Good evening, everyone! Welcome, and Happy New Year!
Welcome Secretary Tibbits-Nutt, State Senator Pat Jehlen, State Representatives Mike Connolly and Erika Uyterhoeven, and Middlesex County District Attorney Maryann Ryan. Welcome former State Representative Denise Provost, and our Emeritus Somerville Mayors Gene Brune, Dorothy Kelly Gay, and Joe Curtatone. And if I’ve missed any of our esteemed electeds, welcome as well to you too.
Welcome as well to Superintendent Rubén Carmona, Chief Charles Breen, and all our Honored Guests, Friends, Family, City and School staff, and especially to, you, [wave arm] all of you, our community members here tonight.
I’d like to start with some sincere thanks.
First thank you to Marcus Santos, Reverend Raymond, Clerk Wells, the Honor Guard, all of tonight’s performers and interpreters, and everyone who helped behind the scenes with tonight’s ceremony.
Thank you to my family, especially my husband, not just for all the dinners you've cooked, the buttons you've sewn, and the family support you've given me, but especially for making our intergenerational household work over the last 4 years while caring for my 92-year-old father with dementia, who passed recently. To my daughters, you are the best. You keep me grounded, and for that I thank you. Also, thank you to my brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces, and nephews for your love and support. I love you all.
Thank you to our dedicated, tireless, talented city workers who move this city forward every day.
I want to take a moment and ask our city and school staff to stand. Please join me in thanking our staff for their service to our community.
Thank you.
And finally, thank you to all of you, our community members, here tonight, as well as those who couldn’t join us, for your support of this amazing thing we call local government.
Here we are.
The 2024 Somerville Inauguration.
Let’s pause and take stock of the meaning of this moment.
Every person being sworn in tonight stepped up to serve our community. A number of months back, we each looked our loved ones in the eye and let them know we just might be a little busy the next two years.
So, we all pulled our papers, ran our campaigns, and then the wheels of democracy began turning. We made our case, we knocked on doors, and residents made use of that hard-won right to vote in a fair election.
Our community exercised a right that so many in the world do not have.
And now we’re here.
We’re launching another two years of local government facing both exciting opportunities and complex challenges.
But one thing is certain: the 19 officials who took the oath of office tonight, including myself, now have the honor and responsibility to make sure Somerville continues to prosper, thrive, and hold to its core values.
I have every confidence that we will each honor the faith you have put in us.
So, it is with deep respect for my colleagues, for local government – and for democracy itself – that I congratulate all of our electeds.
And I'm going to ask you to hold your applause to the end.
First, congratulations to all returning and newly elected Honorable Members of the City Council and School Committee!
Congratulations as well to City Council President Ben Ewen-Campen, and Vice President Judy Pineda Neufeld, and School Committee Chair Ilana Krepchin and Vice Chair Sarah Phillps for being chosen by their peers to take on leadership roles.
Congratulations to newly elected officials: Councilor at Large Will Mbah, Ward 5 Councilor Naima Sait, and Ward 7 School Committee member Leiran Biton.
Thank you for your service and dedication to our community.
I look forward to working alongside all of you in the coming term.
Everyone, please join me in congratulating our new and returning officials.
I am honored and humbled to serve you for another two years.
I am keenly aware that I am only the second woman to be elected Mayor, since Somerville began electing Mayors more than 150 years ago. In fact, there are more Mayors named John than there are women Mayors in our history.
I suspect I’ll be the only Katjana.
But I am not defined only by gender. I stand before you as a first-generation immigrant, the first in my family to go to college, and one of the many who had to lean on friends for a place to stay when I first moved to the area and couldn’t afford rent.
Even though I became a U.S. citizen when I was a teenager, I've been told numerous times as an adult that I'm not a real American, because I wasn’t born here.
I know what it feels like to be treated like an outsider.
I also know what it feels like to be embraced by a community that values diversity.
Somerville welcomed me and strengthened me as I raised my family here.
Somerville anchored me as I built a career dedicated to creating opportunities that can change people’s lives.
Somerville shaped me as an advocate first and then as a public servant with the honor of working for change and progress for eight years on the City Council.
Now, I have the honor of being Mayor of Somerville once again. I pledge to honor the trust that you have put in me every day I am in this office. I pledge to work with you, not just for you.
My vision for Somerville is an inclusive, equitable city where we can all thrive together, and I know that’s the vision that this community shares.
My promise to you is a city government that values community voices, seeks out best practices, and follows the data and science.
