Episode 50: Will Brownsberger (Massachusetts State Senator)

Meet Will Brownsberger! He's a Massachusetts State Senator for the Suffolk and Middlesex District which includes Watertown. In this conversation we talk about his career in criminal justice (and how his views evolved over the years), his political journey from municipal leadership to the state level, his takes on transparency in government, transportation, the reality of the battle with climate change, housing, and more. 

(Click here to listen on streaming apps) (Full transcript below)

Find out more about Will at willbrownsberger.com

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Transcript

Matt: 0:07

Hi there, welcome to the Little Local Conversations podcast. I'm your host, Matt Hanna. Every episode, I sit down for a conversation with someone in Watertown to discover the people, places, stories, and ideas of Watertown. This time I sat down with Massachusetts State Senator Will Brownsberger. Actually, we were technically in Belmont, but he is familiar with Watertown and as a senator he represents Watertown, so I thought it was okay that I went over the border to record this one. So I'll let him introduce himself and then we'll get into our conversation.

Will: 0:35

So I'm Will Brownsberger. I'm the state senator for the so-called Suffolk and Middlesex District, which is about 65% of it is in Boston. That represents Fenway, Alston and Brighton, and then I represent all of Watertown and all of Belmont and a chunk of West Cambridge.

Matt: 0:50

Cool. So we'll get into how you got into that, but I always like to go back in time first and how you kind of got involved in this work to start with. I also know another angle we can take too is I also know that you were raised in Watertown but live in Belmont now. Do you want to talk about a little bit growing up in Watertown?

Will: 1:07

You know, my father moved around. My family moved around a bit because my father was in the Army when I was born originally. But we moved to Watertown when I was two years old, around 1959. We lived in a house on Russell Ave. It was a little carriage house kind of behind one of the other houses, what might be referred to as an accessory dwelling unit now.

Matt: 1:26

It's got an upgraded name now.

Will: 1:27

Yeah, but it wasn’t an accessory dwelling unit then. And my family, my mother's family lived in Watertown for generations, so Watertown is very much home. My mother's sisters lived in Watertown. We moved to Seattle for a few years when I was a kid, but then we came back to the Boston area when I was 10. I know my family looked at houses all over the place but ended up moving back to the exact same street in Watertown. That's where I finished growing up. I did last year of elementary school, junior high school and lived there through high school. I went to the Commonwealth School in Boston for my four years of high school. So yeah.

Matt: 1:59

Yeah, cool. So where did you go for college and what was your college experience then?

Will: 2:04

I went to college, at Harvard, stayed close to home. My parents didn't want to see me travel too far, kind of wanted me nearby, yeah. So I majored in math and bit of a nerd, bit of a shy guy in college.

Matt: 2:16

What kind of math got you excited? 

Will: 2:20

Pure math, you know, the abstract stuff. And came out of college not quite sure what direction I was headed in, but with an orientation to service, and things kind of took off, evolved over time from there.

Matt: 2:30

So what was your first experience with being involved with service?

Will: 2:34

Well, I ended up going to the Mass Taxpayers Foundation, which is a small, it was business funded sort of moderate group oriented to fiscal responsibility and transparency around taxes and so forth, and I stayed there a year and a half. That was my first exposure to working in the statehouse and I kind of discovered that I liked the legislation then. I liked the statehouse, I liked what was going on there. 

Matt: 2:55

What did you like about it? What appealed to you?

Will: 2:57

Well, I just, you know I liked the whole atmosphere. It was a beautiful building, you know. There's just a whole lot of things happening in it and you know I was impressed by it as a young person and I thought about going into politics as I came out of law school but I realized I really wasn't ready personally to do that. I ended up spending eight years on Wall Street when I came out of law school. I did systems development mostly, and then made a decision to come back to the Boston area in 1992 and return to one of my other sort of one of the subjects that was most interesting to me in law school, which was criminal law, and I went to the attorney general's office. Scott Harshbarger was good enough to hire me then after I'd been away for some years. I did do some internships there in law school and had a relationship with him and was grateful that he sort of offered me a job before I went to Wall Street and I said, nah, I'm going down Wall Street make a little bit of money, pay some bills. And so I spent five years in the attorney general's office and made a career in criminal justice, which is basically a three chapter, sort of five plus years in the attorney general's office doing a variety of kinds of enforcement but including narcotics enforcement. Then several years just doing teaching and consulting especially around drug policy. And then about five or six years as a defense attorney before I entered the legislature.

