An Interview with Willie Burnley Jr.

Somerville City Councilor and Candidate for Mayor

This post is a lightly-edited transcript from an in-person interview. If you’d like to confirm an exact quotation or simply prefer the unedited content, please reference the original audio.

What is a realistic but ambitious single achievement that, if accomplished, would make your term feel like a success?

Initiating an unarmed emergency response program for the first time in Somerville.

I think it's really important that members of our community who do not feel comfortable having interactions with the police or contacting the police, but want to support their neighbors or want to receive support when they're experiencing crises, have a number to call, have a tool in the toolbox. We can create a program where someone can call, maybe it's 911, maybe it's a different number that we create some kind of shortcut to, in order to send a team of peer support specialists, social workers, people who come from the same communities that they would be supporting, in order to deescalate and bring people the resources they need rather than subject them to the threat of violence or incarceration.

This is something I'm really passionate about, and it is incredibly important, I think, for public safety and transforming our understanding of public safety, and reaffirming for folks the values that I think most residents have, which is that we make each other safe.

The community makes each other safe. It does us no good to turn on one another and to try to dispose of or displace folks who are here, whether they're unhoused, whether they suffer from mental health crises or substance use disorder crises, or whether they're just neighbors who are having a bad day.

How do you determine who responds to a call? Should the caller decide? The dispatcher?

It's a little bit of all of those things. There are calls where I think legally we would have to send the police.

I think that would be the case just based on if there's a report of someone brandishing a weapon. We, at the very least, would need to work our way up to that. This is a program that we want to start really strong, but with the expectation that it can't solve everything out of the gate.

These folks are gonna need a lot of training, a lot of support from different departments. Thankfully, we've seen examples of this throughout the commonwealth. There was a presentation that was done in Somerville Public Health and Public Safety Committee about two years ago, where we had experts from cities across the commonwealth who had programs like this already, to talk to us about the different models that exist, the different ways of funding, the different ways that they can interact with the public. But things like this have been happening in the United States for decades. Colorado has the STAR program (Support Team Assisted Response), Eugene, Oregon has a program, Cambridge has Cambridge HEART (Holistic Emergency Alternative Response Team), Northampton has had a program.

We were on the cutting edge of this conversation five years ago, and now we've fallen behind. And that's a place I do not want to see Somerville.

Would it make sense to train the existing police force in deescalation and responding to these kind of situations?

Some of them have taken some trainings on this, but it fundamentally does not change their role or the threat that they present to members of the public.

Whether you have the nicest police officer in the world or the meanest police officer in the world, if they're holding a badge and a gun, or handcuffs and gun, for a lot of people, that is going to be terrifying. And if they're already having an incredibly stressful experience, it is unlikely to me that everyone is going to come out of that engagement or interaction feeling calmer.

When you have peer support specialists, people who are from the community or who have engaged with particular populations very deeply, you get far better results. For example, when you have someone who's been unhoused as the ambassador to the unhoused community, and who can help deal with disputes and who can help get people away from conflicts and into spaces where they can be safe and provide safety for everyone around them. It's just a much more effective means of getting them the resources and then having them take advantage of programs. If you get a cop who says, "You gotta go to rehab," that might not stick because you're being forced to at threat of arrest, potentially. When you have someone who you've built a relationship with, who's a friend, I think that's just better for us all.

In 2020, did you create a group called Defund Somerville Police?

Yes, I was one of the founders.

Do you still feel like we should defund the police?

Yes. I think that defund was always a movement about the construction of the world we want to live in and the deconstruction of the systems that currently exist.

It wasn't just a call to say, "If you take this money out, then everything's okay." No serious activist or organizer had the opinion that, "Oh, if we just remove all the money from the police department, crime stops," or life becomes fully less stressful for everybody.

It was about saying how do we get to the root causes of crises in our community from a public health perspective, from a mental health perspective, and knowing that a lot of that is rooted in an allocation of resources that is not equitable.