I promise an administration that always holds itself to the highest standards for fiscal responsibility.
Under my watch, we will remain fully committed to delivering quality core services like schools, public safety, and recycling. While also taking on some of our greatest challenges like housing, climate change, and racism.
Our pursuit of progress for all will remain centered on justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. These are not just buzzwords to me, or to Somerville. They are core, guiding principles that we forge into real-world impacts every day.
This is Somerville. The culture wars raging across the nation will not shake us. Somerville will hold true to these values.
Did you know we’re busy not just fixing streetlights but also adding great LGBTQ+ themed books to our libraries rather than removing them?
While so many communities and institutions have drifted away from work to dismantle systemic racism, we’ve leaned in.
While inhumane policies prevail at our borders and hate is stoked nationally, Somerville doubled its support for new arrivals who just want to work, contribute, and have better lives for their families.
While nations discuss increasing carbon reduction goals to slow climate change, we’ve already raised ours.
While gender defines income, opportunity, and how hard you have to work to be seen or heard in our society, we are working to break down these barriers.
While harassment of transgender persons is being legislated into law elsewhere, we hired our first full-time LGBTQ+ Services Coordinator, and they are expanding our supportive work in multiple ways.
While seniors face ever tightening resources, we’re expanding programming, supports, and opportunities for representation and engagement.
In Somerville, we fight the good fights. And we do this all while taking on our aging sewer system, school buildings, snow removal, and more.
This is Somerville, and I am so proud of this city.
We are a city powered by vision, compassion, true grit, and most certainly a little bit of marshmallow fluff. That’s the inventive part - that makes us so creative.
Those strengths give us opportunity. They also give us responsibility.
Our challenge and our opportunity is to join together to create progress, not just for some, but for all.
I want to share with you a story about seeking progress for all.
In 2023, we held our very first participatory budgeting process.
Residents were asked to decide on spending $1 million in City funds. Over 900 ideas were submitted, and then they had to be narrowed down to 20 for the final ballot.
We asked for volunteers, who came together to evaluate the proposals. I stopped by to see them at work, and what I observed was remarkable.
Most of these volunteers were strangers when the meetings started. They came from all different wards, with their own ideas and beliefs about what type of ideas would benefit their neighborhoods most.
Yet, as I walked around the room and chatted with different groups, all of them were having thoughtful, constructive conversations that always built toward creating the best ballot proposals for their neighbors to vote on.
And they did just that, giving Somerville a final ballot with 20 carefully developed proposals that reflected our city’s ideals, concerns, and creative spirit.
3,500 votes were cast to fund the five winning ideas. Many who voted were youth who don’t get to vote otherwise.
Thanks to this collaborative process, we’ll now have new resources for food access and our bicycle network, as well as bus stop area improvements, more public trash cans, and new park shade structures.
This group of seniors, adults, and a truly inspiring number of youths demonstrated an openness to engage, to learn, and to rethink. A model we can all strive for.
This is the give-and-take of how we learn from one another to create progress.
It’s important to look back on the progress we are building on as we chart our path forward.
Two years ago, we began to systematically strive to advance our work in three ways.
One, we began to accelerate the urgent work of the city where possible.
Two, we began deepening our approach where needed.
And three, we began broadening our impact to deliver increased and more equitable service.
I want to talk first about accelerating our work.
To protect lives, we added staff and funding to traffic safety, enabling us to install nearly sixty traffic safety treatments each year. The annual average for the five years prior was 15. This is life-saving infrastructure like bike lanes, improved crossings, and speed humps.
To take on the housing crisis, we brought the number of affordable housing units actively in the construction pipeline up to an unprecedented 822 units. I remember when the City was justifiably proud to be striving for 100 affordable homes.
To reduce the threat of displacement, we expanded housing staff, directed millions in investments, and pushed out an unprecedented $4.3 million in rental assistance. We tripled legal assistance for tenants facing eviction and tripled tenant outreach, education, and organizing efforts.
We also kick-started a first-of-its-kind municipal voucher program to make rent deeply affordable for families without other options.
We revived the Anti-Displacement Task Force, and we worked with residents to develop our ground-breaking rent stabilization Home Rule Petition, which the City Council passed unanimously just last month.
To cool our neighborhoods and improve our air, we planted more than 1,300 trees, nearly doubling the number planted the previous two years. And we launched expert care programs for roughly 3,000 trees.
To increase our work to prevent overdoses, Somerville Prevention distributed more than 4,000 doses of Narcan to community members and, with Cambridge, jointly held 173 overdose prevention trainings.
