 Hello everyone, James Mann, welcome to this ACMI election 2021 event. And it is the debate for select board. And we welcome our three candidates in the order that they appear on the ballot. I imagine their screen, well, in the order they appear on the ballot. We have Eric Helmuth and Jennifer Seuss and John Hurd. So welcome to all three of you. Thanks for being here. A very quick synopsis of what we'll do. We are gonna start with two minute opening statements from each of the candidates. And then we will have a single question, the same one posed to all three and they will have two minutes to answer that. And then around three questions, randomly chosen from this here, Mason Jar, one going to each of you in turn and you'll get two minutes to answer that, the person it is asked of. And then the other two will have one minute to respond. And then we will move from straight to closed statements. Those will be one minute long. So we'll move riskily, I ensure. And we welcome you and are glad to get going with this. So it was randomly chosen in the order of both the opening and closing statements. And a reminder, you have up two minutes and we are starting with you, Jennifer Seuss. Hello, my name is Jennifer Seuss and I'm running for seat on the Arlington Select Board. I have served the town in a wide range of capacities, including town meeting, school committee, long range planning committee and the election modernization committee. I've had leadership roles in multiple ballot question campaigns and I've been active volunteer with many different community organizations. As a member of the school committee, I advocated strongly for transparent decision-making and community dialogue, organized public forums to hear from stakeholders during difficult decisions, initiated office hours, a webpage and email newsletter. Other efforts I was involved in include an E30AM start time at the secondary level, standardizing the after-school application process, the five-year strategic plan, reports on school suspensions broken up by race and implicit bias training for all administrators and staff. Why run for select board? As I've gained experience through my varied roles in town, I have become more invested and involved in issues that go beyond the work of the school committee, including housing, the environment and racial justice. On housing, I believe that every community in the Boston area has a responsibility to do its part to increase affordable housing, housing diversity and housing supply more generally. But the particulars of how that looks needs to emerge from a larger community-wide conversation. On the environment, I support the goals of the Net Zero Action Plan and the proposal to declare a climate emergency. We are on the right track, but we need to remain vigilant. On the, sorry, finally, we need to consider issues of racial justice, equity and inclusion in everything that we do. As a town develops its equity plan, we need to make sure that all voices are heard from and represented. Thank you for listening. I look forward to the debate. Thank you very much. Mr. Helmuth, you're up next. Thank you. Thank you to ACMI for this forum. And thank you to the viewers for caring enough about your government to watch this debate. My name is Eric Helmuth and I'm running for select board. I wanna bring my experience in our town government and my passion for bringing people together to help meet our challenges and move Arlington forward. My husband and I moved to Arlington 14 years ago and I quickly discovered that Arlington is a place where people get involved. I got involved too. And over the past 11 years, I've learned how town government works and how you get things done. As a town meeting member, I introduced the idea of using electronic voting in town meeting and I led the team effort to change our bylaws and set it all up. It was a big change, but now you can see how your own town meeting members vote on the issues that you care about. As chair of the Community Preservation Act Committee, I've led the process to fund millions of dollars in affordable housing, open space and historic preservation projects in Arlington. Working closely with many town departments, commissions and town meeting to choose good projects that everybody can agree on. In these and other roles in our government, I've earned a reputation as a good listener, a team player and a consensus builder. I'd like to bring those skills to the select board. I'm grateful to have supporters from many walks of life, people who've lived here over 50 years or less than five, parents, seniors, people from every neighborhood and every political persuasion, elected leaders including members of the select board, school committee, town meeting members and others. Local government can make a big difference in people's lives. And I look forward to talking tonight about how we can work together to make Arlington a better place for everyone. Thank you very much. And Mr. Heard. Thank you. My name is John Heard and I'm currently serving as the chair of the Arlington Select Board. First, I wanna thank ACMI and I'm moderated James Milan for facilitating this debate and my fellow candidates, Jennifer and Eric for their willingness to serve and for running positive productive campaigns. It's been a privilege and an honor to serve the residents of Arlington on the select board over the past three years. I continue to learn