LeBlanc's Run

Former Councilor David LeBlanc threw a little campaign kickoff for his state rep run last night. He talked about a few issues, promised to free up community preservation funds for Fitchburg, and had a few city councilors in the crowd.

One nit-picky issue we have is LeBlanc's desire to keep Fitchburg affordable for senior citizens (we're picking up on a Sentinel paraphrase here). That's all well and good, but shouldn't Fitchburg be trying to be kept affordable for everyone? Wouldn't be in the city's interest to find a way to be safe, affordable and interesting for middle-class families squeezed out of buying in other areas?

It's certainly politically prudent to want to cater to the seniors. They vote and no one is going to argue against helping the elderly. But, what can LeBlanc do as a state rep to help? Isn't this really a local issue? It's the kind of by-the-book political pandering that makes for nice, safe campaigning but doesn't transfer to bold leadership in the long run. Fitchburg would be better served by the latter.

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One of the things we're going to take on as a little experiment here this spring and summer is a running tally of all the obvious, big-ticket junk we see pile up on 5th Mass Turnpike. It's the perfect dumping spot in that it offers nice on/off to Route 2, and no one is around to see dumpers do their thing. We drive by almost every day, so we're experts on the junk situation around there. We're likely to lose track at some point this summer but to start we currently have:

Four plastic bags of leaves (really, you can't just wait for the leaf pickup?)
Two mattresses
One couch

The mattresses and couch have been out a good week.