Five-term Somerville city councilor JT Scott announced on Thursday that he will step down Dec. 31, far ahead of the end of the two-year term he won Nov. 4 but timed to be part of an upcoming special election.
“By announcing my irrevocable intent to resign at the end of 2026, it allows the city to schedule one special election for both seats and minimize the time that either ward is without a representative on the council,” Scott said in a resignation letter shared with The Cambridge Somerville Independent.
Fellow councilor Ben Ewen-Campen won a Democratic primary Tuesday for the 27th Middlesex District seat held by state representative Erika Uyterhoeven, who is moving on to take the 2nd Middlesex District seat of retiring state senator Pat Jehlen. A special election must be run to fill Ewen-Campen’s seat representing the people of Somerville’s Ward 3.
Will Mbah, the council’s vice president, is also leaving for the Legislature, having won his primary race to replace state senator Christine Barber in the 34th Middlesex District. As an at-large candidate in November, Mbah can be replaced by candidates in that race who were lower in the voting; Ewen-Campen ran unopposed.
After leaving office Scott intends to keep working on community issues such as food insecurity, out-of-school-time resources for youth, community defense against federal anti-immigrant actions and for community-led development benefits, perhaps more effectively than he can as a councilor, he suggested in his letter.
“There is no shortage of work to be done, and I was an activist before I was an insider. It is time for me to step back from legislation and prepare for my next phase of public service. It is time to change my relationship to institutional power once again, as I did back in 2017, to push those initiatives forward from a different perspective,” Scott said. He referred to the year he was first elected to the council, part of a wave of 15 candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America who won office that season. Ewen-Campen was the other DSA winner in Somerville.
Doing the work of the council “left increasingly little time for the outside organizing and advocacy that built power and led to such massive momentum and change in 2018 and 2019,” Scott said. He noted that despite the productivity of his his time in office, “it hasn’t all been wins.”
He described frustrations with municipal government:
The tendency of our local government seems to be spending more money on describing problems and not nearly enough on solving them. And it’s not for a lack of legislation; I can point to a list of laws the council has ordained in the past nine years that remain unenforced to this day. Our vacant properties ordinance (passed May 2019) provides the city with a tool to encourage proper building maintenance, reduce vacant storefronts and return vacant apartments to the rental market – yet the law itself has never been funded and enforced. Our short-term rentals ordinance (also passed May 2019) would encourage vacant units to be opened to rental housing instead of turning into Airbnb listings, but has never received the funding to proactively enforce the law and free up housing stock for long-term residential use.
Still, he urged others in Ward 2 to step up to run as his replacement on the council, and offered some coaching to make the process easier. “I mean it sincerely when I say that you can do this job as long as you care deeply for your community and are ready to work hard to serve it,” Scott said.
He reminded constituents that when he was elected, he vowed it would be “a temporary service, not a career,” and was fulfilling the promise.
Scott is a native of rural west Tennessee who graduated from Duke University with bachelor’s degrees in electrical and biomedical engineering. After more than a decade working in tech, he changed careers to fitness; his work outside the council is as owner of a CrossFit gym location opened in Somerville in 2011. The next year, he began community activist work with the group Union United, and then Union Square Neighbors. Scott has been vice chair of that group and a board member of Union Square Main Streets.