from my colleagues and town residents and grow as a select board member each day. I'm proud to represent a diverse, vibrant community whose residents actively participate in the political process and hold their elected officials to a very high standard. The last term has not gone by without challenges. We had to solve problems relative to fiscal stability, racial inequity, housing affordability, and deal with a pandemic that threatened the lives of our residents, all while continuing to support efforts to promote sustainability, update our transportation system and protect our natural resources in town. However, through collaboration among both board members and residents, we were able to address these issues and I am proud that I played a critical role in the solutions. While we have achieved much, there is significant work ahead of us. I am committed to continuing to work with residents and town staff to build on the progress that we have made and I look forward to a positive, constructive conversation tonight. Thank you. Thank you. This next question is going to be posed, well, obviously you're all answering the same question each time, but in this case, you've got two minutes each and we've chosen the order in which you'll respond, again, from the order in which you appeared on the ballot. So the question is, Arlington faces a number of challenges in the coming years. What challenge or issue would you particularly like to take a leadership role in tackling as a member of the select board? And we start with you, Mr. Helmuth. Thank you, James. You know, I think the job of a select board member is to be the link between the community and its government. We have to be good listeners, we have to put together teams and we have to be ready to face whatever challenges hit us. We didn't see the pandemic coming, we didn't see other challenges coming and I think having the right skillset is really, really important. And I care a lot about taking care of residents and local businesses as we come out of the pandemic that I think is the most immediate over the next few months issue we need to deal with. The residents in town, we've had a 35% increase in the amount of emergency food requests from the food pantry over the last year. Requests for rental assistance have gone through the roof and I've been fortunate as chair of the CPA community to be able to direct several hundred thousand dollars to that effort, but we're probably not done. We need to support our local businesses. They've had a tough year and I think the town has done a good job of being creative and listening to some red tape when it's safe to do so to enable them to operate but we need to help them have a great year as we emerge from the pandemic. That means more flexibility. That means finding funding sources potentially from the new federal funding coming our way. We don't know yet, but I think that helping residents get back on their feet by making sure those services are fully funded and that we are paying attention to the needs of people as we heal is going to be one of my most immediate priorities. We have other things to tackle. Housing, racial equity, sustainable transportation, the climate, those are all really important and I wanna take leadership roles in those as well but I think the thing that's on everyone's mind right now is the pandemic and I wanna be part of helping that healing. Thank you very much, Mrs. Europe, next. Yeah, when I talk to people, I think that people generally think that the town is well run, that the psych board are good people but there is sort of a lack of trust or understanding about how decisions are made. When I encountered that in the school committee, when I first got on, there was a lot of conversation about communication, frustration that the superintendent wasn't communicating better and I realized that actually as a board member, this is something you can do, right? You can go out to the community and you can just start talking to them. You can explain what's going on, you can explain how decisions are made, you can gather input from people, have forums, create surveys and so when I've talked to people across town, the sort of anxiety and frustrations on whether it's be zoning changes or decisions over the police department or decisions about our outdoor spaces or certainly economic development, empty storefronts, what I see is sort of a frustration that they're not getting more information and they're not able to tell us what their opinion is and so that's what I've done on the school committee. Whenever you have that anxiety, you have that frustration, the thing to do is to step back, don't jump into decision right away, start talking to people, hearing from people and being very, very clear and transparent about the issues and why you're making decisions. Thank you very much, Mr. Heard, two minutes. Thank you. As a local business owner, like Mr. Helmuth, my main priority next year, in addition to the number of ongoing issues that the Slack board has been dealing with during the past three years is to support local businesses and residents as we emerge from the pandemic. We've done as much as we could under the constraints that we've had during the pandemic to help keep our businesses alive and keep as many of them with their doors open as possible. The board has created new outdoor spaces for restaurants to operate and I serve on the economic