Candidates for Select Board and School Committee in the upcoming Longmeadow Annual Town Elections on June 11 were asked to provide their election profile and answer a series of questions so that town voters would be better informed about their candidacy. The following information was submitted to LongmeadowBuzz blog by Andrew Lam- a candidate for election to the Longmeadow Select Board.
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| Dr. Andrew Lam |
I moved to Longmeadow in 2008. My wife Christina and I have four children, three of whom are currently in Longmeadow schools. Professionally, I am a retina surgeon and an author. I am the senior partner at New England Retina Consultants, an attending surgeon at Baystate Medical Center, and assistant professor at UMass Medical School.
Before settling in Longmeadow, I grew up in Springfield, Illinois. I went to Yale for a degree in history, and then completed medical school at the University of Pennsylvania.
Since moving to Longmeadow, I have been dedicated to serving our town in ways that reflect my passions for municipal finance, schools and education, and historic preservation. My service includes:
- Finance Committee (2014-2023), past chair
- Historical Commission (2010-2014)
- Historic District Commission (2010-2014)
- Center School Council (2010-2014)
- Bay Path University Board of Trustees (2018-present), chair of the academic committee
In 2018, I led the effort to save and restore the Brewer-Young Mansion on the green.
Politically I am a registered Independent. I feel this puts me in the best position to consider all viewpoints objectively and always vote for simply what I think is right. I am a fierce advocate for prudent fiscal management, diversity and inclusion, educational excellence, healthcare access, and environmental conservation. I am a prolific writer of articles on topics as varied as history, race/anti-racism, migrant crises, the importance of science and vaccinations, and government spending that have appeared in both the national and regional media. You can view some of these articles at www.AndrewLamMD.com.
As an author I have written four books: Saving Sight, about my surgical career; Two Sons of China and Repentance, both novels of WWII; and The Masters of Medicine.
Why are you running for Select Board?
I have always had an innate desire to contribute to my community that—in Longmeadow—has been amplified by my deep gratitude and affection for the friends, neighbors, and teachers that have helped me raise my four children in a wonderfully nurturing and inclusive environment. My in-laws also live in town, so there are three generations of my family here, and this has given me important perspective on the needs and priorities of each demographic cohort in town. I would like to use my experience and skills to help make Longmeadow’s next decade even stronger than the last.
What are your qualifications including relevant experience?
I believe I have the experience, commitment, and vision to help lead Longmeadow well.
Experience – In my 9 years on the Finance Committee I scrutinized 9 annual budgets and helped maximize the cost effectiveness of every major project we undertook. This includes maximizing the value of money spent on big projects like the DPW Facility and Adult Center, as well as smaller projects like sewer work and vehicles for the police and fire departments. I am known for asking tough questions to ensure we are getting all the necessary information and considering the best options before a project is approved. It is easy to want new projects to be done, but more important to make sure they are done well and cost efficiently.
The Finance Committee and Select Board are often presented with proposals, such as new playgrounds, for example, which we are told might cost $1.5 million. But if you are doing a home renovation project, you don’t just say, “I want a new kitchen,” and pay whatever the first contractor bids, right? You get multiple bids, sometimes adjust the scope of the project, and think hard about what is a need or a want. I may need new appliances, but perhaps, upon reflection after seeing the cost, realize changing the cabinets are not that critical and we can save a lot of money if we keep the ones we have. It can be similar with municipal projects, but we need people willing to dig into such things and often ask the tough questions in the interest of the town. To be frank—I really like doing this. Seriously. It’s fun for me.
If I serve on the Select Board, I will bring strong institutional knowledge about how our town government functions. I always ask the tough questions. I follow through, sometimes years later, to make sure what we approved happened and the town got what it paid for. It often takes people who have that experience and knowledge to remember what we’ve done in the past. I am diligent and dogged in my desire to ensure value for every tax dollar and I have always treated our town’s money with the same care and meticulousness as I do my own.
Commitment – In everything I seek to do I give it 110%, whether it’s in my medical career, as a writer of books and articles, and in my community service. Almost from the moment I arrived in town, I started volunteering—as a soccer coach, at my church, and with the Cub Scouts. I served on boards like the Historical Commission, Center School Council, and Bay Path Board of Trustees. In doing these things I was merely following my own interests and passions, and if I’m not on the Select Board I will still find many ways to serve our community.