To increase access to quality green space, we completed renovations of two parks and three schoolyards, completed the High School’s first ever athletic field, and have two more park projects underway, and three more set to launch in the coming year.
Because no one in Somerville should ever go hungry, we accelerated food security initiatives. This includes providing nearly 600 monthly food boxes to 8 public housing sites and multi-use grocery cards to more than 1,000 students.
To keep our public spaces clean and support our expanding rodent control efforts, DPW added and is maintaining 100 new solar-powered big belly trash cans.
To increase youth enrichment, we opened the City’s first two teen centers and created a new Youth Services Division that hit the ground running, employing nearly 200 teens at 31 sites during our Summer Jobs Program.
To assist residents without transportation, our new Taxi to Health program provided more than 9,000 rides to access food resources and health services.
To better serve all of you, we increased 311 staffing and took more than 100,000 calls per year.
To keep our city running, we’re advancing multiple major infrastructure and planning projects at once. This work was upended by the pandemic as staff focused on the emergency response. So now we are pedaling twice as hard to get things back on track.
That means we’re overhauling our sewers while we’re also working to build a critical Pump Station that will manage stormwater for two-thirds of our city.
We’re re-engineering dangerous intersections while we’re also restarting road and sidewalk reconstruction projects to improve mobility and accessibility -- including right out front on Highland Avenue.
We’re upgrading old HVAC systems in our schools and enhancing maintenance protocols.
We’re restarting neighborhood planning processes to improve accessibility, green space, and stormwater management, while we also construct a new Fire Station in Assembly Square, Somerville’s first new fire station in nearly half a century.
This, all while we start planning for new construction for our schools.
Meanwhile we are deepening our work where needed. Often that means going back to the source, to you, to inform and guide our aspirations as a community.
It also means studying the needs and the data to best guide our efforts.
Anyone who has done wood-working or sewing knows the value of the advice to, “measure twice, cut once.”
When we take the time to learn your priorities and study the facts before acting, we aim to use that same care.
For one, to begin the important work of modernizing our fire stations, we inspected all our firehouses. Now, we’re developing the City’s first Fire Station Master Plan to guide needed upgrades and repairs.
To ensure we provide the quality school buildings needed to prepare our youth for a successful future, we completed the City’s first K through 8 School Master Plan. With this work, we can better plan for today’s students and for tomorrow’s learning needs.
To strive for a city where everyone can feel safe, our Department of Racial and Social Justice conducted an intensive, comprehensive, standard-setting Public Safety for All survey and discussion process. With this work, we can better move forward with more voices at the table to create safety for all.
To make sure our efforts reflect your priorities, we’ve launched multiple engagement processes.
Cultural Capacity Planning for the Arts, the Youth Justice League, Union Square Plaza planning process, Civilian Oversight, Public Safety for All Task Force, Mobility planning, the Prevention Needs Assessment Plan process, a Disparity Study to build equity in our City contracting process, and more.
You’ve been sharing your ideas and concerns and we’ve been listening.
And finally, to support fair wages for our workers and attract and retain talent, we launched a Wage Compensation Study prioritizing our unions first. With this, we can better build equity and fair wages not just in comparison to salaries in our neighboring cities.
For the first time, we are also examining gender inequities across industries and within our own city structures.
And I want to pause on this point and be clear: I am determined that on my watch we will not perpetuate unequal pay for equal work. National data shows time and again that women are underpaid for doing the same work – and that is particularly true for women of color. Somerville can and will do better.
We have also been broadening and expanding our services.
To advance our commitment to accessibility, we added staff to monitor ADA compliance for our buildings, sidewalks, crosswalks, and public spaces, and we are launching our next update process for our Americans with Disabilities Act Transition Plan.
To support lifelong learning and aging in place, we increased the Council on Aging's capacity, programming, and supports for both seniors and caregivers.
To keep our residents out of the legal system and prevent the long-lasting impacts of incarceration, we invested in new civilian Jail Diversion Clinicians within our Police Department.
To ensure language is not a barrier to accessing City services and civic life, we expanded our Language Justice and access staffing.
And we are taking City Hall right into our neighborhoods with our new team of Community Health Workers, our expanded multi-lingual Equity Support Team, and a new social worker being hired for our libraries.
To aid our lowest-income residents, we’re preparing to launch a Guaranteed Basic Income Pilot to cover their most urgent needs – the first of its kind in Somerville.