How do you rebalance those scales so that someone isn't feeling so much despair about their own lived reality that they seek support through hard drugs or that they don't feel the need to do something violent in order to get enough money to pay a bill or get food for somebody. There are ways that we can do that, and in 2020, in particular when we founded it, it was because of the threat of COVID cuts. Mayor Curtatone at the time had a preliminary budget where he said, "We're gonna get all these cuts. We have to make some tough decisions. We're gonna take like 25% from Health and Human Services. We're gonna take like 18% from Economic Development, and we're gonna take maybe 2% from police."

At the time when everybody was getting sick and losing their jobs, there were also cuts to housing, and people were losing their housing. It made no sense to us in the community that we would decimate those departments, including Office of Housing Stability, which was fairly new at the time. It was three years old at the time.

We would decimate those departments only to leave one of the largest source of our municipal funds, which for many of us does not feel that it is enhancing our health, totally unchanged.

So what we did is we got, as a community, we moved the council and the mayor to take over a million dollars out of that department and it got put into rental assistance, it got put into food assistance, it got put into two youth specialists, two bilingual youth specialists for our public high school students.

If you ask me if I think that was worth it, moving that money out of the police department and paying for people's food and housing and mental health supports, I would say absolutely.

And I think that is the direction we should be doubling down on.

As mayor, you’d certainly have the option to double down when you proposed the budget, right?

I think at this stage, we're going back to the previous conversation we just had, we're at the stage where it's not just about what we can take away from one department, but what we're trying to build up.

The alternative emergency response program is a program and institution, potentially a department even, that we could be investing in, to deal with a host of issues that do not require the police to solve.

Unfortunately, because of the way society has evolved, the police have a near monopoly on those situations currently.

So my overall strategy would be about what institutions can we build to take that load off of that department.

If there are only certain things that we have the capacity for them to do at this point, that's what they should focus on. They shouldn't be the only people who can do civilian flagging for roads and when there's construction, or monitor that, or all these things that don't require you to have the kind of training that police have.

So we should expect a Burnley administration to propose a budget that includes an unarmed response force in the first draft?

I would hope so. There is a complication that when you're elected mayor, you get in in January and the budget's due a couple of months later.

The budget's a massive project that takes an all hands on deck approach for the city. Every department obviously has a role in pitching what they want. Some of their needs are sometimes conflicting. It's a tricky thing to balance and to change direction for a ship that is so massive as a city.

But it would be one of my top goals. In addition to so many other community initiatives that we've been asked for over a number of years that have been delayed or simply denied during this administration.

What are your thoughts on the Copper Mill project? What about towers in Davis Square generally?

The way I look at pretty much all development in the city is based on what concessions are we receiving as a community, particularly for-profit developments.

What concessions are we receiving as a city? What engagement have they had with the community and the neighbors in particular, and especially through neighborhood councils which I am an advocate for, and I think we should be having more of them throughout the city because one of the things that I see in Somerville's future, and knowing some of the development plans we have currently, Somerville is changing, and it will continue to change. We cannot be a community that is stagnant. A city is a living, breathing thing. And in nature, when you don't adapt, you die. So the question to me is not are we gonna have development? It is what kind of development we're going to have and what can we receive as a community to make it worth it for us?

In terms of the Copper Mill project, in terms of the numbers of units, the numbers themselves don't worry me. Frankly, the height doesn't worry me that much either.

I've been to some of the meetings. I know that for a lot of people, the height is quite scary. It bumps up against their view of what the culture and character of the square is.

I have seen and heard from the Davis Square Neighborhood Council, which is still in formation, that the developers have been willing to make a lot of concessions, from moving the front entrance of the building, which is quite a big task to do in terms of how it changes overall plans and traffic impacts, to having a setback on the building, so it's not actually on the sidewalk. It's actually further away from the street, so it doesn't cast as much of a shadow on the street.