recovery task force which is solely tasked with trying to help businesses get through this difficult time. And we've done as much as we can to both listen to them, listen to their concerns and address those concerns and try to spread the word about our businesses to help get people in their doors. But as difficult as the past year has been, I really look forward to the next few years serving on the board because I think it'll be an interesting time to try to find creative ways to help our businesses. We already have in the queue some initiatives such as increasing outdoor art spaces, increasing outdoor dining for businesses and just reaching out to businesses and saying, what is it that we can help provide you with and allowing businesses to operate outdoors in a safe manner in our public spaces in town. And so I think with what's been going on, there's a lot of issues that we'll need to tackle but really the most imperative in the next few months to a year is gonna be working with our local businesses to make sure that they can survive and continue to serve the residents of the town. Thank you very much. We'll move into the next section of questions which will be directed again, one to each of you intern and Paul, as I said, from here. I'm pulling out the first one and it is directed to you and this is Seuss and that will be followed by a response from Mr. Herd and then Mr. Hall. So the question is, looking back over all that's happened in the last year plus, in Arlington and around the country and world, what are the most important lessons you'd take into this work on the select board? Whoa. That's a good question. It's broad. What I've seen in the last few years, I mean, is a intense desire to be involved to make a difference, to understand how local government works and state government and federal government. I think one of the things that happened in the last few years is that people didn't feel that they could do very much on the federal level, certainly, or even state and so really sort of put a lot more effort into town government. So I'm seeing, there's just been a great amount of sort of excitement and effort and involvement in getting involved. Which actually, I can transition to the work I've done in the Election and Modernization Committee, one of the things that we would like to advocate for is for ranked choice voting, which would be a great way to get more people involved in the process of running for office, in the process of supporting candidates. It just, it makes it sort of a better process and a more inclusive process. Thank you very much. Mr. Herd, one minute. Thank you. And I completely agree. In the past few years, particularly serving on the board, we've seen a huge increase in the amount of participation. It's just an open forum at town meeting. There's far more articles than there's ever been. And we have an incredible group of residents that previously didn't participate in the local political process. I think when I, in my last election, I think it was around 6% or 7% the vote of participation. But with events that have happened both locally and around the country, we've had a lot of really productive discussions. When it first happened, the board had trouble communicating with some of the people that came before us. And that's on us as elected officials. But I really think in the past year, we've improved these discussions and they've become much more productive. So I look forward to continuing that. Thank you. Mr. Helman. Thank you. It was, I think about the experience of our community over the last year or even two years. I think I've been really struck by how important and fragile trust is in our government. And what an honor it is to have that trust and how much, how difficult, how much work it is when that's lost. I think some of the events in Arlington over the past couple of years resulted in a lot of members of the community, frankly, losing trust in the police department or in the town's response to some difficult situations. And I want to give credit to the people of the town who stood up and told their stories of pain in public, to the town staff, including a police chief who were willing to step in and be part of that process for the town for increasing opportunities to have difficult and painful conversations. So I think that's a good start. We're not done, but we have a lot more to go, but it's the direction we should keep. Thank you. Next question is directed to you, Mr. Herd, and it is. I realize that you guys have touched on this already, but do you think that the Select Board has an accurate sense of what the major concerns of the Arlington community are and are the existing mechanisms for getting community input sufficient? So I think we do. And like I said, in the wake of Lieutenant Padrini's writings where they're really tore the town in half, the Select Board had issues, I would say, communicating effectively with people that were agreed by the things that Lieutenant Padrini wrote. And it was a long while where we weren't able to effectively communicate. But as we worked through it, we listened to residents, we worked with residents, we worked with town staff to start implementing new trainings and discussions and forums on race and racial inequity. I think we really came to a place where we understood where our residents were coming from and we were together with both the residents who were agreed