that is very here and now, and this is where, to me, again, having a state house that is dragging its feet for decades, years, saying, oh, we need to look at these problems for so long. We don't have that option right now with AI. I mean, we have a federal government that is trying to essentially have a completely unregulated AI, right, and in fact actually Trump was trying to pass an executive, I mean he did pass an executive order, they're trying to pass legislation to make it so states can't even regulate AI and so we do need to get moving on this quickly so that is something that I'm very, it's one of my areas of interest and expertise and I want to be pushing that on day one. And then the last third piece I'll add is of course the affordability agenda. So really building up so that we are raising that progressive revenue to fund things like Medicare for all, universal child care, as well as I didn't mention this earlier but I want to add building affordable homes that are permanently affordable in our communities. Recently I had a newsletter that I'd love to plug and share around how there is a incredible project right now in Chinatown, 100 plus units that are permanently affordable, 100 percent, not inclusionary zoning, not 20 percent added on or anything like that. It is 100 percent permanently affordable. And with those public investments, we've been able to make a building that would have essentially cost a family living. Had it been like market rate, it would have cost them over a million dollars over the next 30 years. We have made these permanently affordable units that are you know, charging $2,000 a month for a family, right, rather than $3,000 to $4,000 a month for a one-bedroom that is typical with market rate, you know, new construction. And so that model is available. We used to do it all the time as a country, right, but we stopped investing, you know, at this level in terms of public investment in entire building since the 80s. And so I do think we can turn a leaf here and make sure that we are making those investments in those permanently affordable units when we do build so that people can We're both building housing that is going to fit the needs of our community, not the needs of a developer that is trying to get a 20% return on investment, but also is making it permanently affordable so people can stay in the communities that they've been part of for their whole lives as well. And so that's something that I'm, you know, again, the whole affordability agenda is another giant priority. I know it's a big one, but yeah, it's an important one.
[Danielle Balocca]: It seems like capitalism is a huge layer of this onion where like that somebody's profiting off of all of these things and that's maybe what's slowing down the positive change for all of us. And I think like from the takeaway that I've been getting from a lot of these interviews about state government is that I think Massachusetts has a reputation for being like a pretty liberal state and that we take for granted how those votes are actually happening in the statehouse and like what you know how our representatives and senators are actually representing us so this is really helpful. How would you say you kind of like set yourself apart from the other candidates in this room.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will say that the main thing that distinguishes me from my opponents is twofold. One is that I have nearly a decade of experience getting things done in the legislature. So whether it be transparency, increasing funding for our public schools by $1.5 billion, passing legislations to get rid of those frankly really exploitative brokers fees that were required by renters without their consent, as well as doubling the funding for affordable housing in my municipality. I mean, all of those wins I have a track record of experience of getting things done in the legislature by building up the political pressure. Oh, and I'll add, sorry, I forgot. Also the stopping really regressive corporate tax breaks and tax breaks for the very wealthy. That's another, again, building up that pressure to make sure we pass legislation. That is not going to take away money from our communities, but it's actually gonna be investing in our community so I have that experience, getting that work done, but I also have done that by challenging the status quo and really taking that head on. Again, these are fights that boat with me particularly just uplifting the transparency. the $1.5 billion for our public schools, and as well as the corporate tax breaks, and stopping these utility companies from raising our bills. All four of those examples are ones where the common status quo narrative was, it can't be done. The speaker said no, the powers that be said no, don't bother. And we were able to win it, right? In addition to transparency, the $1.5 billion in our public schools, the House Ways and Means share at the time said, I'll fund a fourth of that. So about 300 plus million, that's all we can afford, because I'm not willing to tax wealthy people to fund our schools. And we were able to force the state house's hand, right? So I have that track record not only of getting things done, but challenging the system to get it done so that we can build a state house that is working, rather than there's a way of getting things done in the legislature where you're reinforcing the current broken status quo. And that's something I completely I think strategically, I should say, strategically is a big difference between myself and some of the other candidates in the race. And so that's to me the distinguishing piece around that strategic difference of we have to change the statehouse. While also, we're not just gonna change the statehouse by trying to just change the narrative. We do it by getting it done through organizing and building the political pressure to make it so that the powerful decision makers up top can't tell us no anymore.