Will: 4:05

There was a lot of evolution for me in terms of my understanding of the issues. When I was doing policy work I just sort of hit a point where I got tired of talking about people with addictions and I realized I wanted to work with people with addictions. That's when I started doing defense work. I went to work in drug courts in Brighton and Dorchester and it only took about 60 days for me to kind of realize that a lot of what I'd been thinking as a researcher and policy advocate was kind of off base. There was a whole school of thought about sort of forcing people into treatment and basically punishing people as a way of making them get out of their drug addictions, which I really saw in practice really doesn't work the way you want it to work. It's doing brain surgery with a sledgehammer to lock people up as a way of curing their addiction. Not to say you don't want to lock people up to just hold them for a while. But my ideas evolved a lot and that sort of set me on an arc when I got to the legislature.

Matt: 4:55

Yeah, and were there any particular stories that really impacted you in that evolution there that, like, was a moment that had that flip of the switch of your way you were thinking about things. Is there a particular story involving someone or a particular case, or anything like that?

Will: 5:11

Well, you know it was in the 90s, there was this movement that, like I say, that was about, people knew that there were too many people locked up and they wanted to start getting them out into the community. But there was a mentality that said you had to keep people on a very short leash and that that would be good for them and that you know you would punish them if you know, with some sort of moderate punishment a few days in jail if they made a mistake, and you reward them with praise if they did the right thing and stayed off of drugs for a few weeks. And so I sort of bought into that orientation and traveled around the country talking about drug courts and advocating that whole approach.

Will: 5:45

Then when I started working in drug courts, I just realized the level of bad faith that defendants have in that situation and the extent to which defendants are really crushed by the whole process. People would walk to the front of the courtroom and the judge would say you know, good job, Will you've stayed clean for another week. I'm going to put a star on your record. And they say oh, thank you, your honor. And then I'm sitting in the back of the courtroom. Now they turn around, give their eyes a big roll, you know, knowing that they're just sort of saying what they need to say. And then, when they do make a mistake, maybe get off the wagon, have a few drinks. The consequences are crushing, you know. Ok, you made a mistake, I'm going to have to lock you up for a few days. Well, you lock somebody up for a few days, they lose their job, they lose their job, they lose their apartment, they lose their apartment, they break up with their girlfriend and they're back on the street and let's just go back to using. So the whole mentality of punishment as a way of moving people in the right direction, I started to understand how badly it works. So that's not entirely inconsistent with the orientation I brought into the conversation about drug policy.

Will: 6:46

I always thought drug policy was a little bit too law enforcement oriented, that there had to be more of a health component to it. I now believe there's a law enforcement component which is essential to reduce drug dealing, and you need law enforcement to address a place like Mass and Cass. But with people with addictions, if they commit crimes, you have to respond to their crimes with whatever level of punishment is appropriate, but the punishment itself is not a treatment for addiction. That has to be a separate thing, that has to be healthcare driven. And so my whole, a lot of my effort as a legislator has been around criminal justice reform. Let's lift people up instead of locking them up, and let's try to cut the chains that hold them down if they're trying to get back up on their feet.

Will: 7:23

But I'm not a prison abolitionist. I'm not a police abolitionist. I respect the work that the police do. It's absolutely necessary and I think they've, you know, as a result of some horrible things that a few police officers did, police officers all across the country are in kind of a morale crisis and recruiting is hard. And you know so I think we actually need to support the police better than we've been doing, and the same really is true in the corrections field. Again, you know, a few bad actors give the whole profession a bad name. There's a role for police, there's a role for corrections, but it's limited and we need to focus a lot on health care.

