Elections on the Medford side of the line :)

[gingicat]

There was a City Council primary this past Tuesday (why so early? well, one of the polling places is a synagogue...) that narrowed a field of 16 to 14. There are two seats available.

Edit - forgot to mention:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1597769450491172/
Meet Your Candidates, hosted by Jay Campbell
Wednesday, September 16 at 6:30pm
Tufts University, Cohen Auditorium, 40 Talbot Avenue, Medford, Massachusetts 02155

The November election will be:
- a hotly contested mayoral election between Bob Penta (conservative not-really-an-outsider) and Stephanie Muccini Burke (progressive long-time participant in city government)
- the aforementioned City Council election
- School Committee election

I personally think participation is really important. There are problems with streets, parks, (including Wrights Pond), mild public safety issues, snow removal, and budget allocations.

Discussions are happening mainly in Facebook groups:
- Medford for Massachusetts gives good summaries of candidate platforms (also at http://medfordforma.org/): https://www.facebook.com/MedfordForMassachusetts
- Medford Square has a lot of the discussions: https://www.facebook.com/groups/medfordsquare/

If you're a parent, male or female or other, the moderated-membership Medford Moms group has a lot of discussion of the public safety issues there as well.

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

thank you! As another Medford resident I should be paying more attention to this, but ugh. I appreciate you bringing it to me here.

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

Me too!

[nonelvis]

Thank you! Do you have links to the FB groups and/or know if they're publicly visible discussions?

[gingicat]

Apologies - I wrote this from my tablet and cutting and pasting is more difficult (LJ entries disappear when I leave the page). All set.

[nonelvis]

Thank you! At least I can see one of those sites without having a Facebook login, but that's not your problem ;-)

[ron_newman]

Can you turn the names of those three Facebook groups into links, please?

[gingicat]

Apologies - I wrote this from my tablet and cutting and pasting is more difficult (LJ entries disappear when I leave the page). All set.

[somergirl80.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this. I will definitely be passing it along to some Medford friends.

[irilyth]

A friend who lives in Medford posted recently about the elections, and about playgrounds (which he sees as an election-related issue):
http://houseoutoffocus.blogspot.com/2015/07/medford-elections-2015-first-edition.html
http://houseoutoffocus.blogspot.com/2015/08/dear-abby-my-playground-is-wreck.html