by Lieutenant Padrini's writings, town staff, the Select Board, and residents on the other side of the issue to start moving forward to get us to a place where we can have respectful, productive discussions. And I know we try, and I've certainly tried and I hope it comes across to be very respectful, open to input, accessible. We respond to emails. We have our phone numbers out there. We have citizens open forum on just about every meeting. And we've had a number of instances where we've sat for two hours and we let every citizen that has a concern speak for a lot of three minutes. So I think there were some citizens that didn't feel like they were being, residents that didn't feel like they were being heard. But I think we've got to a better place where we're having good productive conversations with our residents who want more from the Select Board and our town leaders. Thank you. Mr. Helmets, you have one minute. Yeah, I think the town does make a real effort to listen and to be aware of what people's concerns are. There's certainly the avenues to do that that John mentioned. It's been my experience that the hard work is, you know what people are saying. You know what the concerns are, the people who are in touch, but you don't know what people are thinking if they're not feeling like they're able to be part of the process or that they're welcome or that they know how to. I've heard from people that, you know, there's sort of like the people in the know at town hall and the people not. So I would want to work more as a Select Board member to really look for who's missing from the table, who feels like they can't just pick up the phone or drop an email to the town manager, because you can't. But do they feel welcome at the table? And I think that's the only way we'll know for sure if we understand what the community is needing from its government. Thank you. Mrs. Seuss, one minute. Yeah, I'm actually going to give a similar answer. We know from lots of research that people show up at meetings are usually wealthier, whiter, older. And so sort of by definition, we are not hearing from everyone. And there needs to be new avenues to try to reach additional people. It's difficult. It's not an easy problem. It's you need to not just fly in and sort of have a conversation as a one-off. You need to be there at all moments. You need not all moments, but you need to have a relationship that you've built up or time with different communities. And I think this is a hard problem and it's a really important problem. One of the things I think would be helpful is as a town develops its multi-year equity plan that we focus on sort of bringing ideas together for how to get here for more people. I'm sorry. Thanks. Thank you. And last question of this round goes to you, Mr. Helmuth first. And it is. Okay. Arlington's tax base is overwhelmingly residential with the recent override and debt exclusion further adding to homeowners tax burden. What ideas do you have to balance the needs of various types of homeowners, from individuals to families in the school system to seniors and those who are on fixed incomes? Yeah, one of the recent year's budgets, something like 77% of our town revenues was the property tax base. Arlington does not have a lot of room to add new business and commercial space. So I think we need to look very carefully at smart growth and where we can get the most value out of the commercial areas that we have. And I think with respect, because that will help reduce the property tax burden when we have commercial growth. One of the things I'm most interested in is taking better advantage or mixed use zoning and finding creative ways to employ that so that we can have a two-fer. That we can have economic development, but we can also have more in different kinds of housing that will help us have more economic diversity. Some of those can be above businesses. They can form thriving neighborhoods for people who want to live near local businesses and create new customers for those businesses. So that can be part of the solution. I think that for seniors in town, I am generally supportive of accessory dwelling units. I think that we have to be very careful about how they're defined so that we don't end up with unintended consequences, but allowing a homeowner by right to add on to their home within careful square foot restrictions and safety restrictions and careful rules so that those aren't abused and turned into Airbnb's can allow a person to age in place. As our property tax burden rises, I think that we owe it to our residents to provide opportunities for them to stay in town. And that's another way we can be creative. And I think finally, we need to work really hard on doing more for affordable housing. Part of my work as CPA chair has been to support affordable housing funding to housing corporation of Arlington. We have the new affordable housing trust, which is a powerful tool for creating more subsidized housing. We need to fund that. And I want to be a robust advocate on the select board for getting that done. Thank you. Ms. Deuce, you have one minute. Thanks. This is a hard problem. So Arlington has a revenue problem, not a spending problem. So we spend less 3,371, I have a note, per resident in town services, less in our comfort communities. I tell people all the time that I think communities like ours and we're not the only ones that are going to rebel at some point. Because frankly, the state has put us in this position. 