Matt: 7:56

And so back then, when you were having those experiences and realizing your way of thinking and what the majority of people were thinking at the time wasn't working, did you start to explore alternatives then, or what were some of the things that were bubbling up?

Will: 8:07

Well, look, there's a whole conversation about how to get people into treatment with, you know, through screening, brief intervention and those kinds of initiatives. But they really have to be separate from the criminal justice system. There was this idea, I mean goes back to some insights that came out in the late 80s. The policy conversation about drugs in the 80s was supported by National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Hello, I'm a surveyor. How many times have you used cocaine in the past week? Never, not at all. And so the number of cocaine users detected by that survey, or heroin users, was, you know, like half a million nationwide. But then they used a new instrument, and when you use a new instrument, like a new telescope, you discover new things. And the new instrument was cheap drug testing. And when they started doing cheap mass drug testing, they started testing everybody arrested in Philadelphia. They realized that wait a minute 84% of these people are tested positive for cocaine, which means that most of them are frequent cocaine users. And you do the math and you end up with a number which is completely uncertain, but well into the millions as to the number of frequent cocaine users, and it changes how you look at the problem. And it also says well, most of the people that are involved in heavy cocaine use are involved in the criminal justice system. So there was a theory, there was a way of talking which said that's where all the cocaine users are. Cocaine was the larger problem at that time. Now we're back to opiates, although they're both still problems.

Will: 9:24

There was a thought process that the way we get at folks is in the criminal justice system. And what can we do in the criminal justice system? Well, we can punish people. But the fact is it just doesn't work. And even trying to do screening and brief intervention in the criminal justice system, which is a voluntary kind of thing, it doesn't work either way. We tried that in Dorchester. We set up a system where we do screening for people with substance abuse and we'd invite them to participate in screening. So when we did screening and it was totally voluntary the judge would say you want to go down and talk to these guys over here? You probably ought to try that. We did the first 150 of this screening, peer intervention kind of conversation. One person out of 150 admitted drug use.

Will: 10:04

So you realize that anything done in the courthouse environment is coercive and there's a lot of recognition that you know the use of the criminal justice system to force people into treatment has kind of destroyed the treatment system, because there's so many people who were there because they have to be there, who know that what they say may go back to some judge or probation officer as to you know how well they're doing and so they work the program and they say what they say may go back to some judge or probation officer as to how well they're doing, and so they work the program and they say what they're supposed to say. And I was really gratified to be talking to I guess I shouldn't quote her, but a very senior person in our administration of treatment in Massachusetts and she said oh yeah, there is so much lying now. It's a tragedy what's happened to the treatment system and it's a fact. So what we need to do is restore the treatment system as a place that people go for help, as opposed to a place that people go to do what they're told.

Matt: 10:49

Right. Interesting, so let's continue your journey though. So you were in that system working with the criminal justice. For how long were you doing that for roughly?

Will: 10:57

About 16 years.

Matt: 10:58

Yeah, so that's a good chunk of time

Will: 11:00

17 years. 

Matt: 11:02

And then what did you move on to after that phase?

Will: 11:04

You know was a legislator. So when I came back to Massachusetts in 92, we did locate in Belmont. Wou know wanted a good school system for the kids and wanted to be able to send my kids to public schools. And our kids went K through 12 in the Belmont schools and had a good experience. I got drawn into local politics what I think of as sort of the right way is because you have a stake, because you care about issues, and I was concerned about quality of schools for my kids. I was concerned about traffic safety for my kids and those are the issues that drew me into politics initially. Then you discover other issues. You discover land conservation issues. That was a big fight in Belmont at that time was their big development above McLean Hospital and people wanting to preserve the land there. You discover the needs of senior citizens, which were not on my radar screen as an issue until I ran for the select board in Belmont. That became one of my causes. We built a senior center in Belmont, which Watertown's had one for a long time. Belmont didn't have one. And so I grew up in local politics. I spent nine years on the select board in Belmont and had a lot of good learning experiences, a lot of good collaborative experiences, looked back with a lot of satisfaction on some of the problems we solved and some of the things we got built. 

