L to R: Kurt Redgate, Katjana Ballantyne, Anthony Slocum, and Christian Martinez.

The City Councillor and current mayoral candidate Katjana Ballantyne sat down for a conversation with Next Wave/Full Circle students Anthony Slocum, Christian Martinez, and Kurt Redgate.

Anthony Slocum: How did you end up in Somerville?

KB: Great question. It was affordable, I had been living in Chelsea for five years and my housing situation changed. I was single, roommates and all that, and I moved to Winthrop for a year and a half, two years when the house had a fire and I got displaced. I lost everything and my friends let me sleep on their couch for three months here, two weeks there until I was able to find a place.

AS: Why do you want to be mayor?

KB: I think Somerville is at a pivotal time and I believe that our next mayor needs to have three key qualities. They need to embody the cultures and values of Somerville, like really believe in them. They should have an inclusive leadership style and they should have the skills and experience to be chief executive. I believe I best bring those three key qualities to the mayor’s office.

I think we’ve worked on a lot of good progressive things in the last decade and I’d be honored to be able to do it. One other thing, I moved here in 1993, and why did I decide to stay in Somerville? I was born and orphaned in Greece and adopted there by my Scottish father, hence the name Ballantyne is Scottish and my Czech-German mother is eastern European.

We are a family of immigrants and we emigrated to the United States when I was four. I learned then that sometimes people are afraid of differences. It could be your accent, your food, or it could simply be your culture. So, it was always important to me to make sure that people are included and feel a part of it. I love the fact that you talk about a circle, and I always step back to make sure people are in the circle.

I’m Greek and I like to Greek dance, and if you notice about the Greeks, the Greeks like to line dance for the most part, but a curved line, so an open circle really, so they never close the circle. The idea is it’s a metaphor that people should always feel that they can come into the circle. So, if you are Greek dancing or go down to the Greek festivals, they want anybody to show up. You don’t have to be a couple, you know, you can be three, or five, or you can be one person. You know, you just join in on the dance.

So, when I moved to Somerville in ‘93, I saw a place that was changing. People were talking about things and using words like progressive. They were thinking in a way that I just had never experienced it in a community that I lived in. I felt comfortable here and I started to get involved, I volunteered. I love it here, it has been good to me, good to my family and those three key qualities are, I think, necessary. A mayor is an executive, not a legislator but an executive.

And so, the skills that I have, I was the first and only one in my family to go to college. I worked two jobs and took out loans to get a bachelor’s degree and an MBA so I have a master’s degree in business. I have worked for over thirty years. I’ve worked for a dozen years in business and international supply chain management. I worked in some startups, but then I moved into the non-profit world. I worked for an affordable housing developer and also on the economic side, the work force side.

So, it was trying to connect local people to local jobs, making sure they had the skills and that they had career ladder opportunities. I use the word economic mobility so that If you’re starting out and you’re making twenty thousand or fifty thousand, in my mind you should be making a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand. There should be a step and a career ladder path for you. So, I also worked with community-based organizations in Boston to create green economy jobs, that was back in 2010.

So, we know that climate change is real, how do we make sure that the work force and the people working have the skills to work in solar, work in wind as we try to move away from fossil fuel. For five years I was executive director of a violence prevention non-profit for at risk girls. I’ve been on the city council seven and a half years and twice elected city council president. So, my vision of Somerville is an inclusive, equitable city where we can all thrive together.

AS: What is one change that you will make?

KB: Well, I want to continue to work on the things I’ve been working on for my adult life and they’re interrelated. It’s on affordability, and affordability is really layered, it’s complex.

So, I want to make sure that there is housing here and that we as a city can use every tool possible. So, some laws we can make, other laws we can’t because there are state laws and maybe in some areas, federal laws. But we can use every tool possible, whether it is incentivizing developers to make more affordable housing, or to make sure that there is more family housing, three bedrooms or more so we make sure there are families who stay here.

Whether it is on the jobs end, there is so much construction going on around us and it took 31 years between building office buildings. So, right now the businesses that exist here tend to be more food service and that is wonderful. If you don’t want to do food service, what else can you do?

Right, so the point would be to give people who live here now an opportunity for jobs. So, what am I going to do? The main thing is to work on the affordability. But how do you get jobs? We have to make sure that we’re attracting the right kind of jobs. So, it gives career opportunity to the people who live here now. Then they also get first preference to those jobs.

Then also, when you are managing the city, you have to make sure that the expenses that you have, you have money coming in that pays for it. That primarily comes in from office-commercial. So, we don’t make money on residential houses, it isn’t a net positive but net negative. That means it costs the city more to deliver services then the revenue and taxes we get for it. So where do you get, then, the money to fill that gap? You get it from commercial buildings, office buildings, they are the ones that help us to be able to fund building a new high school.

