Post Election Thoughts With a Framingham Perspective

The Presidential election result was a body blow.

It has a physicality which is real and needs time to deal with.

There are clear lessons conveyed by the shift against the Democrats, which occurred in all parts of the nation.

These are my raw, unrefined thoughts on the state of affairs.

One takeaway for me is the fact that Democrats have focused on the middle class, while their opposition comes from the very rich and the less well off.

That opposition from the less well off is growing, and tipped the election against the Democrats.

So many times, I have heard from Democrats about the importance of making college more affordable, when 60-70% of the US population don’t have a college degree.

We have many millions of people in the US who graduated from high school but did not go on to college. They need to become the highest priority for ensuring that they have a fair deal.

They have a tough time getting jobs which pay a decent wage, finding affordable housing, and paying monthly bills, when inflation has been such a problem.

It does not help that post-pandemic inflation was a worldwide problem.

Inflation always punishes the low-income earners the most, and they are largely the ones without college degrees.

The question we should be asking is: “How are folks without a college degree affected by this”, when ‘this’ can be any policy decision made at any level of government, or any budget cut, or any investment, and so on.

For Framingham, we have been systematically reducing job opportunities for this group:

1. When the roads are neglected and deteriorate each year, we have not been hiring enough Department of Public Works (DPW) staff to fix them.
2. Same story for the water & sewer system.
3. Same story for city building roofs.
4. Same story for deferred solar installations for city building roofs and parking lots.

The DPW situation is especially alarming, as the number of job vacancies has been steadily increasing each year, reaching at least 90 in the current fiscal year.

In most cases, when infrastructure maintenance or climate change action is involved, Framingham has not only neglected its duty to invest in solutions, but it has diminished the job prospects for the very sector of the population which sent out such a cry for help in the recent election.

Further, when the Mayor contemplates a water & sewer rate solution which has water costs for renters pegged at double that for homeowners, he is aiming to punish the lower income residents of the city and that also ignores the election message.

In addition, Framingham could be doing a great deal more to prepare its high schoolers for productive lives. Although it is especially fortunate to have a vocational/technical high school: Keefe Regional Technical School, it has not made it a priority to expand the facility to accommodate the 300 students on its waiting list who want to go there but are excluded by limited capacity.

The Mayor’s Community Center project is soaking up more than $10 million in federal COVID relief funds and will likely suck up another $10 million or more before it is complete. The whole project is shrouded in secrecy, with no one knowing what is really going on.

It would be a much better use of a good portion of that money to expand Keefe Tech for the betterment of our students who need good jobs and productive lives.

There are many other comments which could be made, including some about the abysmal proficiency of the average Framingham student in the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, which MCAS results reveal each year.

But I shall pause here.

My takeaway from the election is that Framingham must take positive steps to respond to the strong message sent in the election, by specifically improving the prospects of those residents who don’t have college degrees and who have been underappreciated for many years.