My Turn - Election an opportunity for change
September 2, 2023
Published in the Greenfield Recorder on September 1, 2023. By Marianna Ritchey.
Greenfield is a beautiful city with a lot of potential. It is also a low-income city. Many residents struggle to afford food and housing; our school budgets face perpetual cuts (and a looming cliff in 2024-25 when pandemic aid ends); and much of our important infrastructure is in dire need of updating. Just as with cities across the U.S., Greenfield’s budgetary decisions, as well as its approach to public safety, also disproportionately affect people of color and low-income folks. These issues and problems impact all of us, and impede our full flourishing as a community.
The upcoming Nov. 7 election will give Greenfield residents the opportunity to make some big changes in how our town works. Over the past several months, members of FCCPR and Greenfield People’s Budget have been having conversations around the community about what kinds of changes people would like to see in our town. Many of the same issues came up over and over again in these conversations, and we’ve compiled them into an independent platform we urge our town leadership to adopt.
One of the biggest concerns voiced by Greenfield residents across the board is that we—meaning all of the people who live in this town—ought to be more included in decisions about how our money is spent and what our government does. Accordingly, the community platform we have generated contains a lot of commonsense proposals aimed at increasing communication between city leadership and residents and incorporating a wider swath of residents’ perspectives into city decisions. We collectively call on city leadership to:
- Fund the schools to keep up with the rising costs of education, so our kids can thrive.
- Reassess police response, since 90% of calls police respond to have nothing to do with even an allegation of crime, and since current police activity disproportionately targets and harms people of color. Pursue non-police alternatives that better promote public safety
- Make Greenfield affordable, by working with the Franklin County Regional Housing Authority, the Franklin County Community Land Trust, and other local organizations, to increase the supply of affordable and accessible housing
- Clean up the Lunt facility, cooperating with residents and safeguarding the health of the neighborhood
- Audit tax assessments (especially for commercial properties) and ensure that businesses and high-value property owners pay their fair share of taxes.
- Enforce health codes in rental housing
- Expand healthy, affordable, and climate-friendly transportation by expanding walking and biking routes and making existing routes safer, including the long-neglected and urgently-needed safe route to walk/bike between Greenfield and Turners Falls
- Support working people by enacting an ordinance against wage theft and developing a plan to enforce it
- Protect everyone, including immigrants and unhoused people, from harassment and harm. Work to end all forms of oppressive, hateful, racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, homophobic, transphobic, sexist, and ableist behavior, especially by city employees
Although our group is not affiliated with any candidate — we vote based on policy goals, not personalities or parties! — we have been motivated by a strong sense that something is very wrong with certain aspects of our current city leadership. Cronyism and back-door dealings are rampant, and the public has been left out of many decisions that directly affect our lives. In particular, recent scandals have demonstrated major problems with the mayor, the chief of police, certain members of the school committee, and the chair of the board of assessors. We believe that no real progress is possible without some basic changes to our city government, and we believe that Greenfield deserves honesty, integrity, and humility from our elected officials.
We also believe that everyone deserves to know where candidates stand on these issues, so we sent them a questionnaire. We will publish their answers by late September on our website. Please check out blueprintforgreenfield.com, sign up for updates, and stay tuned for candidates’ answers to our questions. We also encourage you to reach out to the candidates and let them know you want them to answer!