Polly Titcomb: State Representative Candidate Profile

SWAMPSCOTT, MA — Polly Titcomb is one of six candidates on the ballot looking to fill the open seat as the state representative for the 8th Essex District encompassing Marblehead and Swampscott.

The 41-year-old former Swampscott Select Board Chair is a practicing attorney with an undergraduate degree from the University of Vermont and a law degree from the Northeastern University School of Law.

The mother of two was also a member of the Swampscott Finance Committee, is a Swampscott town meeting member and served on the Essex County Commission on the Status of Women.

She told Patch her priorities in the State House will be working to address economic inequality, climate change, the housing crisis, public transportation and education access disparities.

Campaign website

www.pollyforessex8.com

Why are you seeking elective office?

I am running for State Representative because we need more people in government who (1) will work to mitigate economic and social injustice by prioritizing the interests of marginalized and underrepresented populations in their policymaking; and (2) prioritize the remediation of the substantially unchecked autonomy of lawmakers.

My personal and professional experiences promise that I offer the bold leadership needed to identify and address these issues. In every aspect of my work, from policy decisions, while serving on the Swampscott Select Board to my work as a public defense attorney in Essex County, I have consistently focused on creating greater equity in our district with independence and integrity.

For the past nine years, I have served in various capacities as an elected and appointed municipal government official. Because of this experience, I not only am uniquely qualified to fully grasp and grapple with the challenges facing Lynn, Marblehead, and Swampscott, but I am distinctly prepared to affect tangible policy changes to mitigate them.

As a member of the Swampscott Select Board, I was confronted with many difficult situations that demonstrated my consistent commitment to making principled and objective decisions, even when they are unpopular. Through both successes and failures, I learned to balance determination with effectiveness; transparency with efficiency; citizen engagement with decisiveness; and unwavering principles with collegiality. I honed a skill set that has enabled me to effectively transform ideas and ideals into realities.

State Representatives are the chief advocates for their districts, and I am a trained and trusted advocate in this community. As a child welfare law attorney, I protect my clients’ due process rights and advocate for the services needed by my child or parent clients to get them the services they need to be reunified as a family. I also represent individuals in Children Requiring Assistance cases in Juvenile Court to advocate for the services needed to enable a juvenile to succeed in school and at home, including but not limited to advocating for special education services and therapeutic and mental health services.

Throughout my time in leadership, I was careful to protect my independence and integrity. These qualities must be actively safeguarded as a leader. I am concerned about the substantial unchecked autonomy of lawmakers, who should be held accountable for all of their actions and votes, regardless of whether the same takes place in a committee or on the floor. Every vote of every legislator at every level of decision-making should be recorded and made easily accessible to the public. It is essential that legislators establish a legal structure that increases transparency and in turn holds them accountable for their policy decisions. I would advocate for this change.

During my time on the Swampscott Select Board, I drafted and implemented the Town's Financial Policy Guidelines, Select Board Handbook, Board and Committee Handbook and Board and Committee Code of Conduct. I prioritized these projects to create uniformity of conduct and ensure a standard of professionalism throughout election and appointment cycles, regardless of personal or professional relationships and preferences.

The single most pressing issue facing our district is _______, and this is what I intend to do about it.

The most pressing issue facing our district is economic inequality because this fundamental issue gives rise to and perpetuates each of the other seriously pressing issues in our district, including climate change and rising sea levels; the housing crisis; inadequate public transportation; disparate access to education; and insufficient access to various community services. It is not enough for lawmakers to draft legislation that is economically and socially neutral. The social and economic history of our Commonwealth and nation requires legislators to be affirmatively anti- economic and social injustice in order to effectuate notable and substantial change.

To address this issue at its root, I would advocate for numerous legislative changes relating to taxation. First, I will vote in support of the Fair Share Amendment, which directs the legislature to earmark the additional revenue generated from the surtax for spending on transportation and education. As a legislator, I would ensure that these earmarks not only are fully funded (which a ballot question cannot guarantee), but that the legislature adequately researches the areas of greatest need and drafts the necessary legislation to direct the funds to those needs.

Second, I would advocate for any and all of the following additional mechanisms through which economic inequality can be addressed: progressive increases to the earned income tax credit; raising the tax rate on capital gains income and dividends (the MA Constitution prohibition on progressive tax only applies to earned income); imposing a tax on substantial endowments to private universities (a 1.6% tax on such endowments would generate over $1 billion in revenue annually); creating a surtax on multi-million dollar homes; raise the rate of the minimum corporate tax and create a progressive tax structure relating to the same; and establish a progressive surtax on excessive CEO salaries (e.g. impose surtax on any CEO to employee ratio that exceeds 100:1, a higher surtax on a ratio that exceeds 200:1, and so on).

