Braintree Candidate Profile: Thomas Reynolds Jr. For Mayor

BRAINTREE, MA — With Mayor Joseph Sullivan not seeking reelection, four candidates have emerged and will run to be Braintree's second ever mayor. In preparation for September's preliminary election, Braintree Patch asked the candidates to answer questions about their campaigns and will be publishing candidate profiles as election day draws near.

Thomas Reynolds, the chair of the Braintree Electric Light Board, is among the candidates running for mayor. Preliminary elections left Reynolds and Town Councilor Charles Kokoros as the two remaining mayoral candidates in the Nov. 5 election.

Are you running for office in Braintree? Contact Jimmy Bentley at jimmy.bentley@patch.com for information on being featured in a candidate's profile and submitting campaign announcements to Braintree Patch.

Previously on Patch:

• Braintree Candidate Profile: Lisa Fiske Heger For Mayor
• Braintree Candidate Profile: Thomas Bowes For Mayor
• Braintree Candidate Profile: Charles Kokoros For Mayor

The single most pressing issue facing Braintree is _______, and this is what do you intend to do about it?

The number 1 issue facing Braintree is how the town will address the aging infrastructure that is in dire need of upgrade and how are we going to pay for it without overburdening our taxpayers or cutting essential services. Our schools have always been a priority and the level of education offered to our children. The ability of the next mayor to balance the cost of maintaining the quality of our educational programs while at the same time, managing to provide revenues to address the aging town water treatment plant, a outdated fire department headquarters and a rundown DPW facility are just a few of the high cost upgrades to our infrastructure and the significant challenge they pose to all of us in Braintree.

I’ve built three water treatment plants in my capacity as DPW Director and have built a power plant for the Braintree Electric Light department which has resulted in the capacity for our town to consistently provide unequaled availability of municipal power production at the cheapest electric rates you will find anywhere in Massachusetts and beyond. This approach of focusing on power generation has resulted in annual profit of $26 million dollars in revenue for BELD and provided significant cost reduction for our Braintree rate payers. I’ve also been responsible for building new seawalls in the Town of Marshfield that have served to protect the people and precious assets of that community. I built trust with those who I served, time after time.

My name has been on these contracts and plans that accomplished these critical projects. I’ve always been accountable to every stakeholder and tax payer for the part I played in using their tax dollars to achieve maximum return and value to our taxpayers.

Over the past 12 years under the Town’s mayoral form of government, the administration has built a strong and stable financial foundation. Sustaining this foundation is essential to maintaining the economic stability that’s now in place. It is critical that Braintree’s next mayor has the requisite leadership skills, proven accomplishments and the vision to carry Braintree forward. A step back is not an option for Braintree!

In order for Braintree to maintain a solid financial footing, the next mayor must be ready on the first day of the new administration to have the necessary financial management skills to address our future financial challenges head on and with proven experience to do so. Having a mayor on day one who has a working and proven effective understanding of the relationship of how our ability to generate new revenues, maintain an adequate level of reserve funds and available cash to apply towards our town’s ability to deliver essential services to our residents, and pay for our operating and overhead costs. I am the only candidate in this mayor’s race who understands the cost of doing business for our citizens and has the experience to get it done.

The next administration's ability to identify new sources of revenues will be key to how much of our infrastructure, educational and services needs, can be addressed and how Braintree can fund these needs affordably.

Some ideas that will be vetted over this campaign are:

• Traffic mitigation funds to be paid for by developers
• Partner with existing businesses to augment municipal services for residents and schools (i.e. Shuttle transportation program, facilities rentals/discounts, educational co-op opportunities)
• Leverage state regional transportation programs to defray costs to town
• Parking enforcement program and expansion of public parking in our Squares to generate additional traffic, sidewalk and street improvements
• Maximize chapter 90 funding by prioritizing a town wide road acceptance program
• Identify underutilized municipal assets that can be leased or sold
• Increase the Mayor’s Office efforts and focus on securing a larger pool of state and federal grant monies that are available in order to augment the town’s revenue pool

What are the critical differences between you and the other candidates seeking this post?

