Often, referendums have been a bit more vague and less far-reaching. So we may have broken some new ground with this language. This was a city-wide referendum for the City of Somerville. Somerville has always had a large immigrant population. Most recently, there are a lot of new residents here from Central America and Haiti.
Older residents tend to be Irish, Italian, and Portuguese.
It s always been a working-class suburb of Boston, it s one of the old mill towns. It s starting to get a little more gentrified. But our outreach for this was very broad and grassroots. We ended up getting the referendum on the ballot by going to the Board of Aldermen with our 2,500 signatures. They were impressed enough with the support we had gathered to vote to put it on the ballot.