Candidates make their pitches at Cambridge mega-forum
With the primary nearing, candidates vying to represent Cambridge in the state legislature gave their pitches on housing, legislative transparency and other issues at a mega forum organized by the Cambridge Democratic City Committee (CDCC) on Thursday at the Cambridge Public Library.
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The forum was structured differently than many prior campaign events, with each candidate receiving 10 minutes to make a personal statement and field questions posed by CDCC leaders George Varghese, Deb Nicholson and Dan Paradis. The questions were previously prepared by CDCC members and were picked by rolling a virtual pair of dice.
The primary is Sept. 1, and Tuesday Aug. 25 is the last date for requesting mail-in ballots.
2nd Middlesex
Three of the four remaining candidates for the 2nd Middlesex district were on hand, with state Reps. Christine Barber and Erika Uyterhoeven and Cambridge Vice Mayor Burhan Azeem in attendance. Somerville City Councillor Matt McLaughlin did not attend. (Winchester School Committee member Tom Hopcroft dropped out of the race late last month and has not made an endorsement, though he has met with his former rivals and posted their visions for the district.)
The speaker order was selected by drawing names from a hat. First was Barber, who started by saying the House had become “really good at describing problems and much worse at solving them,” adding that “values don’t protect anyone.”
She focused on her legislative accomplishments, including leading the passage of the Work Family Mobility Act, which allows all Massachusetts residents, regardless of immigration status, to obtain standard driving licenses.
Asked about transparency on Beacon Hill, Barber backed “full public record reform” and the legislative audit which was supported by a large majority of voters in 2024.
She also called herself a “strong proponent of rent control” noted her support of the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase proposal, which would give tenant groups an opportunity to buy the building when its owner decides to sell. It is a five-town pilot program in the House’s recent economic development bill.
Barber urged voters to consider what bills she had “filed, negotiated and got turned into law.”
Speaking second was Uyterhoeven, who has emphasized transparency in multiple forums. She said the state’s affordability problems are tied to a Legislature she called “one of the least transparent and least productive in the country.”
Uyterhoeven credited greater public scrutiny, after the House voted in a rule requiring committee votes to be made public, with putting the brakes on an energy bill advanced last fall that would have weakened some emissions requirements slated for 2030 and allow utilities to recover new costs from ratepayers. The proposal was substantially rewritten after drawing widespread opposition from environmental groups but not yet become law.
Uyterhoeven expressed her strong support for rent control and proposed building 100,000 permanently affordable homes over five years through $3 billion in annual state borrowing and what she called “raising progressive revenue” By “taxing the rich” or “taxing corporations that have been getting exemptions on their taxes.”
Azeem talked about issues in Cambridge and how the state has made them harder to solve, pointing to the area around Alewife and the city’s transit connections and sewage infrastructure. He said the state has, at points, “been really difficult to work with.”
On housing, he said he would crack down on communities that shirk their legal responsibilities, pointing to suburbs that had found ways around the MBTA Communities Act’s zoning requirements, such as Marblehead’s recent decision to place much of its multifamily zoning district at a golf course.
Suffolk & Middlesex
Incumbent Will Brownsberger attended a different event in Boston, giving Daniel Lander the stage to himself.
Lander, who grew up in Cambridge, has worked on the campaigns or in the offices of Democratic leaders such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, both of whom have endorsed him. Lander said he first considered challenging Brownsberger after Brownsberger opposed legislation that would have allowed municipalities to impose transfer fees on high-value real estate stalled on Beacon Hill. The legislation failed.
In an article posted on his personal site in 2024, Brownsberger explained his opposition, saying the tax would have discouraged housing production. Lander said Brownsberger is part of the reason the legislature moves too slowly on progressive priorities.
“Senator Brownsberger is able to tell you why things are complicated, why they are hard and why we should just settle for the way things are,” Lander said. “But I reject that poverty of imagination.”