Our work toward opening an Overdose Prevention Center has required navigating a range of hurdles. But I am proud to say it is advancing. We will provide this life-saving health service in our city.
We established the City’s first-ever Stabilization Fund for persons put out of their homes by emergencies like fires or floods. With this, we will expand our ability to help make sure no one in Somerville finds themselves without a place to sleep in the wake of a crisis.
We developed the city’s first ever Pollinator Action Plan expanding our environmental stewardship to the smallest of creatures, like butterflies and honeybees, which are vital to our ecosystem.
Last winter, the City piloted an overnight warming center for unhoused persons for five nights, and we funded the Somerville Homeless Coalition’s new day-time Engagement Center to expand services.
The Engagement Center is thriving, and this year, I am happy to announce that next week, we will be opening Somerville’s first City-sponsored seasonal overnight warming center.
Our new warming center will be open not just for a handful of nights but for the remaining months of winter. Somerville is a community that understands we need to keep our unsheltered residents warm and connected to resources.
There is so much more, but the other way we are broadening our impact is by building opportunity.
I call this pursuing both sides of the coin. On one side of the coin, we need affordability. On the other side we need economic opportunity. We need good jobs, job training, pay equity, and wage theft protection. And we need a faster path for immigrants to join the workforce.
I want our residents to have the whole coin.
To increase access to opportunity, education, and employment, we’ve pushed to advance public transit and mobility options.
Two years ago, we didn’t have the Green Line Extension. Or the Community Path. Let’s pause for a moment and applaud everyone in Somerville who spent decades advocating for these monumental transit gains for our community.
Public transit is an opportunity creator, and we’ve been working to advance transit access on all fronts.
From equity work on new bus routes and free T pass programs for students, staff, and low-income families; to safer streets for walking, rolling, and biking, we are working to create affordable, sustainable ways for our residents to get around and to get to their futures.
To prepare our students for success, we’ve made historic budget increases in our schools, expanded out of school time programming, and opened our first teen centers. We also launched a new program to coach Somerville students as they make the transition out of high school and into their next step be that college, training, or a career.
To improve service access as they rebuild their civilian lives -- and to expand recognition for their service -- we upped staffing in our Veterans Office, which brought back the Memorial Day Parade; relaunched the Veterans Commission on Monuments; and strengthened programming.
To support our entrepreneurs and small businesses, we not only committed more than $5 million in pandemic relief, we’re launching new efforts to market our businesses and skill-building supports.
We are also working to preserve and propel our vibrant arts community. We expanded staffing and launched listening tours. We are expecting up to 550,000 square feet of new arts space to come online over the next decade, thanks to development carve outs. We will work with our arts community to best seize this opportunity.
And I am proud to share that to build access to the wealth of online resources that shape opportunity today, we hired our first ever Digital Bridge Coordinator to build internet and device access as well as digital literacy. The fast pace of that work has already garnered Somerville recognition as a Digital Inclusion Trailblazer by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance.
This work is local. It’s driven by local priorities. Carried out by local government. Conducted with our amazing local partners.
But it happens in a broader context.
We’ve been able to accelerate, deepen, and broaden the good work of this community, and this City, by intensifying the background work that doesn’t make headlines but impacts your everyday life.
That includes improvements like scaling the organization to ensure we have the staffing and resources to meet evolving needs. It also includes investing in training, budgeting strategically, and ensuring fair wages for our workers.
And it requires strong fiscal management so we can get more for your dollars.
This is the work that helped secure our break-through triple A bond rating in 2023, the first time in the City’s history we’ve received this rating.
A triple A rating means critical investments such as major school, road, or building projects will be more affordable for the City going forward. This is significant for helping us reach our goals.
As we work toward local progress, regional, national, and global opportunities and challenges can shape our outcomes.
Again, this is a time of both opportunity and challenges.
More than $77 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding has fueled our ability to support our residents, local businesses, nonprofits, and community priorities as we recover from the pandemic.
Thanks to the vision of this community to pursue both housing and commercial development, we have record levels of new growth tax revenues and community benefits from developers that are also funding the progress and services we seek.
The transformation of Assembly, outer Union Square, and Boynton Yards is helping to pay for our High School, our desperately needed water and sewer upgrades, and our expansion of funding for our schools.
When those lab buildings go up, so does funding for youth mental health services, road paving, field maintenance, and more.
Thanks to the advocacy of our federal and state delegations, the funding they bring in likewise funds our progress and critical projects.