They've also been trying to work with local businesses. One of the things I did after that meeting is I connected the developers with the owner of Narrative Bookstore, because they had proposed a set of businesses that they would like to house on the retail level of their proposal, trying to keep the same type of businesses that exist, and ideally, the same exact businesses. But some of those businesses chose or are choosing not to return, if this project goes through.

So I want to make sure that we are not hurting existing businesses by trying to replace them with outside forces. I think we're still very early in that process. But I am hopeful that we can actually find a path forward for this project that doesn't harm the cultural gems of Davis Square.

They offered the city two free commercial spaces to use, which from my perspective as mayor there are so many things that we could be using those spaces for. That could be the space for a teen center. That could be a space for dealing with our public health in a much more robust way, in the city by using that as a space where people can go directly and receive the supports that they need. Because we're frankly at a loss for space for staff at the moment. We have plans around it, but we're still a while away from actually having enough space for our own staff and for all the programming that we need and that our residents demand.

Given that the developer seems to be very willing to accommodate community requests and the Neighborhood Council seems to be appreciative of that, if you took an up or down vote today, do you think you're in favor of Copper Mill going forward?

I wouldn't take an up or down vote today.

Which, as a councilor, I have the power to do. If the council gets something, and I don't want this to come off as a dodge, but if something comes before the council and we're not ready, we do have the power, legally, to push it off for at least two weeks using our charter right. If the mayor were to try to speed roll this through, I would say no, because we need a CBA in place. We do not have one, a Community Benefits Agreement, from the Neighborhood Council. They might be supportive in theory, but I want to see neighbors be able to directly negotiate with developers and have legally binding contracts so that we can say, as a community, "Look, we fought for this. We have agreements that we're gonna hold this developer accountable to. And we will only move forward when we know that our community is supportive of the direction we're growing in."

They've also agreed to a Project Labor Agreement, which is frankly, a huge thing. Because it's something that is often the make or break piece for these kind of decisions for the city. And it does add some cost to the project overall. But I would want to see all these things in writing first, before giving an up or down vote.

I've also been in contact with the owner of The Burren. I want to keep engaging with him to make sure that we're not losing one of the staples of the Square in an attempt to make it better for everyone.

Are we in a housing emergency currently?

Absolutely.

Are we building enough housing to get out of it? Would you support building more? How do we exit the housing crisis?

As the only renter in this race, and as someone who has been displaced from Somerville due to rising rents, and not only was forced to leave the city of Somerville but the state of Massachusetts when it happened to me, I take the housing instability of our neighbors incredibly seriously.

Probably more than any other fear or worry that I've been told about since I've become a councilor, the number one is, "I don't know if I'll be here next year. I don't know if in a couple months I'm gonna be able to sign my lease again. I think my landlord is gonna flip my house. I don't know where I'm gonna go." Things like this have become endemic to the story of Somerville.

I think it is incredibly important that we have leaders who not only say the right things on these issues, and frankly not even have lived these experiences, which I certainly have, but have a track record of doing as much they can to keep the folks who are here, who want to be here, able to afford this community.

We do have a housing crisis, but it is kind of a misnomer, because we have a housing crisis with many units that are not actually being put to use to house the people who live here.

We have many units that are just, frankly, far beyond the means of the people who live here to afford, including myself.

That's why the first law I put in place as a councilor was a tenant protection law that would let every tenant know their right when they moved into a unit in Somerville.

And it's why we just passed at our last meeting a home rule petition to [make landlords pay their own] broker fees, so that we're not adding an additional $800, if you're like me, with several roommates, or $3,000, $3,500, to the initial cost of moving in or staying in a community. So before I even get to the supply and demand of it all, I certainly believe that we need to have a mayor who is incredibly focused on making sure that middle and low income residents aren't just pushed out so that we can be more attractive to folks who can afford more expensive housing.