Read more To improve fire safety, Cambridge must build more multifamily housing
Lander also called for giving local housing authorities the means to be “public developers,” running MBTA busses 24 hours a day, expanding and electrifying the regional rail network and establishing universal childcare.
25th Middlesex
The forum’s format was meant to discourage confrontation, which did not deter state Rep. Marjorie Decker and her challenger Evan MacKay. (MacKay is the CDCC’s Affirmative Action and Outreach Advisor but Varghese affirmed that neither MacKay nor their supporters were involved in the planning of the event.) Decker, who came to the forum from another event, was not present for MacKay’s remarks.
MacKay used much of their time to attack what they saw as Decker’s alignment with “the State House bosses” and her campaign fundraising, repeatedly declaring, “this is a race about trust.”
The clearest policy disagreement between the two centered on the state’s new PROTECT Act, and its relationship with the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). MacKay argued the act, signed into law by Gov. Healey early this month, did not go far enough because it left in place the Department of Correction’s (DOC) existing administrative 287(g) agreement with ICE, which allows designated corrections officers to carry out federal immigration enforcement functions. The PROTECT Act bars any new 287(g) agreements and broadly limits state and local participation in civil immigration enforcement.
When she spoke, Decker defended the compromise as a “harm reduction decision,” saying that the bill was shaped by the legislature’s Black and Latino Caucuses and calling MacKay’s criticisms of it “fearmongering.”
She said allowing the DOC to provide ICE with advance notice of the release of certain individuals would reduce the likelihood of agents conducting broader searches or raids through immigrant communities.
Decker spent the rest of her 10 minutes emphasizing her efforts to fight poverty, rooted in her own upbringing in public housing. She highlighted her work over several terms to expand the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which she had helped increase in stages from 15 percent to 40 percent of the federal credit.
The most recent increase was part of a 2023 tax package that cut the short-term capital gains tax rate, a provision which MacKay had criticized Decker for supporting. Decker said she voted for this after obtaining compromises on the EITC and removing the Child and Family Tax Credits cap on dependents.
Decker closed by saying “I have been your disruptor and not electing me would make a lot of people in leadership very happy.”
26th Middlesex
Housing dominated this part of the forum with state Rep. Mike Connolly and his challenger Neil Miller both proposing varying approaches to solving affordability issues. Connolly, who came to the forum from another event, was not present for Miller’s remarks.
Miller has been engaged in housing activism in Cambridge, including a leadership position with A Better Cambridge, where he advocated for the Affordable Housing Overlay and expanding legal assistance for tenants facing eviction. At the forum, he made the case for statewide zoning reform, taking aim at exclusionary zoning and calling for the lifting of parking mandates as well as the “streamlining” of the permitting process.
He said these changes had to be made at the state level. “I think it’s a little bit weird that we have this huge regional problem of affordable housing, and yet we give insane amounts of discretion to municipalities to reject affordable projects for various reasons.”
When Connolly spoke, he said he was fighting for “housing as a human right” and that he supported a comprehensive approach, including “housing production, tenant protections, support for community land trusts, support for homeowners and new revenue.”
Connolly said those revenues could come from introducing a Fair Share Amendment to cover housing similar to the one passed by voters on the 2022 ballot that added a 4% surtax on the portion of an individual’s annual income that exceeded $1 million. That money can only be used for transportation and public education.
Connolly pointed to his opposition to House bill 5151, an energy cost and utilities reform package that passed earlier in the year and included $1 billion in cuts from the Mass Save marketing and administrative budgets. He said that he had been clear, “we can’t pit affordability against renewable energy.” He was one of two House Democrats, alongside Uyterhoeven, to vote in opposition.
Connolly tied his progressive policies to his upbringing in public housing and in foster care before receiving a full scholarship to play football at Duke, which he attributed largely to his size (his Duke bio listed him at 6’8” and 303 pounds). But when it came to being able to afford a life in Massachusetts, he closed with his familiar line that “you shouldn’t have to be born a six-foot-eight white guy to have every opportunity in this world.”
