In 1999, my wife, journalist and author Helen Epstein, and our two sons moved to Lexington for the schools, where they received a superb education: one was active on the LHS science and debate teams and is now an engineer; the other was active in LHS’s music program and is now an academic.
In retirement, I started Plunkett Lake Press, which reissues books of non-fiction that I find of particular interest as eBooks.
I joined the Lexington Tree Committee shortly after we moved to Lexington when I noticed that tear-downs in our Woodhaven neighborhood were accompanied by the indiscriminate cutting of old but healthy trees. I co-wrote what was then the first Tree by-law in Massachusetts. I joined Town Meeting in 2000 to get the Tree by-law passed and served as a Precinct 3 Town Meeting member for the following 15 years, focusing on finding ways to operate more efficiently to save taxpayer money.
I also served on the Town’s Ad-Hoc Electric Utility Committee for many years, periodically inventorying double poles across our 160 miles of streets. Double poles are illegal after 90 days, yet the pole co-owners, Verizon and Eversource, keep them in place for years. I also promoted the establishment of a Lexington Municipal Electric Utility, such as Concord has, to replace under-performing and expensive Eversource. This effort has so far been squashed by Eversource’s lobbying on Beacon Hill but I have remained available to assist other activists in the field.
Puzzled by why our School Building Committee (SBC) proposes to build a new High School sized for fewer students than we now have at LHS, given that High School enrollments will evidently increase as a result of the dense new housing to be built on 228 acres zoned for MBTA developments, I researched and analyzed the financial impacts on our future Town budgets of these developments. I found that (1) nobody in Town government had done any such analysis before the Town rezoned 228 acres, and (2) unless the Town acts very soon, MBTA developments will have dramatic impacts, requiring huge tax increases and deep service cuts that will compromise the quality of our schools.