Now, how do we do that? Part of that strategy needs to be doubling down in our efforts to support this Community Land Trust. We certainly work with them, and I've certainly worked with them and been supportive of them since their inception. And on the project that they're working on now, at 297 Medford Street, which is an all-affordable unit, as proposed, an all-affordable building, which I think we need more of, frankly, if possible.

I would love to see us move more in the direction of more permanently affordable housing, housing that takes use of municipal spaces, municipal lots, partnerships with the Land Trust, partnerships with Just-A-Start, one of our incredible not-for-profit developers in this region, to make sure that we are, yes, creating more units, but that they are either all affordable or that the affordable units involved are deeply affordable, because the affordable housing that we have, many people note, is not affordable for most people.

We need to actually see stuff that's not just 80% of area median income, but more like 50%, 60%, 30%. I've had conversations with developers when they come before us to speak about housing to say, "I want to see that full range and not just the bare minimum of what is legally considered affordable."

How do we get more of that? Is constructing more deeply affordable units the path out of the housing shortage that we're facing? Or is there another root of it?

It's kind of a related problem.

For the folks who are here who can't afford the housing that's being offered, we need this for them. We need to be able to say, "We're not just gonna create..." My colleague, JT Scott, always wants to make this analogy around housing where it's like, if people can afford a car and you just make a bunch more Bugattis, it doesn't actually help them afford a car more.

You might be able to say, "Yeah, the cost of Bugattis went down." But if I'm poor, I still can't afford it.

So yes, for the folks who are here who are getting pushed out, I absolutely think we need more deeply affordable housing. And part of that, and something I think I'm in a particular position to do, is through the leadership of the mayor, through making sure that Somerville is open for business, but making sure that anyone who wants to come and play in our playground has to play by our rules.

There have been a number of reports and studies and surveys that have said Union Square is one of the best neighborhoods in the country. And obviously there's a lot of development that's happening in Union Square, but there are a lot of other parts of our community that want that development. I think it takes someone who has the media training or the ability to communicate with the press effectively, to really shine a light on those other spaces so that we take some of that energy that's been focused at spaces like Union and Davis for so long and actually spread it throughout our more minor squares that I would like to see some of that.

As someone who lives in Magoun, I'm not saying I want to drop a massive development there. But I know it's coming. And I know that in order to direct that energy and influx of finances effectively, we actually need to be having leaders who can build bridges and connect the pieces that have fallen to the wayside.

The median household income in Somerville is $130,000. As a community, we're relatively affluent. But my sense is that rent is feeling less affordable for folks across the income spectrum. How we might try to address rent increases affecting a wide range of Somerville residents?

When I first ran for council, one of the things I did was look at the economic demographics of the city as well, over a span of about ten years. And you could see how the number of people who made over $200,000 in the city had went up in that time.

And how the number of people who made less than $60,000 went down.

I don't think it's because the people who were making 60 suddenly started making 200. Part of the reason that median has trended up is not just because people are making more money. It's because we've pushed out the people who don't have as much.

I think that is one of the saddest shames of growth that this city has had and it's something that a lot of members of this community, particularly in East Somerville and Winter Hill, remember well. When I knock doors in those neighborhoods, the feelings they have about places like Assembly and the growing sentiment for folks around Union around development, is deeply tied to the fact that their rents have skyrocketed and a lot of the folks who were their neighbors, who were business owners, who were core parts of their neighborhood are not there anymore.

So knowing that Somerville has its roots as a working class community, I hear that number and I think there's some positives to it, but there's a sad story that is attached to that figure.

Another piece of it is, when you're a homeowner and you have a mortgage, the cost of housing shifts is just a very different thing for you. Because having a mortgage is essentially having rent control. So for about a third of our community, they already have rent control.

And I'm very happy for them. I just wish I had it too. And that's another thing that I would continue to fight for as mayor. I think in the next few years, we're gonna have to start talking again about statewide referendum on that issue. Because from my perspective, that's the only way we would get rent control back as it currently stands.