The critical difference between myself and the other candidates is I have 30 years as a proven municipal manager developing and managing the daily operational and capital project budgets. I have owned a number of municipal capital projects from start to finish, to include design, financing and the construction of three water treatment facilities, sewer pump stations, new Wastewater Screening Facility, 3 miles of newly constructed seawalls, along with repair of Shoreline protection infrastructure damage caused by numerous coastal storms, numerous water main replacement projects, on time and on budget, the design and construction of a 17-acre, 5 multi-purpose athletic field complex and currently involved with the selection of a designer and preliminary design of a new DPW facility in the town of Marshfield.

Essentially I am the only candidate in the Braintree mayor's race who has gone beyond being able to only state the issues facing our town, but who has actually offered solutions to address these issues.

When elected, I will not be learning on the job. With my PROVEN Municipal Managerial experience, I will step into the job running on day one.

Describe the other issues that define your campaign platform

Braintree needs our next mayor to be capable to lead our great community to a place of financial stability and to maintain the quality of life that is the envy across the Commonwealth. Braintree needs to have in our next mayor a collaborator who will listen to and respect all points of view from our citizens and those who care deeply about the present challenges we face and the challenges we will surely face tomorrow. Our next mayor needs to be a person who comes ready with ideas and recommended solutions to the discussions of important issues and challenges facing our town. Braintree’s next mayor needs to be a person who says what they mean and means what they say. A mayor who has demonstrated a straightforward and deliberate vision for what we want Braintree to be. Someone who has the proven experience of accomplishment and a clear track record of consistently showing up when the hard decisions, and sometimes not always the most popular decisions, need to be made for the greater good of Braintree.

Over the past 12 years under the Town’s new form of government, the administration has built a strong and stable financial foundation. Sustaining this foundation is essential to maintaining our economic stability. It’s critical that Braintree’s next mayor has the requisite leadership skills, proven accomplishments and the vision to carry Braintree forward. A step back is not an option for Braintree.

The state of Braintree’s school infrastructure needs to be a primary topic of concern. We must prioritize our long overdue individual school building upgrades and prioritize our ability to fund these upgrades without adversely affecting our current tax rate, which continues to be one of the lowest on the South Shore. We must maintain the great asset that our great public school system is.

What accomplishments in your past would you cite as evidence you can handle this job?

My proven daily involvement as a municipal manager and leader, managing budgets for both general fund and enterprise funds, as Chairman of Braintree Electric, as a Braintree Selectman, or as a member of the town of Marshfield Financial Team, developing revenue projections and aligning the needed funds with the municipal spending priorities, provides me the skill to understand how to identify and generate funding sources available to the town, and to how best approach developing current and future operational and capital budget needs. Also, as a member of multiple towns management negotiation teams tasked with dealing with union contracts negotiations, capital planning budgets and purchase negotiations that have provided the communities I’ve served with the best value for the limited tax dollars available. My highly effective performance in building and developing highly skilled professional managers and operational teams that increase the effectiveness of essential services delivered to our taxpayers will be key to maintaining a financially sound community that will not overburden our taxpayers.

I’ve taken organizations that were in poor shape and that had become ineffective and turned them around to become highly efficient operations and reliable in their charge to provide high level services to the taxpayers of multiple communities, to include our Town of Braintree. All of these accomplishments have always been pursued with the goal of accomplishing what is best for the community. I have consistently taken a collaborative approach and have solicited opinions from subject matter experts and those most affected by the projects I managed or policies I championed as a selectman, Light Board commissioner, a park commissioner, an operations manager and a DPW director. I’m a consensus builder. A person who stands behind the decisions I’ve made.

As a Braintree Park commissioner, I was a member of the building committee that proposed the design and construction of the high school athletic complex/ Herget Field and Braintree Golf Course clubhouse. As the selectmen’s liaison to Highway and Engineering Departments worked to develop a 5 year road maintenance program that is the original framework of the 100 Roads program the town has today. As a Municipal Light Commissioner, I have provided oversight as the BELD Board of Commissioners Chairman to the general manager in developing a business plan and implementing multiple long range purchase power agreements as well as collaborating on the development and construction of a new electric generation power plant along with solar and wind turbine projects which has enabled the Light Department to hedge the annual increases in energy costs out across multiple future years resulting in protecting the Braintree Electric ratepayers monthly cost containment. These are amongst the multiple qualifications and accomplishments that separate me from my opponents as the most qualified candidate for mayor of Braintree today.