Will: 12:06

You know I feel best about. There was a very strong sort of pair of factions in Belmont, sort of the old guard and the new guard, and you know I was the new guard candidate. But when we succeeded in taking over the board and got two seats out of the three on the board, I didn't change direction hard. In other words, I included, I continued to include all the same people, some new people, but I treated everybody with respect, all the sort of old guard people. I continued to evolve and appoint to boards and so forth and really aspired not to perpetuate that division. Okay, now we won. No, now we can work together. I'm not going to exclude your faction the way you excluded mine. I like to feel that the town is a lot less polarized than it was then and you know that reflects the whole evolution of the polity. But it's certainly a direction I tried to row in was more collaboration.

Matt: 12:51

Yeah, and what made you have that mindset versus just digging your heels in?

Will: 12:55

It's the way I was raised. Raised with an orientation to service, raised with an orientation to collaboration.

Matt: 13:02

Yeah, so how long were you on the board then for? 

Will: 13:04

Nine years on the select board

Matt: 13:07

And how did you feel about the Belmont-Watertown rivalry at that point?

Will: 13:10

Oh well, I don't feel that. I love Belmont, I love Watertown. Both are home to me. I really feel that way, and you know what I mean, I've represented Alston and Brighton and Fenway for 13 years now in the Senate and I'm very attached to those areas as well. I feel very fortunate to have a district that I sort of developed attachments to all across. And this may sound trite, but they're really great people in every community. I've sort of bonded with a lot of people that you know. That's the beautiful part of being in politics is you get to know a lot of great people.

Matt: 13:39

Yeah. So how did you continue to rise up from you know, just being Belmont and then wanting to go higher up from there?

Will: 13:45

Well, you know, the municipalities, and I argue that this is appropriate, you know exist within a framework of state law, and so some of the problems that municipalities have can only be solved with help from the state level. After nine years in local government, I was ready to sort of tackle some of the issues from a state level, and when the state rep seat opened up you know Belmont, Arlington, Cambridge, ran for that and was successful there. And so then I spent five years in the House, you know, fought my battles there. You know people are talking about legislative transparency. I feel like a lot of the transparency issues were settled in material part by my efforts some years ago. I mean, you know, 14 years ago, 15 years ago, we put in place a procurement structure for the legislature. We put in place complete transparency for all the spending in the legislature. When I was first there you had to make a public records request to find out how the details of spending were going down. But now anybody can see that online. There's a lot of transparency and I actually feel very good about the transparency of the legislature, even though it's sort of a thing right now to say we're not transparent enough. We're actually extremely transparent.

Will: 14:48

But those battles then cost me some relationships. I was on the kind of on the outs in the House and you know I'm going to say it's the battles I fought and to some extent how I fought them as a young legislator. I probably was a little harder on some people than I had to be. But when the Senate seat opened up it was a great opportunity for me and an opportunity to go to a body which, you know, because it's smaller, is just sort of intrinsically more collaborative than the House, and also to have a sort of an opportunity to reset my approach a little bit and really practice collaboration with everybody in the body.

Matt: 15:20

Yeah, so what is it? 40 members in the state Senate?

Will: 15:23

Yeah.

Matt: 15:27

And so what are some other differences that people might not know like between those two bodies?

Will: 15:29

Well, you know what I mean, they're really the same people, right? I mean first of all, I mean more than half of the members of the Senate were previously state reps and we're all elected by the same people. So it's not really a different place, right? I mean, I don't think the political center of the Senate is intrinsically different from the political center of the House, nor is the range of views in the Senate different from the range of views in the House. At any given time, you may have a leader who's going to lean one way or lean the other, and issues may go in different directions, but I think the bodies are fundamentally similar. I think the primary difference is the size of the body, which I think it favors a more collaborative approach.

Matt: 16:06

Yeah, and then what were some of the issues maybe that you felt like when you were just in Belmont that you didn't really have control over that you were able to address once you got up to the higher levels? Were there specific issues that were key for you as you moved up?