But I also am a fan of missing middle, of course.

What do you think about the recent citywide upzoning that Cambridge passed? Is that something that would be good here in Somerville do you think?

I think it's good. I have a little bit of competitiveness with Cambridge. I'm a fan of some of the initiatives that they do and I'm certainly friends with some of my counterparts on their council. We have some of that already. I'm not saying we don't need it, I'm just saying. I don't see it as impressive. We're not that far behind them on that.

But certainly, I am very much looking forward to leapfrogging them on this.

I don't think that our residents want to have Kendall Squares in Somerville, or to become Cambridge. That is not my goal. However, there are certainly improvements we need to be making on our zoning.

Both from a size and density perspective, but also around accessibility.

I want to make sure that we're having more accessible housing in this community because one of the facts of life is that we're all getting older. And because of geography and because of a lack of investment and because of some restrictions, Somerville is a deeply inaccessible community for a lot of people.

So would you support a city-wide upzoning to four stories, with two more allowed if the units are affordable?

Sure, yeah.

The only reason I think I haven't personally made more moves on that is because I know that there are organizations that are trying to build out that zoning, such as Somerville YIMBY, and work with the council to present it and get it through. I think that will happen this year.

I don't want to just come in as one person with a lot of good ideas but just by myself and say, "I'm going to reimagine all of our zoning by myself."

I want to wait until advocates who've been invested in these processes and issues for a long time came to us and said, "This is what we want to see."

But if Somerville YIMBY came to you and said, "Here's our plan for four-plus-two citywide upzoning", you think you're probably on board with that?

In general, yes, absolutely.

Is the root of the housing problem a lack of supply, that we're not building enough housing? Or something else?

This is where my socialism comes in. I don't think this is as simple as supply and demand.

I think it's a part of it. But I do not trust the market to get us out of this problem. The market got us here. We don't have people who are unhoused and people who are paying 50 or more percent of their income into rent because there's not enough housing. We have those problems because people make money from that. It is to someone's benefit that there are people in our community that do not have a place to sleep at night.

It is a sad reality of capitalism that there are people who actually benefit from that.

What's our biggest problem after housing?

I think we need leaders right now who are going to make sure that people can find some semblance of economic stability in this moment. The world we're living in is chaos personified. It feels like to me and to a lot of folks right now, particularly on the national level, but the impacts of that locally are many fold.

Particularly for our schools, and for the future of our climate resiliency, because a lot of the funding, or a significant portion of that funding comes from the federal government, and from the state, which gets it from the federal government. As a councilor, I found ways to try to support our local businesses by cutting regulations that I found, or suspending, technically, regulations that I found overly and unnecessarily cumbersome in the financial sense.

As a mayor, I would love to do a reevaluation of a lot of our permit and licensing fees. When I got the tattoo licensing fees suspended, the reason that they wouldn't, that I was given, that the Board of Health wouldn't just make them closer to the equivalent fees in Boston or Cambridge or Salem, is because they wanted to do a wholesale reenacting. They didn't want to just say, "We're gonna take this one business industry and give them special treatment." Problem is, it's been three years and they haven't done that.

I think the city forgot. I don't completely blame them but we are sorely overdue a look at broad spectrum all of our businesses and how we're engaging with them through the permitting process and what kind of fees that we're recouping from them.

As a means of supporting our local businesses and not creating an environment that is more disadvantageous than if they just went to Cambridge or went to Boston.

I'm slightly surprised to hear your position there. That seems not super socialist of you.

I just had an endorsement Q&A with the DSA last night, and one of the questions I was asked was "How will you support local businesses?"

Because folks, I know these terms socialist and DSA. For a lot of folks it might seem scary. It might just seem like, oh, here's a bunch of people from outside our community who are telling us what to do and trying to control us. There are hundreds of DSA members in Somerville, hundreds, who are deeply engaged and care about this community and care about their local businesses and want to see those businesses thrive and not see big multinational corporations come and take their place.