20 years ago, 21% of our budget was covered by the state. And now the percentage is 12.5%. So that's partly why we're in the position. We certainly have the unique situation in Arlington, or not unique, of most of our property, most of our taxes are from property taxes. So we have the state's position, they've also given us very few resources to help seniors. So the senior exemption amounts have been stuck at 1,300 for years, even as property taxes have gone up. When I talk to our state representatives, that's one of the things I talked to them about. Thank you. Mr. Heard, one minute. Thank you. So Proposition 2.5 was enacted and it wasn't meant to benefit a town like Arlington that is really just built out at the scene. There's not a lot of space to create new growth. So what we have to look is to review our zoning by-laws to start promoting new growth along our commercial corridors to start. To see where we can put more units, create more housing affordability, and increase the housing stock that will stabilize prices in the housing market. Over the past few years, we've instituted a few, the Suck Board has promoted a number of senior-friendly tax relief options such as the circuit breaker tax and other options to help relieve the burning on seniors. But we do have to do more to increase our housing stock in order to really alleviate the affordability problem in town. Thank you very much. I appreciate all, I just want to express my appreciation and hopefully the audience as well for the patience with which you dealt with that. I know that those are big questions to answer in two minutes or one minute. And we appreciate the fact that you did your best to do so. And we will move into closing statements of one minute each. And we are going to begin those with you, Mr. Hellman. Thanks, James. Thank you to everyone watching once again for watching the debate. The Select Board is the link between the community and its government. The job of a Select Board member is not to solve everybody's problems. It's to bring people together, to work on our challenges, to compromise and to find the best path forward together. I have broad experience in Norlington's government, strong relationships with our local leaders in our state house delegation, and a track record to getting things done by building consensus. If you entrust me with this role, this is what I promise. I will work hard. I will always listen carefully. I will honestly consider your views, and you will always know where I stand. Please visit Ericforselectboard.com to learn more about me. And I ask for one of your two votes on Saturday, April 10th. Thank you, sir. Mr. Herd, you're up next. One minute. Thank you. I want to again thank James Mulan and ACMI for hosting this debate and my fellow candidates for the productive discussion. One of my greatest strengths, both as a person and Select Board member, is my ability to work collaboratively with others to tackle important issues. Currently the town is facing significant challenges, and these issues do not have easy solutions. They will require the input of a broad spectrum of residents in town. It is critical that we have town leaders who engage in measured, respectful discussions with residents, listen to their input, and create solutions that reflect the diverse opinions here in Norlington. I am a coalition builder. I like to bring individuals together to achieve a mutually beneficial goal. I am proud and honored to have received the public endorsement of all of the Select Board members that I have served with, except, of course, for the late great Kevin Greeley. I look forward to continuing to discuss the critical issues facing our town and our residents over the next few weeks. And I respectfully ask for one of your two votes on Saturday, April 10th. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Seuss, you will wrap proceedings up for tonight with your closing statement. I'd like to thank ACMI for giving us the opportunity to introduce ourselves. I would also like to thank my fellow candidates for running positive and thoughtful campaigns. It has been a pleasure to campaign against and alongside two people I both like and respect. Frankly, I wish we could all serve together. I want to thank you, the voters, for listening, and I want to thank my supporters, including the over 30% of town meeting members who have publicly endorsed my campaign. To learn more about me and the issues I care about, I encourage you to go to seuss4selectboard.com. I just put up a transportation plan or issue. And finally, don't forget to vote on Saturday, April 10th, early by early by absentee ballot or earlier by absentee ballot. And when you do, I hope to earn one of your two votes for the Arlington Select Board. Thank you very much. And that does indeed wrap up the meetings for this year's debates for the Select Board seat. I want to express our appreciation to the candidates for being here and answering tough questions as articulately as we could hope for. Thank you all for joining us as well. And I repeat what Ms. Seuss just said. Don't forget to vote on April 10th and that you do have opportunities to vote before that, but you've got to go to the town's website to make sure you do it the right way. So for ACMI, I'm James Milan. Thanks for joining us. And we'll see you again. Thank you.