Will: 16:19

What drew me into local politics was the number one issue was schools and support for the schools. And that's a very finite thing from a local perspective. I mean in Watertown because of the commercial tax base Watertown has a much higher level of per pupil spending than Belmont does. Belmont's very constrained by the fact that it has no commercial base, has no ability to transfer the tax burden to the commercial side, so tax bills are much higher for the same value in Belmont than in Watertown. There's a lot more cost sensitivity. So in that box the issue was state aid. So I worked hard to bring more state education aid to Belmont and to Watertown. Watertown actually, although it's relatively healthier than Belmont from a financial standpoint, was getting shorted on state aid when I first got there. So we worked to bring the formula into line so that Watertown would not be disadvantaged. There was kind of basically a glitch in the formula that was hurting Watertown. It was not a policy-based thing, but it was really just the way the math worked was wrong. So that's one thing.

Will: 17:14

The other things that I've worked on in the legislature the whole criminal justice thing has been a central theme and some of the big things that I feel best about having gotten done in the legislature are the criminal justice reforms of 2018 and the police reforms of 2020. Both of which I played a central role in and feel really good about. But other issues the transportation issue I've been very focused on MBTA funding and MBTA management and I think we've done some good things along the way there and I think the MBTA is finally moving in the right direction. And I think that's the top single priority right now for me in this next few months is to make sure that we put money in place to keep the MBTA moving in the right direction. They've benefited from a lot of federal funding, but it's not really going to, can't keep them going because that money's going away, so we need to put more in place, more firm state funding for the MBTA's operations. That's a top priority now. We've also gotten a lot involved in bicycle and pedestrian safety issues, traffic issues, so there's a bunch of different things in that space. There's rules of the road, things protect vulnerable road users, safe passing distance, speed limits, truck equipment to make them less likely to harm pedestrians and cyclists. And then there's just those local road issues. So the whole transportation space has been a big space for me, continues to be a big space.

Will: 18:26

The environmental space, the climate change space has been huge for me. You know, when I got to the legislature we put in place the Global Warming Solutions Act and set goals to reduce emissions 80% by 2050. And now we've ramped those up to net zero by 2050. I have to say I'm at a stage where I'm a little, I'll use the word disillusioned, with the strategies we've had in place in the climate space. I think the goals were a little bit arbitrary. I mean, from a climate science perspective the answer would be, well, we should cut things yesterday. I mean, 2050 was kind of picked out of the air. I mean I know it was picked out of the air because nobody could ever give me a reason why. I mean I was kind of asking why is 2050 the goal?

Will: 19:12

There's really no, there's no magic there. And the sort of planning that was done to sort of backfill, a justification for the 2050 goals. I mean the sort of evaluation of how we're going to get there, these definitions of pathways to decarbonization. In my opinion, and I've looked most deeply at the building sector, the numbers in those documents are complete nonsense. They don't correspond to reality. What we're seeing is now, in the 2020s, we're seeing us fail again and again to meet goals. That's despite what I think are really valiant efforts by a lot of people to achieve those goals. Those goals just never had any practicality and I have to believe that if we're messing it up as badly as we are in Massachusetts, that's happening all over the world. And I think we're going to have to have a conversation with people about where we really are. One of my big life experiences was in 2011. I biked across the country and you know it's a peak experience every single day, from beginning to end.

Matt: 20:09

You started from here and you made it all the way to West Coast?

Will: 20:13

Yep started from Belmont, rode all the way out to Anacortes, Washington, every day rolling into a new country. But Montana is sort of the most amazing part of the trip because it's so desolate and I actually got into riding at night to beat the headwinds. And so there's this one night where I rode maybe it was an epic night maybe 100, 120 miles, something like that. And I got into this little tiny town with just a few buildings, but they did have this restaurant and I was ready to eat the whole place. And I sat down and they gave me this menu and I said I'll have one of these and one of those, and one of those and one of those and one of those. And the waitress went away for a while and then she came back and she kind of sat down next to me and leaned her shoulder on mine and said honey, actually we don't have any of that stuff.