[Danielle Balocca]: I think I'm saying that residents in Bedford would resonate with them. I think we've been told for years and years that we just have to make do with what we have, and every year somebody loses something else. And we just passed our first override, I think, ever. And I think it's been helpful. And it makes a big difference. And I think it makes a big difference in terms of our budget, and maybe less of a big difference than people thought in their own bank accounts but yeah no it's interesting to see how your your kind of perspective here is in line with like some of what we've been seeing just at the city level for Medford.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, absolutely. I think there's a bit of this, like, I think what's so exciting over the past year and several years, and this is not unique to Massachusetts, but people are demanding that we have a government that really centers us, right, and not, you know, PACs or super PACs, not these corporate interests. I mean, because I will say, like you mentioned earlier, with like capitalism at the root of a lot of these issues, and and kind of just kind of take that statement one step to, you know, about like how it's the machinations of the State House, right, is that for each of these issues there are also these corporate lobbyists that have an immense amount of access. It's funny because I just knocked the door of someone who was a former staffer at the State House and was like, I think something the public just, you know, something he said to me was that the public doesn't know how much these ever source national grid lobbyists right these health care company you know insurance company lobbyists how much of a they literally live in the State House as more than the legislators do they have a bigger access to the you know the institution and it's just it's so fundamentally wrong. I mean, they weren't elected to represent us. And yet they have such a big say over what moves forward and what doesn't happen or what is possible and what is not possible. And I think people are just fed up with that system of essentially a system that works for the wealthy and well-connected while leaving the rest of us to fight over these crumbs and scraps and make these, quote, unquote, like, you know, necessary decisions between do we fill the pothole or do we fund the school? It doesn't have to be that way. And I think that's the piece that to me the transparency was so vital to exposing that because, and I'll just give an example with that utility bill. This was a bill that was put forward late last fall that would have increased those delivery charges on our utility bills, that black box that we don't know where that money is going, but now makes up more than the electricity or gas use. They wanted to put more fees and costs into that black box. while at the same time pulling back all of our climate commitments for 2030 and 2050. And so it was bad on like an affordability agenda level, and it was bad in terms of you believe in the climate change, you know, you believe in climate change and want to stop it level, right. And so those are both, you know, so anyway, that that bill, it was given to the first committee that voted on it, they had an hour to vote on that bill. And I mean, like, that just tells you two things, right? One, they don't care about legislators voice in this at all, because we know that there were lobbyists and people who crafted this hundred plus page bill behind closed doors. And they had a say over, I mean, this extremely complicated energy permitting statute and all of the layers that were in this bill. And then the following committee only had a day to vote on this bill. And that's actually that one day we had to use to stop this bill from moving forward. And fortunately, because we have the infrastructure in place with the climate justice movement and a broad coalition, I mean, we're talking from suburbs, the rural parts of the state to the gateway cities and environmental justice communities, because they had been doing such incredible organizing, they were ready to jump on this, I mean, this really horrific bill and stop it, right, put that political pressure. And at the same time, we had a small number of legislators on the inside who you know, because of our work and our background in working on utility policy, we're able to push on the inside to be like, we cannot, no, we cannot vote on this. This is a terrible and, you know, really talk to our colleagues to get them to commit to saying we're not going to vote on the, you know, the next committee, we're not letting this move forward. But again, it's like, right, like underlying that, I mean, what was a win, and I'm really proud that the most recent version of the bill does not have these cuts or pullbacks, I should say, to our climate commitments, but also has some more accountability around how National Grid and Eversource spends our utility bills at the same time. It's like, who was in the room before this, you know what I mean, this slapdash, like, immensely chaotic, immensely, I mean, it's just like, we really were operating on the order of hours to stop this bill. You know, and that's like, that's the system I think we're all standing up and saying, we're not for this anymore, we're not allowing this happen anymore in our government, and it's our tax dollars, it's our government, it's our democracy, not theirs.
