A race for a state House of Representatives seat serving Somerville and Medford got its first stage time Saturday in the Somerville High School auditorium, with Will Mbah, Christopher Oates and Paul Ruseau debating for voters in the 34th Middlesex District.
Though Mbah has the most direct legislative experience as a Somerville city councilor who has given testimony to committees on Beacon Hill, Somerville resident Oates gave a polished presentation as an Oxford-educated political risk analyst who worked on 2018’s ranked-choice voting ballot question; and Paul Ruseau has a powerful story as a Medford School Committee member, and proposed ideas his opponents acknowledged as exciting.
Each is running to replace Christine Barber, who has served the district since 2015 but is running to replace the retiring Pat Jehlen in the state Senate. With no known Republican or third-party candidates named for November’s general election, it’s likely either Mbah, Oates or Ruseau will emerge from a Sept. 1 Democratic primary as the ultimate winner.
“Who is prepared to get results on day one? This district deserves more than good intentions, it deserves proven leadership,” Mbah said. “Throughout my life, from immigrating to this country to raising my family here to serving on the City Council, I have never forgotten why I entered public service.”
To get laws enacted in the Legislature, though, “you cannot just say ’This is popular in Somerville or Medford or Cambridge or Boston.’ You need to get allies in the Berkshires, in Worcester County, on the South Coast,” Oates said, describing the coalition building he’s done. “You need to deal with the reality of what your situation is. If you’re at the State House and you need to get a majority of the Legislature on your side, you need to meet them where they are.”
Ruseau described being part of a unified slate of public officials – “I know how to build a coalition and keep it together” – as a testament to his ability to get things done. “When I say Medford Public Schools has changed dramatically in nine years, I don’t think you can comprehend how dramatically it has changed. It is an unrecognizable school system after five terms in office,” he said. “I plan to take that same approach to the State House, where I’m going to subvert my other 750 priorities to the ones that are most important now, like Medicare for all.”
More millionaire’s tax
One way Ruseau distinguished himself under questioning from moderator Joe Lynch was by explaining how he would fund single-payer health care: by raising $8.7 billion in an expansion of the recently passed millionaire’s tax.
“Paying for it is not actually a challenge. It’s only a challenge if you’re really, really, really rich,” Ruseau said. The tax now is 4 percent on every dollar earned over $1 million, and Ruseau proposes adding 1 percent more on each million dollars above that, capped at 12 percent to avoid encouraging the richest residents to stop accepting formal incomes and switch to more covert forms of wealth accumulation. “There are people in Massachusetts, and I don’t mean one, whose income last year was over $50 million … We don’t want to go too high, though in my heart I would like to go higher. But $8.7 billion is a lot of money and could do an awful lot for Medicare for all, and probably a lot of other things.”
Mbah agreed with Ruseau that “we can do this stuff – it’s just political will. Look at how much money we spend in war, bombing people across the world.” Oates, however, said that no matter how much he preferred single-payer health care like he experienced in England and Mbah got during his three years in Sweden, “I don’t want to promise something knowing that we may do it and it may not work out,” specifically because health care is split between state and federal governments, and only the federal government can run deficits.
“Meaning if health care costs rise more than expected, that money has to come out of somewhere else. We might be cutting teacher salaries, cutting the MBTA,” Oates said. He later said he had doubts about how well Ruseau’s math worked out, and wondered how Ruseau arrived at the $8.7 billion figure. His conclusions might be “arithmetically impossible,” Oates said.
Rainy-day funds
A similar dynamic played out in imagining spending of the commonwealth’s “rainy day” money for budgetary needs as the White House squeezes money out of blue states for political revenge. “We can afford three years of another $600 million coming out of our rainy-day fund so we don’t have to kick all these people off of MassHealth,” Ruseau said, with Mbah agreeing “100 percent” to his assessment that in terms of using a rainy-day fund, “It’s freaking pouring out.”
Oates, though, counseled caution again considering the potential for lost jobs if Massachusetts has to address a deficit. “If we’re not in a recession, that’s a different story. But if we are, that is what it is there for – so that our teachers and our hospitals do not go under again,” Oates said. “We don’t know if the federal government will come in and bail us out as they did during Covid.”
Lower housing costs
A more distinct split emerged on what could lower housing costs fastest, with Mbah looking to rent stabilization (“I ran for mayor of this city on rent control,” Mbah said).
Oates argued for lower zoning and permitting barriers (“The fastest way to drop rents is a large increase in supply,” Oates said. “But the nice thing when you do that is that you also then generate the revenue to pay for affordable housing, public housing, social housing”).
Ruseau seeks a substantial expansion of public housing – with support for Mbah’s focus on rent stabilization as the quickest answer – because the mixed-income model of social housing is also for “folks that are now making six figures and can’t possibly buy a home in Somerville.” (He noted a term he heard on a podcast: “We live in an inheritocracy.”)
Home rule petitions as legislating
That 511 home rule petitions were filed this year by Somerville and other cities and towns is a failure of the Legislature, which sees “a tsunami” of 5,000 bills a year but signs around 40 – plus 27 percent of those petitions, Ruseau said. He wanted Beacon Hill to operate better so there’s less need for home rule petitions.
Oates, on the other hand, thinks home rule petitions are powerful as proof of concept for laws that can go statewide: “You have to demonstrate to leadership why this is not just for Somerville or for Medford, but really for Massachusetts overall,” he said, another example of the step-by-step, door-by-door, practical and retail politicking that he advised works best.
“There’s three questions that I’m going to be asking myself every day: What is the problem? What is the solution? And how do we get it done?” Oates said. “That’s how you get at the end of the year to be a little bit better than it is now, and a little bit better after that. And that’s how the people who are living here get the government that they deserve.”
Here Mbah had another implicit agreement, as he had a track record of accomplishments and constituent services over nearly a decade in office – shaped by struggles since arriving here 16 years ago from Cameroon, such as moving five times in six years in search of affordable housing.
Mbah said he’s “delivered a lot of meaningful results, and not just talked about problems. I’ve helped create the Office of Housing Stability and the Somerville Community Land Trust. I’ve led efforts to protect workers from wage theft. I’ve championed climate action, safe streets, environmental justice, immigrant rights and investment in affordable housing,” he said. “This race isn’t simply about the best ideas. It is about who is ready to turn those ideas into law on Beacon Hill.”
The Somerville Democratic City Committee held two other forums the same night at the high school: for the 27th Middlesex House seat and 2nd Middlesex Senate seat.
This post was updated where indicated: to show doubts Christopher Oates has about Paul Ruseau’s millionaire’s tax increase.
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