Hi, I'm Mark Neeter Gang, the Ward 5 Alderman, and I'm running for re-election. I want to thank the voters of Ward 5 for electing me now six times to represent them. I serve four terms on the school committee, and now I'm finishing my second term as a Ward 5 Alderman. It's been a privilege and honor and a pleasure to represent Ward 5 residents for 11 and a half years now. Since I'm running on opposed in November, I look forward to more. I deeply appreciate the help and the support that I've received. I've worked closely with many of you, and we've helped make Somerville a great place to live. Ironically, because of our success, we now face some new challenges. We've got activism by residents and strong leadership from our city government. We won't keep Somerville a mixed income diverse and creative community for much longer. The board of Alderman will continue to make big decisions in the next few years that will shape the future of Somerville for generations to come. Thank you for the opportunity to have a seat at the table. These are exciting, but also scary times for us in Somerville. The pace of change is rapid, and we have many challenges before us. I want to spend my time with you today talking about the future of Somerville and Ward 5, and what I plan to work on in the next couple of years. The most important issue in Somerville is affordable housing. We need to create affordable housing, not just for low-income families, but for working class people, for our city employees, and even middle-class professionals. With the price of housing and rents going through the roof, we're facing a future where unless your city government takes dramatic and unprecedented action, in 10 or 20 years, most of the people who live in Somerville will be rich people. Somerville is and has been a mixed income community, where people do all kinds of different work from all different kinds of background and live together in the same neighborhoods. On my block, we have laborers, carpenters, teachers, lawyers, clerks, architects, city workers, professors, you name it. The socioeconomic diversity is what makes Somerville special and really unusual in America today, and it's part of what I really love about our community. We will lose all this unless we can take a lot of housing out of the private for-private housing market and make it permanently affordable for people who are not wealthy. There is no other way. Right now, about 10% of our housing is permanently affordable. If we don't expand that dramatically, in 20 years, the vast majority of our residents will be wealthy. So what can we do? First, we need to expand the many things the city is already doing to provide affordable housing. Second, we will need to raise a lot of money, a lot of revenue. The only way to do that is by passing a real estate transfer fee. I currently serve on a committee convened by Mayor Cerditoni that is exploring recommendations to him about how the city might do this. We will need support from the state legislature because it's considered to be a tax. Put simply, a real estate transfer fee would be a one or a two percent fee on most real estate transactions. There would be various exemptions and there are a lot of key details to still to be worked out in terms of how this would actually work. This fee would raise millions of dollars every year, which could then be bonded on and would develop thousands of units of permanently affordable housing for middle income and low income families, including our city workers. Third, in terms of affordable housing, we need to get more from developers who will make you a fortune building luxury apartments in Somerville. I will be proposing next year that we raise the required affordable housing in new development from the current maximum of 20% to 25%. Developers in the business community will scream in opposition to this, but they did the same when we raised the affordable housing requirement from 12.5% to 20% just a year ago, and that does not seem to have slowed down housing development in Somerville. The second most important issue in Somerville is related, its real estate development, especially in our already crowded neighborhoods, but also in the transformational areas like Assembly Square and Union Square. In our neighborhoods, you know it, we have too much development, development that crowds our already dense neighborhoods, and squeezes onto every available lot, or so it seems. The problem is our zoning allows this. It's terrible, but that's the law, so we have to change the zoning. It's long overdue. That's why we need the citywide zoning overhaul that's been talked about so much in the last few years. The mayor proposed a citywide zoning overhaul two years ago, but it had many serious problems in it. The Board of Alderman could not pass it. Since then, the administration has made a lot of changes in improvements, and they'll be introducing a revised and I think much better version in the fall. I look forward to working on this with you, with my colleagues on the Board of Alderman, with the administration, and I'm really hoping we can get something done to protect our neighborhoods. Development also picks up steam in the transformational areas like Assembly Square and Union Square. In these areas, development must provide economic and community benefits that benefit the residents and our city. Development is basically a trade-off. We get economic and community benefits, economic and community benefits. The developers get to build buildings and make a lot of money. If summerval is not getting a good deal, if we're not getting what we need in terms of jobs, tax revenue, affordable housing, green and open space, and other things from development, why should we permit it? The answer is we shouldn't. The city must extract the most that we possibly can from developers and force them to do development that not only looks good, but provides benefits that are good for the community. Unfortunately, while I think overall Mayor Kurt Atoni has done a good job as mayor, in this area, I think he's been too favorable and too lenient with developers. We need to drive a harder bargain, especially with big developers. We can because summerval rocks, everybody wants to do business here. The developers are lining up. This is a great place to build stuff and people want to do it so we can get more out of them. Those are some of the big city issues that I think are priorities, but let me tell you what life is like as the Ward 5 Alderman. I spend most of my time on neighborhood issues such as traffic calming, parking, parking and more parking, potholes, street paving, trees, rats, and of course the development projects in Ward 5. Traffic calming, making our streets safer, especially for pedestrians, seniors, bicyclists and children, is a concern of many in Ward 5, a major concern. We've made some progress in recent years with the reduction in the speed limit, but this is not nearly enough. Just a hundred years ago, President Herbert Hoover said, a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, while I say a speed bump on every neighborhood street that wants one. We have only two speed bumps in our entire city. We need hundreds. I will continue to advocate for speed bumps to slow traffic and protect residents in the future. There are many other important issues that I will be working on, such as road and control, making more trees planted, a lot more green in open space, more athletic fields, environmental issues and climate change, and deep paving, getting rid of asphalt and concrete driveways in playgrounds as well. These are places that cause flooding in our city and make summerville hotter, harder, and uglier. Other priorities going forward are to generate more commercial development because that provides tax revenue and jobs and to increase the city's job training programs to ensure that people can get good jobs, good paying jobs that have benefits that can support a family. I also want Union Labor to be used on all major developments in summerville. This is the norm in Boston and Cambridge, and it should be here as well. Helping people get better work, that pays more, and has good benefits will enable them to pay more for their housing and therefore to stay in summerville. That's a really important goal for us to keep people who have made this community great here in this community. It's so sad to see people being forced to move sometimes very far away where they are so far away from all the things that are big parts of their life, including friends and family and activities. Many in closing, I want to thank the many people who correspond with me and call me and who share with me their concerns and their ideas. It keeps me busy, but I'll tell you, it helps me do my job a lot better. I really value the ideas and the perspective that I get from all of you of my constituents as well as people who live in other parts of the city. Thank you.