[Danielle Balocca]: It does make me think, I'll bring it back to Medford a little bit, is how we think about our budget process. And we have a strong mayor. That's the party that we have. And so she has a lot of power in determining a lot of these things. And it does leave us in this position sometimes where it's like, we either have to say no to something because we don't have enough information, or we're just not getting what we need all the time. And it sounds like the speaker is in a similar position. I wonder it sounds like the speaker is creating all these rules for how you have to respond and or like how much time you have and what like what what options you actually have. And I wonder if there is a mechanism to change that or if you've thought about like, how, if there's anything that can be done to make that better.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, for sure. And I will just, I'd say in the State House, there's sort of three big decision makers. There's the Speaker, the Senate President, and the Governor. Those are sort of like the three, you know, and that's like the three branch, not three branches, but there's the, you know, the Senate, the House, and the, you know, the executive branch, right? Which is you know the governor's like the mayor in this in Medford's example, it just imagine you have these really powerful, you know legislative heads right in addition to the council which of course is not the that's where the parallel falls apart with municipal government and state government but they are essentially like the three big decision makers and. In terms of changing how, I will say part of the issue with this lack of transparency, I mean, they're all interconnected, but there is this extremely consolidated power amongst those three decision makers versus, again, whether you call it the rest of us, the rank and file legislators, anyone else in the system, labor unions, advocacy groups, energy policy experts, whatever, everyone else has such an outsized, less power than the three decision makers. I will say, you know, and I think one of the things that in terms of how to fundamentally change that it's been our voice to start right because I think one of the things that really shocked me and this is what compelled me to run for state senate for what is, you know, I mean, the second Middlesex district it's one of the most progressive districts in the state. And I do think that, like, the most progressive district has a role to play in a legislature, which is not to keep your head down and sort of reinforce that status quo and go along to get along, wait and see. It is to really challenge that and to use and uplift our community's voice when it needs to happen. And I think, you know, I'll just give, like, an example of, like, the horror show example and then, like, the positive example. The horror show example is when, like, nobody raises the alarm and horrible things happen. And because the The rules of the political environment, if you will, the norms, right, the culture, is to never challenge the three decision makers, never challenge those who are in power. What happens is that these horrible things just happen, and then no one reports on it, no one knows about it, no one knows it happened. And actually, this example was one that I uplifted years later. I watched it happen, and I just couldn't believe it was happening. But I uplifted it years later, and it's now something I talk about all the time. Essentially, the legislature in late fall of 2018 passed a corporate tax break that gave a 95% exemption to income earned off of offshore assets. So this is a $1 billion tax break to the largest corporations in the world. Any company that has that amount of, you know, offshore assets, we're talking like tech companies with intellectual property, right, we're talking these big companies are, they figure out ways to put their assets in the Cayman Islands or abroad, right, in these low tax havens, and then that income that they're earning off of those offshore assets, that we gave in our state a 95% exemption on that income. I mean, take that compared to the exemption or deductions you get for your own personal taxes every year. On average, if you max out everything, it's like 12% at most. And they're getting a 95% exemption. And this was done with no recorded vote. It was a voice vote, an informal session. There was three or four legislators in the room, and it just happened like that in a matter of just went right through the system in a matter of minutes. You know that again like nobody raised the alarm when it happened. And the reason why I bring up that example is because a year later they tried to do it again for another tax break and we were able to stop it because we had legislators on the inside willing to kick the dust up and say this is we're not allowing this happening more and we had a coalition on the outside to really push the public narrative. And then we were able, it was actually quite in the globe in the local press when this happened in 2019. And, you know, we were able to put the pressure to stop them from doing yet another corporate tax break when our communities were suffering. And so that's, you know, again, and I'll say another piece too, is like when Governor Healey put forward this open AI contract, I was one of the very few legislators, I think I was the only one at the time, that really raised the