EASTHAMPTON — Precinct 5 City Councilor Tamara Smith is being challenged for her seat by Cathy Wauczinski. One week from the municipal elections, the two shared their top priorities for the precinct while discussing their overall role as a councilor at a forum held at Easthampton High School.
Moderators, state Rep. Homar Gómez, D- Easthampton, and resident Jean Pao Wilson, introduced the candidates, who answered questions in alternating order. Questions were submitted online by members of public and selected based on frequency.
Order of responses are presented in alternating order and full video is available on the Easthampton Media website and YouTube channel.
Introductions
Smith has been an Easthampton resident for the past 18 years, running for her fourth consecutive term on the council; the first two as an at-large member and third as a Precinct 5 councilor. Smith is a professor at Westfield State University teaching gerontology, health science and sociology. She has five children who grew up attending Easthampton Public Schools. She served on the School Council for Center and Pepin elementary schools and is on the board of directors for Easthampton Neighbors, a nonprofit supporting aging in place through local connections.
Wauczinski is a Easthampton resident for more than 30 years, moving here after meeting her husband and having coached soccer for her daughter. She has a bachelor’s degree in communication disorders from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has completed graduate work at Westfield State University in applied behavioral analysis. She has extensive experience in human services working with adults and children with disabilities, and collaborates with local agencies to support community living. Wauczinski is the chair of the Easthampton Republican City Committee and a founding member of the Easthampton Active Citizens group. She has provided testimony to the state Legislature on a variety of topics and has experience in budget development, grant writing and fundraising.
Top priorities
Wauczinski said her top priorities are accountability, transparency, fiscal responsibility and preserving more resources in Easthampton. As a child, she said she got involved advocating against the “bottle bill,” that shifted from glass to plastic bottles, resulting in plastic pollution and a loss of jobs in glass manufacturing.
“We need a diverse knowledge-base to analyze budgets, housing options, zoning ordinances and prevent unintended consequences like we saw with the bottle bill,” she said. “We will look at important decisions and try to reduce the potential damage to our aquifer, overcrowding, overburden of our infrastructure, increasing rents and higher cost of living.”
As a councilor, Smith said she is involved in multiple city projects. This includes work on the Ordinance Subcommittee, which is currently focusing on housing affordability with short-term rentals and long-term rent ordinances. She said in Precinct 5, there are more homes than rentals and she wants to make sure residents can afford to stay in Easthampton.
“Moving forward, I just want to facilitate appropriate conversations that move us all forward together, in a way that we can find our common ground and protect the resources that we have in Precinct 5, such as our aquifer and green spaces, and also meet the social needs of our precinct as a whole,” she said.
Supporting residents
When asked how she would best understand the perspective of her constituents, Wauczinski said she has hosted community gatherings monthly for the past two years, informing citizens about city happenings and creating engagement, something she would expand upon, if elected. She hopes to increase accessibility to meetings, noting that this was an area she felt the city was lacking, due to timing and online accessibility.
“Unfortunately, the voices of many citizens are lost or ignored currently,” Wauczinski said. “I’ve experienced that firsthand with city councilors rolling their eyes, or in one case, falling asleep when I get up to speak. I have heard from citizens across the city that they are afraid to speak up and this cannot happen. Every voice has value.”
Smith said she has a history on the council — particularly as an at-large councilor — when she wasn’t scared to talk about divisive topics, but many times there would be miscommunications or misinformation. She said, for example, there was misinformation when Easthampton was considering passing a “sanctuary city” ordinance in 2017, and she took action.
“When everything came up with ‘sanctuary city,’ there was a lot of misinformation out there. Some people were assuming that sanctuary city meant refugee city, for example,” Smith said. “I held an educational forum at the community center at Eastworks, by myself, to make sure that everybody could understand the terminology that we were using and understand what was at stake, regardless of whether or not they agreed with me. I ended up pulling that from consideration because it was so divisive within our community.”
Park Street infrastructure
When asked for input on the MassDOT Safe Routes to School proposal for a Park Street side path and how the proposed widened sidewalks would affect residents in the winter, Smith spoke about the financial impact to constituents in Precinct 5.
“This is actually a difficult question for Precinct 5, because to be able to take a bus to school, we have to pay … $300 per semester,” said Smith. “Having five kids, that was a substantial cost within my family and we did not have sidewalks that we could have taken to safely go to school.”
Smith said she is in favor of universal design and wider sidewalks, not only to help kids get to school, but to help increase caregiver access as well. With different nonprofits and volunteer groups in Easthampton, Smith wants to bring caregivers together to explore solutions for those who are unable to plow their driveways — something that could decrease social isolation.
Wauczinski said the first thing the city needs to consider is whether widening the sidewalks is an infrastructure priority. If it is built, she would want to see creative solutions for clearing the sidewalks.
“We have a number of essential infrastructure that needs to be upgraded and fixed, and I would need to see some data that showed the demand and the use would be of such volume that would make this a viable project for us to spend our money on, and then to maintain,” she said. “Because unfortunately, we’ve had a series of projects that we’ve done that later have not been maintained.”