If I have to make a choice between supporting a local business and supporting a huge chain, I'm gonna support that local business 10 out of 10 times.

Let's say someone owns a two-family house and they rent out half of it. Is that person a local business owner?

I wouldn't call it that. No.

How come?

I think housing is a human right.

For me, human rights are not things that should be commodified. I don't see the relationship between a landlord and a tenant is not the relationship of a person going to buy a candy bar and the person who's selling them a candy bar.

One is someone who's, I mean, with the candy in the case of candy it's, obviously what one might call a luxury item or it's not necessary to sustain life per se.

Housing is. And without getting too deeply into this relationship that I think is structurally antagonistic on some level, because one person is saying, "To sustain my life I need to give you this chunk, this large chunk of my money, or I could be in a position of dying." The dynamics are just too different for me to consider that a local business.

The idea that like, oh, well, they can just shop around. That's, I don't think that's a realistic expectation to have for people in this market who are being extorted in many cases, forced broker fees, I think is a form of extortion.

And do not necessarily have options and they can't opt out without going to live in the woods. I can choose not to buy a new laptop, potentially. But I can't choose to not have a home.

Why can't people shop around for different housing options?

Oh, they can try. But within the context of Somerville, it is very possible they just might not find anything that meets their particular needs.

So I consider that relationship just fundamentally different.

Let's say I live in Somerville and I start a small grocery store. If housing is a human right, surely food is as well. In that case, I am a local business owner, and I'm providing something that is considered a human right. If I rent out half of my two-family, I am providing something that is a human right, but I'm not a local business owner?

This is a problem with monopolies, because the idea of choice in the market to me is broadly an illusion.

In the housing market in particular?

No, I mean more broadly.

Any market that has monopolies, or corporate conglomeration, choice becomes, I think, a bit fanciful. But, in theory, with a market, you could go down the street and just find a store with slightly different prices. Not now, again, with monopolies, we could talk about price fixing, we could talk about the cost of eggs has gone up and it doesn't matter if you go to that store or that store, things are more expensive fundamentally.

But what I know of the Somerville housing market from talking to people who reach out to me who say, "I don't think I can stay here anymore" is it is a magnitude of difference between that and saying, "Oh, I went to Star Market and it's more expensive now so I'm gonna go to Market Basket."

When it comes to housing it's, I'm getting pushed out of my home and there is nowhere else for me to go in this community. Maybe if they move to Texas they can find something.

But we're having a situation now where, and Massachusetts on the whole is having this conversation, as you might remember, the governor made a lot of comments about it about a year ago. We're seeing people leave the entire state. Why? Because they can't afford to live here anymore.

So, to me, it's just a very different thing because people aren't leaving the state because they're like, "Well, my groceries are too expensive. I went to the store here and I couldn't buy that thing. So now I left the only state I've ever lived in."

I mean, I think that gets us... We could go into a much broader and deeper conversation about de-commodifying human rights and where business owners... I mean, certainly they're making... If you open, if you're a landlord and you're making profit, I guess you could say anyone who makes a profit is a business or a business owner in a certain sense.

I just think of it as a different kind of economic relationship than one with a significant portion of choice.

What's something Somerville should stop doing immediately?

Creating plans and not actually doing anything with them.

For multiple administrations and for as long as I've lived in Somerville, there has been a common complaint amongst residents that the city will create a task force, or a committee, or commission, ask for the time and energy of many residents through community meetings, and then create a report that just ends up sitting on a shelf and doing nothing. That's why one of the taglines of my campaign is "fewer studies, more action." And it's not because I am an anti-intellectual and I don't think we sometimes do need studies. We certainly do.

There are certainly things where we do not have the internal expertise from the city to advance. And sometimes we need outside help or sometimes we need to go to our residents to say, "We really need you to be a part of this process." What we do not need is for the mayor to create bodies that solely exist to justify a plan that has been already committed to behind the scenes and then gets advanced past the concerns of residents.