Will: 20:55

And that's the conversation we're kind of going to have to have with voters about our environmental plans. Honey, none of this stuff is working. We're not achieving any of these goals. We're going to have to recalibrate and kind of recognize that they didn't end the Stone Age because they ran out of stones. They didn't end the Stone Age because somebody passed a law and set goals to stop using stones. They passed the end of the Stone Age because they came up with better tools.

Will: 21:19

So I think we have to have a focus on technological innovation and a focus on resilience, because we're going to experience a lot of climate change. It's just going to happen. So we have to figure out how to deal with that and I have confidence that you know it's not going to be easy, but we as humans can get through that and we've been through a lot of changes. So we will adapt and we have to be thinking about that and we have to be investing in anything that offers real hope of a cost-effective solution. But the stuff we've got right now is just not doing it. So that's kind of the pivot I'm in the middle of right now. I'm sort of having those conversations, I think, kind of grieving the need for that change in direction, and I think a lot of people are feeling that too. Everybody who's close to the numbers has a sense of the problems. So that's the continuing effort now is to really grapple with that and sort of turn the corner on that as a legislature, as a state. And of course you know the federal government's only making things worse, making everything harder.

Will: 22:06

But even under Biden, even with all the help we were getting from the federal government then, there's nowhere near enough money ever to come from the federal government, much less from within our own state resources, to undertake the changes that we're talking about. Some of the changes that we're talking about would exceed the construction capacity of all the people working in construction today in Massachusetts. In other words, the amount of money that would take to do a deep energy retrofit on 70% of the homes, as is contemplated in the state's climate plan, that's more people than we have working in the entire construction industry for the next 20 years. Nevermind, fix the roads, fix the T, build new homes, build wind turbines, all the other things we're trying to do. Put all that aside. You'd have to devote all of them and actually you probably wouldn't even get there with all the resource. So it's not just money, it's also the economy. Economy just isn't big enough. There's not enough resources in the economy to make the turn that we need to make. Education, transportation, criminal justice, housing.

Matt: 23:00

Housing has come up in many of my conversations recently.

Will: 23:02

Yeah, housing is a top priority for everybody right now. Everybody kind of gets it. Housing costs are high. It's hard for people leaving the state. People can't find housing, so that's a huge issue.

Will: 23:11

I've spent a lot of time working on that. I led the Senate's conference team on that. That produced the big bill that we had last summer. Then I spent months figuring out how much do we actually get done? Really, you know what does that add up to?

Will: 23:21

And the reality is that, for all the money we're spending in that bill to accelerate the production of affordable housing, all we're really going to do is keep producing about the level that we've been producing for the last five or 10 years, which is about 1,500, 2,000, maybe 2,500 max units per year, and that includes some renovations.

Will: 23:38

But we're trying to produce 20,000 plus units a year, and so what that highlights, when you really do that math, is that most of that has to come from private production. And so we just have to make this state a place that's more attractive to build housing. And that's partly about changing zoning rules and making more places available for development, but it's also about streamlining the zoning process.

Will: 24:05

We've got a tradition in this state of basically litigating every bush on the property. That wildly contrasts to other places where you go in and you get your 200-unit development approved on a voice vote with no hearing, and so it's much easier to build housing in a lot of other states than it is to build housing here. So that's a culture change we all need to work on together and it's not going to be easy, because we have a very strong tradition of local control and a sense that local control is good and that's sort of a right to make sure that nothing at all changes in the world around us that we aren't completely comfortable with. You know, if we're going to build housing, we're going to have to accommodate more change.

Matt: 24:39

Yeah, I mean, how do you talk to your constituents about the pace of change? You know things have changed quickly than it has in the past, from what I've talked to other people who have been in this area for a long time, and then you're also saying we need to change even quicker to keep up right so.