Establishing any one or more of these proposed amendments to taxation would provide hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue each year that, when combined with the right legislative initiatives, would help to successfully mitigate the other pressing issues and inequities in our district and throughout the Commonwealth.

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

I am the only candidate who has previously served as an elected or appointed municipal official and has achieved policy priorities.

State Representative is a district-level office and the role of the representative is to advocate for the needs of the municipalities and communities within that district. I am an experienced and trusted advocate as a municipal official and for my clients as a family and child welfare law attorney.

I have spent nearly a decade focusing on the needs of my municipality. I have dealt with financing those needs, understanding the competition between those needs, and making difficult choices between competing needs. This is experience that you cannot gain in the legislature, yet is a fundamental base of knowledge to be an effective State Representative.

Further, as a litigator and trained mediator, I regularly engage in negotiations that aim to resolve highly contentious disputes of fundamental importance to children and families in Essex County and beyond. As part of this process, I have to weigh the interests of my client and of justice against the related facts and circumstances in order to determine when to proceed to litigation and when, and on what terms, to settle.

Finally, I have a unique perspective on the needs of families in our district and the barriers that prevent parents of young children, particularly women, from running for office on the local and state level. I am committed to working to break down these barriers to ensure a political system in which everyone can seek office, which will create a more representative government. One of my top short-term goals is to amend the campaign finance law to allow candidates to use campaign funds to offset the cost of childcare while campaigning for office. One of my long-term goals is to re-establish public campaign financing and to fund the same as part of the state's annual operating budget.

Describe the other issues that define your campaign platform.

In addition to minimizing economic inequality, I am committed to:

Combating climate change by providing adequate funding for coastal resiliency; removing the barriers that prevent households from choosing greener living; and creating incentives for greener business practice;

Ensuring the reliability and safety of public transportation and expanding and electrifying transit infrastructure;

Tackling the housing crisis by increasing the quality and quantity of public housing, including housing for seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities; and advancing legislation that promotes the development of appropriate multifamily rental units and housing for families of various income levels;

Increasing the scope and availability of mental health services, including substance use disorder treatments;

Securing opportunities for neurodivergent individuals by increasing state aid for special education services and social systems that will better assist students to transition into adulthood;

Improving government transparency and accessibility by establishing an independent research bureau and expanding access to voting records in the legislature.

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

Having been appointed and elected to multiple offices, I have gained and maintained the trust of the community I have served to make decisions in their best interest. I have proven to be an effective and competent public servant and able to hold difficult public conversations about policy while also maintaining strong working relationships with my colleagues.

My four former colleagues on the Swampscott Select Board elected me as Chair during the final year of my three-year term, a sign of my leadership and my ability to balance remaining steady in my priorities and values with professionalism. These four colleagues have since all endorsed me for state representative.

While on the Select Board, I instituted the town’s Financial Policy Guidelines, which mitigated the rate of property tax increases and helped to improve the municipal bond rating. Additionally, I created the Select Board, Board and Committee, and Code of Conduct Manuals to professionalize the Town’s appointed and elected positions. I planned and implemented a comprehensive waste reduction program, diverting over 10% of the town's waste from landfills and saving over $150,000 in operating expenses per year. As a part of this program, I created town-wide recycling and composting options to encourage and allow households to live in more environmentally-conscious ways.

All of my policy decisions were made with the environment as a priority and I helped the town adopt an organic lawn policy to eliminate pesticide use, supported work to repair sewers to reduce pollution to the ocean, and worked to secure more open space through the acquisition of land. I have a proven record of achieving policy priorities and effectively working to better the well-being of residents in the district.

The best advice ever shared with me was:

If you are going to fail, fail on your own terms.

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

Above all else, independence and integrity are the most important qualities of leadership. The nature of democratic leadership is such that if these qualities are not actively protected, they simply cannot be maintained.

I am committed to serving this district with independence and integrity only on behalf of the interests of the residents of Lynn, Marblehead, Swampscott, and Massachusetts. To this end, I have not accepted donations from lobbyists or any other special interest group. Similarly, I do not believe that candidates for office should need to have large amounts of personal wealth or connections to people who are wealthy to afford to run for office. This campaign structure is inherently and patently discriminatory and perpetuates the economic inequality from which our state gravely suffers, however inadvertently. For these reasons, my campaign experience has strongly reaffirmed my belief in public campaign financing.