alarm saying this contract is dangerous because OpenAI and their vendor Carisoft work with Palantir as well as with their own capabilities to help ICE track down immigrants using Medicare and Medicaid data. And there were no data protections in this OpenAI contract, which was I mean, our state was the only state to ever do this. We've had states do pilot programs with like a specific function, right, of how to use AI in government, but never had any state done a statewide, every employee gets open AI access and we're sharing that data with this company. Again, there were no data protections in place and there frankly wasn't a real procurement process either. And so, and there was this open AI, sorry, there was open AI task force. stacked with people who had financial gains, financial ties with open AI. So the whole system was wrong from the get-go. And again, I'm the only legislator to raise the alarm on this. But because I raised the alarm on it, there was immense public pressure to pull back a lot of the pieces, to slow this contract down, to make sure we put these protections in place. And so there is this element of when we raise our voices, we can change things and we see that outcome over and over again. But when we all kind of tacitly agree and keep quiet and not raise the alarm, particularly from the role of a lawmaker, these billion dollar tax breaks just slide through the system. And that's the piece that like that's why I'm running to be in the state Senate is so that I can continue to do that work of ensuring that we're putting the public's interest first over the interests of these corporations.
[Danielle Balocca]: That's really helpful. These are great examples and it's making a lot of sense to me. My final sort of question is like, so it sounds like you have some experience sort of like agitating in that in this role. What about with constituents so I think like there's a lot of there's a lot going on in my head about like affordability and I think how like the messages that were given or what we're made to understand is that like if costs go up and turn like you know if our if there's more money put into like a state budget it's going to come from us and it's going to harm us and i think there's a lot of people that believe that but it may not necessarily be true but how do you how do you like think about You know, I think we talked about this all the time this like sort of divisiveness around constituents and what people believe and how do you think, how, how do you approach working with people that may have sort of opposite or constituents that may have like opposite beliefs or believe what you're doing is not the right thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, totally. And I will just add, I mean, I think, and you know, I think about like, you know, the constituent who maybe like, say, for example, opposed to the override, right, the constituent who was really concerned about, you know, just like are more fiscally conservative, let's just like name like, as an example, right, who is like, look, I, you know, your little pie in the sky ideas are great, but you know, we don't have the money, you know, and I'm not willing to pay more. And what I say to people like that, or people who are sharing that perspective, which I think, A, it's very valid, right? And again, I think that's reflected particularly with the 60% of older adults who don't have the resources to cover their expenses every month, going to them and saying, hey, can we raise your property taxes a bit more when you're on fixed income? It's understandable that someone is pushing back, right, and saying, no, I don't have the resources for that very understandably. And what I share is that, you know, I fought hard and we won the for the fair share amendment or the millionaires tax. And I'm very proud of the accomplishment with that. It's $0.04 tax over every dollar earned over a million dollars a year. That is now raising $3 billion at the state level to fund schools, repairing the T, all sorts of infrastructure, child care costs for low income families, all these really good things. And even after we pass the millionaires tax people who make over a million dollars pay less in state taxes than the rest of us. And so that's where my what I would say to someone who is concerned right with their their wallet which again I want to validate that that is absolutely a true concern people have. And that needs to be addressed and that needs to be supported. And my focus is we need to focus on what is going on with those, the people who are making over a million dollars right the corporations that are continuing to create billionaires and now trillionaires, what are we doing to ensure that they are paying their fair share because I agree the. Massachusetts residents, most, the vast majority of us, the 90% of us, right, have been paying our fair share. And the reality is our system right now is letting all of these, the very small number of people who are doing extraordinarily well, off the hook. And that's what I would say is that that's where my focus is. It's not on, and I think that's where actually I'll add to that, particularly to relate it back to local Medford issues, right, the override. the reason why we even have to make that decision around the override is this unfortunate and impossible choice that the state government puts municipalities in which is that oh