Will: 24:51

Well, you know what it's a conversation, you know I think we need to have a faster pace of change. I think that's what this state needs. I think the state would be better off, but that's only going to happen if everybody agrees to it. So that's a central conversation that I'm trying to have with folks and see if we can evolve to the point where we're really ready to build more housing. By the way, I mean Watertown has done a great job. Watertown, Watertown, Boston and Cambridge have made huge contributions to housing productions. Belmont has not. If I think of the space that I personally represent, it's Belmont that has the most change of thought process to do. Watertown has a huge advantage with all that commercial property and lightly developed property that it has to build up. Belmont doesn't have that. So I'm not sure the comparison is really fair and Watertown certainly pushes back on development when it gets near the residential areas that people are attached to. But overall, Belmont needs to build a lot more housing.

Matt: 25:41

How about the experience of being a public servant and you know what are some behind the scenes that people might not know from being in the Senate and the House, and that type of thing that people might find interesting to hear about? Or don't know from just seeing you in the news or seeing your releases and stuff. What's the behind the scenes?

Will: 25:59

Well, you know, I'll tell you something. I'll tell you what is most striking from a behind the scenes perspective. The thing that was most surprising to me when I became a legislator was I really like my colleagues. You know you have this sort of very negative attitude towards the legislature that you know it's not universal but all too prevalent. But in fact, after I'd been there about six months, I looked around and said you know, there's some awfully smart people here trying to do the right thing. They're here for the right reasons. They're going about the issues the right way. You know they bring a lot of competence to the table. So the issues we have are challenging, but I think the people we have working on those issues are mostly really good people and that's an important thing. I mean, it's an important thing in my life. I like the people I work with and it's a privilege to be part of the legislature. A large part of that is the privilege of serving these communities, but another large part of it is the privilege of working with the colleagues I have.

Matt: 26:44

Yeah, yeah, that's something I bring up in a lot of my episodes is particularly talking about local government is, regardless of your policy and which side you follow on the issue, these are people. It's not just this blanket, this is the government good, bad. It's like these are people out there trying to do what they think is best. Whether you agree with it or not, they're there for, like you said, the right reasons, and I like to show that side of it for sure. So I think that's important to recognize. Yeah, and was there anything else about your job that you would want people to know you feel is misunderstood or anything?

Will: 27:16

Well, let me answer that on two completely different levels, I mean one. I think it's important to recognize that the legislature is extremely transparent. Basically, all we ever do is create public records. There's not such a thing as a secret legislative decision. Every decision we make only has its implementation through the creation of texts known as laws, which are public and have their effect by being public. Every nickel we spend is online.

Will: 27:43

You know, there's a few improvements that we're going to make, but we're going to continue to make those. But the overall idea I think is really true is the legislative process is transparent. It's complicated and it's dependent on people getting along and that doesn't always happen. So, for me, the real issues about how to improve the legislative process or how to streamline the process and eliminate the friction points that sometimes bog us down and generate, you know, we got a lot of bad press last July about legislature not getting things done on time. By the end of the session we got it all done. I mean, ultimately, there are a lot of adults in the room and they want to get things done and they ultimately do what it takes to get things done. I feel basically good about the transparency of the legislature and the commitment of the legislature to do things in a public way. Again, I know that there's a lot of narratives out there that that's not happening and there are some real issues. The fundamentals, I think, are good. The fundamentals of the system are good.

Will: 28:36

The other thing that hasn't come up in the conversation and this is, I think, an important strand of who I am and what I care about is I also do care a lot about personal liberty. And one of the things that I've sort of grown to understand about myself is that I am bisexual, and so I kind of identify with any people who are marginalized or discriminated against.

Will: 28:59

I mean, I've obviously lived a life primarily with a lot of advantages, so I'm not asking for anybody's sympathy when I say that. But it just gives me more sensitivity, if you will, to the experiences of everybody who's marginalized at all. So lifting up civil liberties, reproductive health, LGBTQ rights is something that's always meant a lot to me. And as I've sort of come home to a full understanding of myself, I perhaps understand why it's meant so much to me throughout my career. You know, the life I live now is the life I've always lived. You know, married to my wife, we have a good relationship. I have a very good thing going with my family, but I understand myself in a broader way and that's an important part of who I am too.

Matt: 29:38

Gotcha, cool, let's see. To wrap up here, I mean we touched a bunch on things that need to be happening in the future, but are there any other forward-facing thoughts for whether it be Watertown or Massachusetts in general that you wanted to touch on and give a vision for going forward?

