Muriel Kramer for Selectmen, Proven Leadership to Balance Priorities
Effective leadership in government is about results and progress centered on the community’s collective priorities.
Leaders must work to optimize every opportunity. Hopkinton values quality services and great schools; we prize our natural resources and beautiful open spaces; yet we struggle with the tax burden recognizing a need for more divergent housing and a larger commercial tax base.
Hopkinton’s priorities can be addressed by thinking differently about growth. The workable solutions are found not by pursuing a single objective but by working hard on all priorities.
Legacy Farms is a promising but complex opportunity for Hopkinton. Fred Merrill from Sasaki Associates asserts, “It can be a showcase for large-scale land-planning that addresses all these issues through smart-growth strategies, that demonstrates how growth can be fiscally, environmentally, and socioeconomically positive… a balance … that would be fiscally positive and still provide meaningful open space.”
Done well, this project offers residents a chance to work together to address many priorities: a diversity of housing options, a variety of commercial and retail opportunities, and protected open space. As leaders, we are working to insure that our service departments—police, DPW, fire protection, town government, and schools— are best positioned to address and accommodate the growth successfully at no adverse impact to the taxpayer.
In my term, I have worked with my colleagues to professionalize Town Government. We established a respectful work environment for the Board, and hired an effective Town Manager. I have facilitated advantageous business expansion (Barry Controls and Lonza as examples), and reworked old issues to find new or additional solutions like accessing needed sewer capacity by fixing Infiltration & Inflow (I&I).
I have the proven leadership that works for Hopkinton to keep communication open, balance priorities, effect necessary change and move the community forward together. Vote Muriel Kramer May 19th.