These are the opportunities we’ve either seized or created. And this is the momentum we will seek to build upon in the next term. But we must be clear-eyed that we are in a time of transition and uncertainty.
As we seek to advance our SomerVision goals and neighborhood plans, the real estate market is tightening, the economy is fluctuating, and interest rates are higher. This can slow investment and reduce the City’s purchasing power.
As we accelerate our climate action efforts to help slow down climate change and prepare for the impacts of extreme weather, the pace of climate impacts is picking up.
As we work to hold true to our humanity and social values, hate and division is being actively sown in our society.
As we do more than ever before for our unhoused residents, we do so in a context where that population is growing, and State emergency shelters are overflowing.
As we work to deliver good local government empowered by fair elections reflecting the will of the people, democracy itself is threatened in our great nation.
These are challenges we must unite to navigate in the coming term.
I’m optimistic that we can and will continue to build progress for all even as we face new headwinds. I’ve seen us do this time and again.
We’ve built the groundwork for continued progress. Our outstanding transit access, our diverse and talented workforce, and our creative planning put us in a good place to exceed expectations on continued growth.
Our strong fiscal management and strategic reserves can help us weather unexpected roadblocks to progress.
Our unshakable core values will keep us resolute in our goals for progress and dignity for all.
And, I have one last story of Somerville’s compassion, grit, creativity, and determination.
Once there was a vacant Star Market.
Maybe you know the rest of the story.
In 2008, the Star Market closed, and the owner refused to sell - for years. So, residents and Councilors joined the City in creating a community-driven plan for the parcel. We established an Urban Renewal Plan that likely inspired the owner to consider selling. We attracted a developer who supports our affordable housing goals. We planned a ground-breaking project with more than double the required number of affordable housing units, as well as green space, and more. And then we hit the wall of insurmountable costs. We found unexpected contamination on the site.
So, this City and this Council broke the impasse. To drive down costs, we used zoning, Affordable Housing Trust Fund monies, and – with the unanimous support of the Council – we passed a first-ever for Somerville special tax credit to provide $15 to $18M in tax relief.
Then we celebrated. It all seemed set. But what you may not know is that later, we hit another wall.
Interest rates went up, construction costs rose, and my office got a difficult call from the developer. They shared they had tried everything, but we needed to discuss how to break the news that week that they could no longer afford to purchase the property and proceed.
But again, this is Somerville.
I called a meeting with the developers, and we flipped that challenge around. We started talking solutions. We were not about to let a project with more than 130 deeply affordable units go quietly into the night.
We went to the state. Talked options. And then we successfully applied for a MassWorks Grant that cut the project gap in half. So, after 15 years of standing vacant, the sale of the Star Market finally went through in October.
By the way similar efforts have kept the Clarendon Hill public housing project and other initiatives on track.
To be clear, we’re not done. We’re hoping as contractors get more eager in a slowing market it will close the final project funding gap. But the path to transforming the site is once again clear. We will build this important project for our community.
Somerville doesn’t give in, and neither do I, and neither do the public servants sworn in tonight nor the staff who serve you every day.
And the stakes of what we do in local government have never been higher.
We are building a Somerville that focuses on your everyday needs while also thinking about the uncertainties of tomorrow.
And we remain steadfast.
We will continue to take on the housing crisis using every tool possible.
We will continue to create safe streets to save lives.
We will continue to welcome and lift up those in need.
We will serve our most vulnerable including the unhoused.
We will celebrate and strengthen our arts and cultural economy.
We will help our local businesses thrive, and break down barriers for women- and minority-owned businesses.
We will seize opportunities to improve our neighborhoods and squares.
We will deliver the best quality core services, and we will advance accessibility and language access.
We will serve and honor our veterans.
We will support and fairly pay our workers, and we will achieve pay equity regardless of gender, race, age, or any other factor.
We will stand up for the rights and dignity of all persons.
We will advance public safety for all and continue the hard work of dismantling systemic racism.
We will prepare our students and workers for careers that help them thrive.
We will use every tool to prevent overdose deaths and substance use disorder.
We will lead the way on climate action, fossil fuel free construction, and be good stewards of our environment.
We will fight for rent stabilization, a statewide approval of the local transfer fee, and every single initiative we need to support affordable housing.
We will provide the education and school buildings our students deserve.
We will seize this moment; we will do great things.
We will move forward together.
We will move forward with purpose.
We will build progress for all.
Thank you, Somerville. It is an honor to be part of our determined and wonderful community and to serve you.
Thank you.