Will: 29:49

Well, you know, to sort of summarize the agenda, we have a conversation to keep having about housing. Can we as a Commonwealth, as a community, move in a direction of producing a lot more housing? And that's going to take some changes in how we think about our need to control completely the built environment around us. We've got to let built environment change around us and that's a culture change. That, I think, is the central conversation over the next 10 years. If we can get the zoning side of this right and streamlined it's taken us 100 years of excessive local control to get us into the mess we're in. And if we can change that culture somewhat, maybe in another 50 years we'll have a better housing production. None of this is a quick fix, but I think we have to take the long view and there's a really big thing to try to accomplish on the housing side. Another hard conversation is about our environmental efforts and being real about what we're going to accomplish and what we're not going to accomplish. And that's busting out in these conversations about utility rates, because we are doing a lot with our environmental efforts to push up the cost of those utility rates. So we really have to assess are all of those things working and we have to continue the things that are working and maybe discontinue some things that aren't working.

Will: 30:51

I'm committed to the continuing effort to lift people up instead of locking them up, but I also think we have to kind of restore the health of our police morale and on the correction side as well. So I believe in our criminal justice system and we do need to make it work better and help people within that system function in the most positive way. And we have that transportation issue, keeping the MBTA working. So housing, environmental, criminal justice, the MBTA and, of course, continuing to fund education. And I think we're in pretty good shape in terms of the education funding because of the fair share amendment we passed a couple of years ago. That's going to give you know, create some funding dedicated to education that will help us moving forward.

Matt: 31:28

Well, it sounds like you have your work cut out for you and everyone else up there. But is there any other last thoughts you want to give or last biking moments you want to share?

Will: 31:37

Well, stay off the ice. That's my main advice to people thinking about cycling. Basically every winter that I've decided I'm going to cycle through the winter, I always end up breaking a bone, and this year I've really had to take some time off because of the gravity of the falls. And so biking on the ice, definitely avoid that.

Matt: 31:52

Public safety announcement. 

Will: 31:53

Yeah, public safety announcement. 

Matt: 31:55

Great. Well, thank you for taking the time to sit down, share your thoughts and stories and yeah, thank you.

Will: 32:00

I appreciate it, I appreciate it. Thank you. 

Matt: 32:03

That's it for my conversation with Will. You can find out more information about him at willbrownsberger.com. Head on over to littellocalconversations.com if you'd like to hear more interview episodes and different episode types I've been trying out, such as local government updates, arts and culture roundtables, and recordings from live Creative Chats events.

Matt: 32:23

Speaking of Creative Chats, if you're interested in getting together on a Friday morning with some creative people and listening to a conversation and then joining into a conversation about creativity yourself, next one is coming up on April 18th at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. The guest is going to be Cat Bennett, who's been an illustrator, animator, artist and teacher. Again, that's Friday, April 18th, 830 to 10 am at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. You can find information about that at littellocalconversations.com as well. Want to give a few shout-outs to wrap up here. Got a grant this year from the Watertown Cultural Council, so I want to give them a thank you and the appropriate credit, which is this program is supported in part by a grant from the Watertown Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. Find out more about them at watertownculturalcouncil.org and massculturalcouncil.org.

Matt: 33:10

I want to give a big shout out to Arsenal Financial, sponsor of the podcast. It's owned by Doug Orifice, who is a very involved Watertown resident. His business is a financial planning business that helps people close to retirement, busy families, and small business owners. So if you need help with that, check him out at arsenalfinancial.com. You can also listen to the episode I did with him on the podcast, he was the very first guest or the recent Watertown trivia episode I did with him to celebrate the sponsorship if you want to learn some Watertown facts. And the last shout out goes to a promotional partner, the Watertown Business Coalition. They are a non-profit organization here in Watertown that's bringing businesses and people together to help strengthen the community. They have a whole bunch of events coming up. Check them out at watertownbusinesscoalition.com. So that's it. Until next time, take care.