The hyphenates debated Saturday for a state House of Representatives seat in the 27th Middlesex District, covering much of Somerville: city councilor Ben Ewen-Campen, a Harvard grad and scientist with a track record of municipal legislative accomplishments; and former Beacon Hill staffer Olivia Gilligan-Corsetti, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst grad who brought to the stage a more working-class perspective as a lifelong Somervillian who has been a plumber, teacher and caregiver.
Each is running to replace Erika Uyterhoeven, who has served the district since 2021 but is running to replace retiring state senator Pat Jehlen. With no known Republican or third-party candidates named for November’s general election, it’s likely that the Sept. 1 Democratic primary decides the race.
One candidate cited extensive experience getting things done in public processes. The other mirrored that experience from behind the scenes, including writing, researching and a hands-on tracking down of practical solutions. Ewen-Campen said every idea for problem-solving legislation (“It’s going to sound trite, but it is true”) comes from constituents, hearing face-to-face about issues such as an eviction or broken water meter; Gilligan-Corsetti agreed, except that she’s lived those problems and also had to find answers ahead of legislative reforms. (“We need representatives with working-class backgrounds who understand the struggles our community is dealing with,” she said.)
Because municipalities have limited power, Ewen-Campen said he was running for state representative “to take Somerville values and what we’ve accomplished and expand that to the state.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work that we have done here in Somerville. I would argue that not only has what we have done improved the lives of people here in Somerville and our constituents – I would argue that it has also influenced legislation around the state and, in some cases, even the country,” Ewen-Campen said, pointing to his work on housing affordability and to one of his first bills since being elected in 2017, a ban on facial recognition technology. That became part of a larger conversation five years ago about surveillance technology. “Where we have the federal government teaming up with big tech to surveil and punish people for constitutionally protected activities – protesting, seeking reproductive health, protecting immigrants – that work has never been more important.”
Gilligan-Corsetti was asked early on by moderator Wendy Blom, a board member at the Somerville Media Center, about her lack of experience as an elected official. She responded with insights from her time with Somerville former state representative Denise Provost, where she drafted legislation, attended committee meetings and worked in constituent services; she continued that work in the office of governor Maura Healey. Over time, she helped thousands of constituents and learned how to navigate a host of state agencies, forming friendships on Beacon Hill among its true but unsung power brokers: staffers.
“So much of the state house is run by legislative aides,” Gilligan-Corsetti said, recounting a state trooper and Massachusetts Department of Children & Families crisis involving a teen runaway. Serving constituents often comes down to “knowing the people who work there and trusting that they are going to have your back, that you can have hard conversations and work through hard problems.”
Fixing the MWRA formula, convening a court
The debate surfaced some aspirational priorities for the candidates.
Gilligan-Corsetti mentioned early in the forum that one reason she was running for office was to be “in the room” to figure out responses to climate change infrastructure. “I’m not convinced that we have the best plan for combined sewer overflows,” she said, referring to the waste that spills into public waters after storms and the multiyear, $1.3 billion plan to reduce them. Ewen-Campen went further, vowing to undo the “crazy, backward system” that makes Somerville pay for a regional problem through annual 10 percent to 15 percent utility bill increases. The regional water authority, the MWRA, has “become this kind of unregulatable behemoth,” he said.
But it was “created by an act of legislation at the state level, [and] we can open up that legislation” and make Massachusetts run its regional water and sewer infrastructure more like other states, collecting revenue at the county level rather than having “every city fighting amongst themselves,” Ewen-Campen said.
The area for innovation that captured Gilligan-Corsetti’s attention was around the increasing public drug use of the past few years – another regional problem that cities are left to handle largely on their own. The existing judicial system cycles what are often unhoused people through incarceration that disrupts them getting social services, which can solve problems instead of causing them to repeat. “One of the ways we could combat this is having a specialty court for homeless and drug situations,” formed in partnership with the Massachusetts Bar Association, District Attorney’s Office, police and clinicians, she said. It follows a Cambridge model. “They were very successful in making sure folks were not going incarcerated and instead were getting the help that they needed.”
Summing up their strengths
Having two bespectacled, slender Somervillians with hyphenated names trading solutions emphasized similarities in foundational beliefs. In summing up their strengths, the candidates sounded like a good team.
Gilligan-Corsetti called it a critical time to support all types of workers, and reminded that in addition to experience on Beacon Hill she had a background in mechanical engineering, as a plumber and a public school teacher for special-needs kids at the Kennedy School, and as a caregiver for members of her own family. “I spent a decade working in restaurants, and I can tell you when a crisis hits, we rely on workers to show up – fix us a coffee, fix our pipes, teach our children and care for our sick,” she said. “City workers must be able to afford to live in our community; they hold up our community.”
Her experiences have “taught me how to work with people from different backgrounds and different beliefs,” she said.
Ewen-Campen had the perspective of a parent, meanwhile, and as someone fighting for housing by co-founding the Somerville Community Land Trust and helping pass affordable housing overlay district zoning. He also deemed himself able to handle the peculiar rigors of Beacon Hill.
“It’s a place where progress is really slow, really frustrating. It can take decades to get stuff done. And this might sound crazy or naive – but that is actually one of the things that draws me to this work,” Ewen-Campen said. “All of us want to change the world. We want to help our communities. We want to improve things. I really mean that, and we all have different roles to play. And I think one role that god gave me is that I’m really good at sitting through incredibly boring meetings and working with groups of people to try to get us to good decisions.”
He drew laughs for his eagerness to attend boring meetings, but finished with inspiration: “I’ve really, really found a passion for this at the city level. I’m incredibly motivated to do this at the state level.”
The Somerville Democratic City Committee held two other forums the same night at the Somerville High School auditorium: for the 34th Middlesex House seat and 2nd Middlesex Senate seat.
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