What's your favorite thing about Braintree?

Braintree has been very good to me personally, and to my family as well. The morals and standards that guide me in life have been formed and ingrained by the community I grew up in and raised my own children in. It started with the education I received through the Braintree school system, the opportunity to compete in so many different youth athletic activities growing up, the church parish my family belonged to, the low tax rates that made life affordable for my parents and for me and my own family, the reasonable water and sewer rates along with having one of the lowest electric rates and the highest level of power reliability in the commonwealth have made Braintree the envy of many of our neighboring communities. With Braintree’s location at the cross roads to three major highways and the access to public transportation that enables us to access travel to Boston with convenience and price value, Cape Cod and destinations north south and west with relative ease. I cherish the history and depth of our community and I’m most proud of the role our community has played in setting the democratic process for the rest of our country. I’m proud of how our residents still live up to the values that made our town and country great.

What else would you like voters to know about yourself and your positions?

It is well known that the town’s zoning ordinances are outdated and need to be updated sooner rather than later. We need to provide the best tools for our municipal leaders and planners to best serve our community. These tools should be an updated master Plan and an updated set of zoning by-laws. I believe that Mayor Sullivan should pull the proposed "Comprehensive Zoning Rewrite" version before the Council presently and allow the next mayor to first address updating the town’s Master Plan followed by the much needed updates to our town’s zoning by-laws.

My commitment would be to prioritize an update to Braintree’s master plan within the first six months of being elected. The master plan is a blueprint of zoning and capital improvements, it sets priorities for developing and maintaining infrastructure and public facilities. I will collaborate closely with residents, neighborhood groups, and business groups to assess, formulate and implement an updated comprehensive Master Plan. I would also commit to implementing new Zoning By-laws that reflect the findings of the updated Master Plan and will protect our community from any legal issues that may come from our currently antiquated Zoning By-laws.
Making our public ways more accessible and safer for all residents will be a priority of mine. When elected Mayor I will implement a sidewalk program that’s been long overdue. ADA compliance will be a primary focus of this new program. We will leverage the current Chapter 90 funding along with Safe Routes and Complete Streets funding sources to offset costs to the town’s general fund.

Additionally, making our roads safer will require us to address the traffic issues that plague Braintree as a major cut-through for surrounding towns. The same state programs I mentioned previously could play a part in the funding and design changes needed to play a role in my goal to effectively address this problem. Developing solutions to address regional traffic issues that impact Braintree is absolutely critical. As mayor, I would promote a new collaborative approach to working with our existing and new business, our town government, and our state government to partner together to implement a last mile shuttle service from our public transportation centers to the multiple commerce and business parks scattered around our town. This would help attract the types of soft impact business such as the life science and bio-med companies looking for production centers and business back office support operations, while decreasing or minimizing the need for automobile commuters driving to and around our town streets.

We suffer greatly from the cut through traffic that plagues many of our surrounding communities who have been impacted in this not so positive way due to the economic boom of Boston. However, through citizen, business and municipal government partnership I feel confident that we can find solutions to lessen the traffic impacts. We should consider partnering with our neighboring communities who also suffer from the same high volumes of vehicle traffic on their streets.

Concerning a regional health safety issue, we as a community need to stand strong together with our neighboring towns of Weymouth, Quincy and Hingham to fight against the misguided placement of the proposed compressor station in the Fore River Basin area. We need to impress upon the state and federal governments that the location of this extremely risky use within such a highly populated area is not practical and highly dangerous to our residents. As mayor I will seek every available recourse to block this proposal.

Braintree’s next mayor also needs to act quickly and decisively in creating a municipal census counting committee and establish a partnership with the federal government’s Census Department so as to ensure Braintree is getting accurate credit for our population. The federal assistance programs that many of our citizens count on such as Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, Highway Planning and Construction, Special Education Grants, and other school related funding are determined by the Decennial Census collected statistics in the census process. Braintree’s local government needs to ensure that it's doing everything possible as a community that the 2020 Census accurately counts Braintree numbers.