Cambridge Democrats heard from state Rep. Marjorie Decker and challenger Evan MacKay on Thursday, just five days ahead of Tuesday’s primary election, as they presented similar progressive platforms but different framings around good governance and transparency.
In a forum put on by Cambridge Democrats, the two candidates for a two-year term representing the 25th Middlesex District were given equal time to speak and answer questions, but they weren’t together before the packed house at the Citywide Senior Center. One left after speaking, the other entered. They did not meet or debate.
Speaking about transportation, both mentioned the need to allocate new revenue sources for the MBTA and stressed the need to unburden it from the debt of the “Big Dig” tunnel megaproject of the 2000s. On housing, Decker and MacKay talked about a transfer tax on big property sales as a useful tool in increasing the number of built units.
Additionally, Decker placed a strong emphasis on the roles she played in getting bills passed in and out of session, improving maternal health care and raising the earned-income tax credit in the latest state budget.
MacKay spoke of successes as a union organizer and in fighting corruption at Harvard, where they are a teaching fellow – and added a note that Decker did not sign on in public letters in support of state house employees union.
With the candidates’ policy positions and goals around more housing and a better MBTA so close, Decker emphasized her perspective from time alongside legislators from across the state: homes need to be built regionally to meet demand, not just in Cambridge; improving transportation will mean convincing representatives in areas that are not reliant on the T to support funding for the system nonetheless.
Decker didn’t refer to MacKay at all. MacKay took aim at Decker multiple times on the issues of transparency and widely documented dysfunction within the Massachusetts House.
“The reason I’m running is this dysfunction,” said MacKay, saying that Decker “time and time again has refused” to vote in favor of amendments to let the public see electronic votes from the Beacon Hill committees where bills go to be refined – or to die. In 2023, the House passed just 0.2 percent of the bills introduced to the floor, which a report has called the lowest rate in the country. “Every person in our community should be able to see how they’re being represented,” MacKay said.
On the same point, Decker acknowledged that committee votes are “public but not accessible,” and that she is working to improve transparency and “certainly has nothing to hide,” while saying that as a 14-year incumbent she shared the public’s frustration around State House dysfunction and has “worked to change it.”
Each candidate took the same four prepared questions, with MacKay’s shorter responses allowing time for several from the floor.
The issue of Decker’s outside work seemed to arise in MacKay’s answers. In addition to her taxpayer-funded salary of $114,447 last year, the incumbent been working with a class-action law firm in Boston for the past eight years for a minimum $100,001 annually. She has met a legal disclosure requirement for the pay, but has not discussed what the work is. While addressing a question about affordable housing, MacKay mentioned not wanting “any appearance of conflict of interest”; addressing another question about transportation, MacKay said that to deal with difficult problems, “we need a state rep who can be present.” They never directly addressed the issue of Decker’s outside work.
For an audience question about what they would do differently on Beacon Hill, MacKay argued that they would vote for the transparency Decker has not, because the“status quo relies on backroom deals that shut out our communities [and] every person in our community should be able to see how they’re being represented.”
The candidates had starkly different stories for running: Decker talked of being the first in her family to get out of poverty and wanting to ensure that could be achieved for others who are disenfranchised in Cambridge; MacKay was centered mostly on rooting out corruption and more accurately representing the views of Cambrigians.
Conversations with a few attendees after the event found no one swayed – several Decker supporters left after her speaking time was done – but some who were discontent with the format and wanted a true debate. Some found it odd that Decker had to answer only one question from the audience, while MacKay took several, because she spent so much time answering the four prewritten questions.
A stronger
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What an odd format… though I imagine Rep. Marjorie Decker wouldn’t have approved of a debate considering their lack of response these past few months [1].
[1]: https://www.cambridgeday.com/2024/08/28/decker-and-challenger-mackay-get-their-forum-days-before-voting-transparency-could-be-issue/
Transparency in our legislature is THE issue. The legislature failed to pass a climate bill (during the hottest year), failed to pass a transportation bill (while MBTA is crippled), failed to pass a meaningful housing bill (we don’t build enough and the prices are sky-high). So knowing why these bills died IS extremely important. Good to see a challenger who understands it.
Why are prices sky high, and how can the legislature change that? Construction costs, including materials, remain high. Interest rates have been significantly higher recently. They’re coming down a bit, but not nearly as much as they’ve gone up. Land costs are really sky high, and continuing to upzone will only push them higher. Demand remains so high as to be effectively infinite, and Cambridge continues to be in the top ten densest cities in the United States with a population over 100,000, so it is hard to find any effective incentive for landlords, more and more of whom are faceless corporations focused on ROI rather than on providing housing for not-fabulously-wealthy people who need it, to moderate their prices. So the real question, not rhetorical in the slightest, is what our state legislature can do to affect these dynamics enough to provide the housing we need.
Trickle-down housing has worked no better than trickle-down economics worked. Both concentrate their benefits at the top of the wealth scale and leave everybody else behind. If you ask me, I think our first step is to go back to a system that considers real estate a place to house people and businesses rather than just a slightly less liquid financial asset than stocks, bonds and cash. That would be an immense upheaval, and I’m not sure a single state can pull it off, much less a single municipality. Short of that, social housing and community land trusts, and maybe even rent stabilization, can make a dent, but they may need some serious subsidies to deal with all the barriers detailed in the first paragraph. The one thing that hasn’t worked and won’t work is platitudes that are heavy on ideology and light on real analysis.