Vision – I spend time looking at our town holistically and thinking about what we will want it to look like in 10 or 15 years. Since I’ve lived here, we’ve made impressive improvements including a new high school, DPW Facility, and Adult Center. We restored the dilapidated Brewer-Young Mansion, an iconic building in our town. All of this took vision. Ten years from now we will have a new middle school. If it is placed at the Williams School location, we will have to decide what to do with the Glenbrook location. I would like us to strongly consider both a 55-and-over community residential development and a park. I am in favor of finding ways to help seniors stay in Longmeadow, the town they love, without the stress and higher property taxes associated with owning a larger home. Such a development would raise revenue for Longmeadow, and seniors do not have young children that will add burden and expense to our schools.
What are the key challenges facing Longmeadow as a community?
I believe the most important role of a Select Board member is as a fiduciary. This is because everything I advocate for, including our kids, our schools, our seniors, our parks, my desire to promote renewable energy—all of it depends on fiscal stability and strength. We will always require careful fiscal management to accomplish all that we aspire to do for our community.
Yet we find ourselves in very challenging fiscal times. We are a town that is entirely built out with few businesses to help mitigate the tax burden falling to homeowners. The state-mandated tax ceiling continues to loom over us and limits our ability to raise revenue. Yet our budgets inexorably rise due to contractual obligations to employees, rising healthcare costs, and inflation. We face the prospect of building a new middle school that will cost well over $100 million in a high-interest environment that will make debt service an increasing portion of our budget.
Navigating these challenges requires prudent fiscal management, setting of priorities, and often, tough choices—exactly the kind of choices I helped make on the Finance Committee that allowed us to remain under the tax ceiling while retaining level town services. We even managed to enhance students’ experiences with initiatives like free kindergarten, a high school internship program, and new playgrounds—all while also undertaking major building projects like the Adult Center and DPW Facility. Our careful fiscal planning helped Longmeadow finally lose its position as the town with the highest tax rate in the state, an undesirable label it had held for many years.
But the tax ceiling issue has not gone away and will probably remain our greatest challenge in the years ahead. We will also need to wisely manage the new middle school project, continue to defend our town concerning the Eversource natural gas pipeline project, and certainly focus on improving our roads.
How would you propose to resolve these issues?
We will need to monitor the tax rate and if we approach the tax ceiling (as we have in years past) we will have to triage our priorities in every department each year. It is far better to make slow, judicious adjustments than to hit the fiscal cliff which would necessitate drastic cuts and dozens of abrupt employee layoffs which I feel would damage Longmeadow’s reputation a great deal. This would show poor management and become very visible in our schools which would reduce newcomers’ desire to move here and hurt our property values. The state-mandated tax ceiling is not something our town can vote to become exempt from. Unless there is a legislative “fix” and change in state law, something we know from our legislators is very unlikely, we have no choice but to manage our budgets carefully going forward.
Though expensive, the middle school project is necessary and very important. Making this investment, and ensuring state funding of up to half the cost, is vital to keeping Longmeadow one of the most desirable places to live in Western Massachusetts—which supports our property values and results in stable tax revenue. It is important to make correct strategic decisions like this to ensure our town remains in a virtuous upward spiral, in which we move from strength to strength and enjoy a rising tide that lifts our whole community—especially the caliber of our schools and infrastructure. We learned a great deal from building our high school a decade ago, and we must utilize the experience of those in our town government who remember those lessons and can help us optimize—and avoid missteps in—the construction of a new middle school.
Defending Longmeadow against the gas pipeline project requires ongoing vigilance in a legal battle that is sometimes glacial and always frustrating. We must continually reassess our position with regard to our goals and legal fees, and, when necessary, do our utmost to attain mitigation of any adverse impact such a pipeline may have on our community.
Finally, we need to prioritize our roads and infrastructure, including building maintenance. The challenge of government is that we are perpetually trying to allocate scarce resources, and prioritizing a goal such as this usually requires shifting funds from other, equally virtuous, initiatives. These challenges will not abate, but if I am a member of the Select Board, I pledge to always use my best judgment, informed by my experience, to help Longmeadow provide the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens—so that we may look back ten years from now with pride at how much we have accomplished for our town.
https://www.facebook.com/LamSelectBoard
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