Medford Candidate Profile: Matt Leming For City Council

MEDFORD, MA — With the Medford Municipal Election scheduled for Nov. 7, Patch is profiling the candidates.

Here, we learn more about Matt Leming, who is among 12 candidates running for the seven seats on the Medford City Council.

Four of the candidates are incumbents: Zac Bears, Kit Collins, George Scarpelli and Justin Tseng. The other candidates are: Leming, Anna Callahan, Charles Patrick Clerkin, Leonard Glionna, Emily Lazzaro, John Petrella, Jaclyn Torres Roth and Melanie Tringali.

Leming, who will be 30 years old as of Election Day, has been a postdoc at Massachusetts General Hospital for three years.

Candidates were sent questionnaires and filled out the answers.

Name

Matt Leming

How old will you be as of Election Day?

30

Campaign website

https://mattleming.com/

What city or town do you live in?

Medford

What office are you seeking?

Medford City Council

Please give us your party affiliation

Democrat

Education

Bachelor's and Master's in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with minors in mathematics and Russian language and literature. PhD in Computational Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge.

Occupation

I've been a postdoc at Massachusetts General Hospital for three years. I study Alzheimer's diagnostics using artificial intelligence models trained on data in electronic health records. I've also been a reservist for the past year.

Family

I have a sister who lives in Oregon, and my parents live in Kansas City.

Does anyone in your family work in politics or government?

I don't have any relatives working in government.

Have you ever held a public office, whether appointive or elective?

No.

Why are you seeking this office?

Medford is not affordable, and City Council has a crucial part to play in addressing this. When I moved to Medford, I really fell in love with it and wanted to buy a house here. But the downpayment alone would have been more than a year's salary for even the cheapest options. As a scientist, I got preoccupied with figuring out why this was. I threw myself into affordable housing organizing, joining citizen advocacy groups like Housing Medford, overseeing affordable housing funding on the Community Preservation Committee, and state-level activism with the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization. In Medford, a group of residents and I pushed City Council to finally adopt an affordable housing trust. The day after the 2022 elections, a few of those councilors approached me and asked if I'd be interested in running for an open seat. At the end of the day, change only happens if people are willing to step up to the plate and put the work in.

Please complete this statement: The single most pressing issue facing my constituents is ______, and this is what I intend to do about it.

The single most pressing issue facing my constituents is the underfunding of the city — we have one of the lowest operating budgets for a city of our size in the entire state, and this is due to complacency and lack of investment in past decades. I canvass and talk to voters a lot these days, and most of the issues they bring up — whether it be the lack of firefighter or DPW contracts, the poor state of the roads and Medford High, or the lack of inspectors to enforce our own ordinances — can be traced to this lack of resources.

There's no silver bullet to solve this issue, and it requires a City Council that doesn't shy away from change. A few concrete steps that would help are:

• Bolster up the staff in the city planning department, including hiring grant writers to bring more money from the state and federal level into the city.
• Allocate the appropriate funds to hire a permanent economic development director, which would help to attract and support new businesses in the city.
• Support the City staff so that projects like Transforming the Square can be implemented.
• Implement, and work with the assessors' office and the labor unions to enforce, a commercial vacancy tax for empty/unused storefronts.
• Study and restructure city boards to make development — particularly along Mystic Avenue — easier in Medford.
• Put protections in place to ensure that residential property tax increases (which will likely be necessary) do not negatively affect fixed-income seniors.

Importantly, we need to get more resources into the city without gentrification and pricing out residents, which is why my campaign has emphasized affordable housing.

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

It's rare to have scientists running for office, so I bring a unique perspective that can be crucial to solving many of Medford's problems. It also makes me more inclined to listen to both data and expert feedback in my decision-making and to seek out information in areas that I know very little about.

If you are challenging an incumbent, in what way has the current officeholder failed the community?

I am not challenging an incumbent.

What other issues do you intend to address during your campaign?

My platform comprehensively addresses affordable housing, getting Medford invested in green infrastructure, transportation, charter review, and so on — I've been putting a lot of work into studying the nuts and bolts, and anyone who wants more details of those policy points can go online to my platform (https://mattleming.com/issues) or blog (https://mattleming.com/blog).

But one soft issue I've been trying to address is bridge building. Medford's a fast-growing city, and there's a mix of long-time residents and people who just moved here; fixed-income seniors, families with young children, and young people; conservatives and progressives and everyone in between. They have different needs, wants, and ideologies, and I talk to anyone I can to find a balanced approach. City Council has historically had fairly homogenous representation — though it is going in a good direction — and we need change, both to get more resources into the city and to get more groups of people involved in local politics. The challenge is doing this without leaving any one group feeling left out.

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

I've been extensively involved in Medford's affordable housing and charter review efforts, serving on both the Community Preservation Committee and the Charter Study Committee. It gives me subject matter expertise in those areas. Beyond that, I've pretty much always been involved in committee work and leadership roles ever since I was in high school. In my career, I have an extensive record of working with all sorts of different people, ranging from labor unions to foreign academics to the military, so I'm adaptable and good at taking in different points of view.

What is the best advice anyone ever gave you?

This is paraphrased, but — "When leading, aim to serve rather than dominate."

I also took some active listening workshops in grad school that were full of great advice — it's been great when going door to door and really understanding voters' concerns.

Is there anything else you would like voters to know about yourself and your positions?

I run a detailed blog on my website, if anyone wants to check it out (https://mattleming.com/blog), which goes into my positions and involvement in various parts of the city.

Something I try to emphasize to voters is that Medford needs a long-term plan, and it needs both time and teamwork to execute that plan. I try to be honest when conversing with voters that many of the issues this city faces can't be solved in one election cycle because we're seeing the results, now, of decades of lack of investment, and it will take time to get ourselves in a better state. Most voters want to see the roads in front of their houses repaved ($80-$100 million for all of Medford), and many families want to see a new high school (around $300 million), but against an operating budget of a bit over $200 million, that will take time. What we can do is plant the seeds now so that we will benefit in the future. Many other cities have gotten resources because they have had, for a long time, an active city council that doesn't shy away from change, and that is what Medford needs now.