Christian Martinez: What is the future of policing in Somerville?

KB: Wow, well what do you want the future of policing to look like? So, I have been known for my inclusive leadership style, so what does that mean? It means that I try to make sure that all voices are heard at the table. That you get best practices, you get data, so you get information so it’s not just people’s opinions because sometimes people’s opinions might not be based on fact. It’ll be based on their personal experience.

So, we want to figure out what’s the best practices. In the city of Somerville, as a City Councilor, we asked, with the community and with public safety in mind, we said we would hire a Racial Social Justice Director. Her name is Denise Molina Capers, she’s been working with us for about six months now. She would host community meetings that would also include the community voices. She talks with public safety people and she talks with the community. She uses data and research, see what other communities around the country are doing to come up with what we want to see here in Somerville.

So, I think we have to finish that process, it has to be an inclusive process. I think there are creative ways to handle things which Somerville has been doing a little bit. We have a department within the Somerville Police called COHR, Community Outreach Health Recovery. So, if someone is having a mental health issue, we have five social workers on staff that come and help calm down the situation. And then, they’d redirect that person to all these non-profits and social workers and hospitals that are supports for people with mental health, or maybe drug addiction issues. So that the first step should not be that you’re arrested, it should be to get the right help for the person.

Right now, the safety net falls to the police because that’s the number to call. But the discussion is, should that fall to the police? Should there be another number, 511? Should there be a system set up? The interesting thing about public safety is you don’t know what else is going on with an individual, and you don’t know when the balance is of will something escalate into something that is unsafe? So that’s the challenge and that is the problem to deconstruct and figure out what would a structure look like. If a social worker is going to respond to something like that and it turns quickly, are we putting them in harm’s way?

CM: What plans do you have for programming for younger teens?

KB: I am really happy you asked this question. I think there should be more programming for middle schoolers. I think there should be programming in a way that you have experiences and not necessarily based on academics. It should be based on trying something new outside of your culture, your neighborhood.

It might be that one little idea that puts you on a pathway to something new. I want to go back to the idea of inclusive leadership because I think there should be more investment at the middle school ages but I would be asking for your feedback, ideas driven by youth. I think it is important and we need to deliver more on progressive values and make sure your voices are heard.

When I was City Council President I actually invited in students. I invited them to sit at the podium and I told them ‘I want them to know that this is your place too.’ They were able to see how the legislative process works. I really feel that city hall is everybody’s space, I call it the people’s chamber. People should feel comfortable walking around there and understanding what all the different offices do.

CM: What new projects will you start on?

KB: We have an assessment of what our city office needs are, and we have fire houses in different areas, all those buildings need to be assessed. We need to determine what has to be done to make sure they are in a healthy condition. So, we need to look at the buildings we own and how we can make sure we have a consistent maintenance plan, as maintenance isn’t always put into the budget.

Kurt Redgate: What will be your biggest challenge as mayor?

KB: Right now, we are at a pivotal time, a lot of things are happening at the same time. We have new construction, we need to attract more businesses to come in because as I said before, the residential taxes don’t pay for the things we deliver on. So, we need to have commercial buildings to help with that.

I don’t know if this is really a challenge or if we need to prioritize everything and decide which one needs to get done first. We are going to get federal money, infrastructure money, that will come to us in installments and we have five years to use it. I think one of the biggest challenges might be when dealing with our physical assets, like there is a lot of flooding that goes on in Gilman Square. That causes a lot of damage to the houses that are there.

So, it is getting all of those projects done at the same time. So, the businesses that are here, they wanted to be here. I asked the executives at Puma at the groundbreaking, why Somerville? And they said they surveyed their employees, and they could have gone to the Seaport district in Boston but their employees wanted to be here.

So, I say that if your employees want to be here then we have to make sure that we bring them in and meet the people so we help out and take care of one another, provide opportunities, build relationships.

KR: How long do you want to be mayor?

KB: Hmmm, not 18 years, we’ll see. I am not afraid of change, change always provides some opportunity and it also gives other people an opportunity to step up. One thing that I’ve learned, having worked with youth while I was an executive director of Girls Leap in Boston is that there are just some really thoughtful and dedicated people.

I have faith in humanity, I have faith in youth. Sometimes I am around young people and I think, “Wow, they are so impressive!” So, it will be someone else’s turn. You can’t get anything done in two years, or even four years, you need a few more sessions after that.

*We reached out to Mr. Will Mbah for an interview but we couldn’t find a time to meet that worked for both of us.