To see the current 2021 Medford People’s Platform, please click here.
We’re building a grassroots movement to win a progressive City Council and School Committee for the City of Medford.
Our coalition of candidates, elected officials, residents, and local community groups envisions an inclusive local government that is responsible to the needs of everyone who calls Medford home. We will work together to develop a detailed, aggressive local policy plan centered on working people, and will band together to support state-level legislation that enables us to make logical municipal decisions for a changing Medford. Candidates for office will be held accountable to this plan through the residents and community groups who have signed on.
Medford is no longer a suburban town that gets to keep to itself; we are now a piece of the puzzle in Boston’s rapid growth and development. We want to live in a Medford that is collectively governed by and responsive to a community of people who truly call Medford home, not by the privileged few or by corporate interests. We must come together to expand affordable housing, address climate change, support a safe community for all, support our public schools, expand access to public transportation, fight for a fair tax structure, and improve residents’ access to our local government through increased and more effective communication.
Here’s what we’ll do to get there:
- Affordable Housing
- Create a Community Land Trust
- Create a transfer fee on house-flipping real estate transactions to fund the Community Land Trust
- Increase affordable units required by zoning in new developments
- Demand for Tufts to build new high-density on-campus housing
- Environment
- Protect existing parkland, trees, and open space
- Require all new or renovated city buildings to have renewable energy plan with a carbon-neutral goal
- Strengthen or establish zoning laws on renewable energy in new developments
- Safe Community
- Uphold non-cooperation policy between Medford Police Department (MPD) and ICE
- Support translation and distribution of MPD policies
- Commit to actively engage immigrant communities to understand their needs, and secure a commitment by the city to hold free, regular immigration legal clinics
- Sponsor a resolution to support the state Safe Communities Act
- Pro-Labor
- $15 minimum wage for city and school system employees
- Prioritize hiring of union labor for all city-funded jobs
- Honor any strikes
- Support new collective bargaining units for city and private sector workers
- Education
- Affordable Early Childhood Education
- Expand hours for Medford Public Schools Pre-K
- Increase Medford Family Network Budget
- Pro-Public Schools
- Increase substitute, paraprofessional, before-school, and after-school educator pay
- Ensure equitable transportation for all students
- Oppose attempts to increase the number of charter school seats currently available to Medford students
- Affordable Early Childhood Education
- Fair Tax Structure
- Reform the city’s tax code to create a fair exemption structure
- Support progressive city taxation, a debt exclusion, or a Prop 2½ override to address aging infrastructure and buildings
- Transportation
- Expand the Complete Streets program
- Explore new municipal bus routes and work with state to expand MBTA routes
- Support a resolution to eliminate fares for public transportation at the state level
- Public Engagement and Decision-Making
- Support a budget to translate all city communications into major area languages
- Develop a modern, fully accessible city website with full-text search access to all public information
- Improve outreach to impacted communities to ensure well-attended public meetings and forums and encourage participation and leadership from those communities in Medford
- Commit to holding regular, publicly-posted office hours
Our Revolution Medford 