are you out of money which structurally you will run out of money because of the way state law works with prop two and a half right the number the amount of the budget that we're working with since 1980 and two and a half percent has been stuck on, we're working with a third less of the budget we had in 1980, assuming that nothing else has changed, right? That is just inflation numbers. So because inflation is 3.8% on average over the past 45, 46 years, and the 2.5% required, it's not in real terms, it's 2.5% regardless, that gap between that 3.8% and the 2.5% compounded over 46 years, That alone leaves us with a third less of a budget and so we're making municipalities and Medford's not alone here but just use Medford as an example to make this impossible choice between do you cut your school budget or do you ask residents to pay even more in taxes during a time when the housing costs have exploded in the region. And then you have an older adults particular, but not always, but like, you know, people who have been struggling to stay and afford to live in Medford, um, having to foot that bill rather than what the state house can do, because we don't give municipalities the option to raise taxes beyond effectively property taxes. Although I know I'm making a simplification there, but, but, you know, state government can raise those taxes on, Excessive CEO pay on you know corporations that are getting these sweetheart tax deals right we can raise taxes on Google Facebook and all these tech companies. You know that's what the state government should be doing rather than telling municipalities hey tighten up your belts again right and that's what we've been telling municipalities as an institution for decades and so. Anyway, that's what I would say. I think this is why my support is quite broad. I think I've had people who told me they voted for Trump and they're voting for me. And of course, I have our diehard progressives and democratic socialists voting for me. But it's because this is an issue that unites all of us. And I think we're all tired of having unelected people dictate what's happening in our government and deciding where our budgets, which is our moral values, go. to them rather than to the rest of us.
[Danielle Balocca]: That's really helpful. I'm wondering if there's anything that we haven't talked about that you think is important for us to know about your campaign.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think so. I mean, I'll just plug since the timing of it. We have early voting at Medford City Hall until Friday and then we have election day. Polls are open from 7 AM to 8 PM on Tuesday, September 1st. I recognize that is also moving day for many renters, so if you are moving, please get your vote in either by mail, although at this point if you haven't requested your mail in ballot, today's our last day to request it, but it might be better to just go to City Hall if you can. And yeah, just make sure to vote and I hope to earn your vote on September 1st.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks, Erika. Any events you're plugging for your campaign, or is it we kind of wrapped up for the primary?
[SPEAKER_00]: We have our events largely until September 1 are canvassing and phone banking. And so if people are excited to try or love canvassing and want to try, it's really fun because you get to know your neighbors. And it's also get out the vote seat time. So I always tell people, I think a lot of people get nervous about canvassing because you're knocking on people's doors and you don't know who they are. And sometimes people are just kind of like, why are you here? This is weird. But also right because we are just a week away from election day, think of it as like it's it's public service like you know public service right you're reminding people about the election coming up you're making sure that they get their voices heard and their vote count. And so you know the you know essentially the script on the doors and on the phones is very much like hey. We need you to go out there and vote, make sure your voice is heard, and make sure you cast your vote for September 1st. So I would say it's a lot of fun to knock on doors. I'm a little biased, but those are the events we have. We actually have canvassing and phone banking happening every day for the next week. And then, of course, on September 1st, we will have our results party happening in Union Square, which is where I live currently. And it is at Sally O'Brien's in Union Square. I think we'll open the doors around 7.30, although polls close at 8, so yeah, definitely come by at 8 o'clock if you're excited about my campaign and the results coming in, so yeah.
[Danielle Balocca]: Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Erica, and thanks for making the time for the podcast, and good luck on the first.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much. It was great to be here, and thank you for having me.
[Danielle Balocca]: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. The Medford Bites podcast is produced and moderated by Danielle Balacca and Shelly Keshaman. Music is made by Hendrik Idonis. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. You can reach out to us by email at medfordpod at gmail.com, or you can rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. Guys, what's the name of the podcast? Medford Bites. Medford Bites.