We saw that with 90 Washington Street, where every single public meeting that they had, at least every single one I went to, but I'm pretty sure every single one, the vast majority of residents who listened to the proposal said, "We don't want this. We don't want that. Don't do it." And then the city said, "We hear you. We're gonna do it anyway."

Or situations where the city says, "Hey, we want you to decide something." And then they steer the process very clearly past concerns so that they end up exactly where they want it.

And frankly, I think that was the case with the report that the city just put out around public safety where they said, "Instead of doing an alternative emergency response and instead of restructuring our police department as the last study we just did a couple years ago told us to do, we're actually just gonna double down on everything we're doing and just put more money into it."

To me, that flies in the face of all the public comment we've had, or the vast majority of it at least, multiple studies that we've done over the last 20 years.

And it is strictly a matter of the enforcement of one individual's political will over the city.

We're early in the race. Is there any chance you end up running at-large or are you 100% committed to running for mayor?

I've been involved with too many races, both for our Massachusetts senators, and other local races to ever say never to something. Politics is fast and moves quickly. Life can be really challenging. Recently, my dad actually had a stroke, and they found two blood clots in his brain. And he's thousands of miles away from here. He is recovering. He is doing well. He's very strong. But, I can't say with 100% certainty that if tomorrow he were to suffer a catastrophic incident or if someone else in my family were, that I wouldn't take the time to be with them at the expense of a race that I really care about.

So just knowing that life is precious and fleeting, I would never say never, but I will say I am committed to this city. As a councilor I've tried as hard as I can to not take second jobs just so I can devote more time and energy to passing laws, to meeting with constituents, to having these conversations.

And I hope this year and next, regardless of what happens, to continue to contribute to Somerville and to try to see us become a better, more inclusive, more economically powerful city.

Where do you stand on the Brown and Winter schools? Which of the proposed plans that have been laid out so far seems best to you? Would you like to see a combined school at Trum Field?

I think it would be a real loss for our community to lose Trum Field.

And I don't just say that because I live near Trum Field and I've been to it many times to meet with friends or to run around, or for the yearly fireworks. Trum Field's one of the largest contiguous green spaces we have in the city.

And it is incredibly difficult for me to imagine how we would make up for that space in the years following any massive construction onto that plot, to get us back to where we are now. We have goals as a city. We have plans that include how much green space we ultimately want to have, and I don't want to see us actually go backwards on those plans.

Having said that, I am acutely aware of the needs of the Winter Hill students especially. I was just into Edgerly a few weeks ago to talk with two classes of eighth graders, to be on their podcast, Municipali-Tea. I know that they not only have been denied the ability to go to the their neighborhood school, they've also had to deal with a kind of psychic and social pain of feeling like the city does not care about them.

When you listen to the second episode of their podcast, it is a lot of students just saying that people feel like their school was all bad and that they didn't have any good connection to it or memories from it because it is a building that was in disrepair. And as someone who grew up in a lower middle class community and went to the poor schools in my community, I know what it does to a person's self-image when every sign around them tells them, "Hey, you don't really matter. You don't have any power. You come from nothing and you're not actually gonna be able to advance past that." And I heard echoes of that from these students and I want to make sure that we are building the best possible school for them in the future, one that is fully sustainable.

I'm certainly inclined to think that we should, it should be a school that has enough space to accommodate the Brown school, because without some major renovations, it is hard for me to imagine that the life of that building will see the next generation of students through.

I'm personally in favor of kind of phasing out the Brown rather than a hard stop which as soon as we build a building saying, "No more Brown school."

I think that would be too harsh even though frankly when that building is ready it'll be a totally different generation of students. But I do think that we need to find a more appropriate use for that space, and that combining the schools ultimately in the long term will serve more people's needs.