Worcester Business Journal

wbjournal.com | May 30, 2022 | Worcester Business Journal 11 Healey & Diehl are our candidates Who would you like to see as the next Massachusetts governor? On Nov. 8, Massachusetts voters will go to the polls to pick a successor to Gov. Charlie Baker (R). Nine candidates are currently seeking the role, including three Republicans and four Democrats, who will first face voters in the Sept. 6 primary. When polled online, WBJ readers picked Attorney General Maura Healey (D) and State Rep. Geoff Diehl (R) as the top candidates in the field. F L AS H P O L L promoting diversity in business and the economy? Healey: I was a business lawyer and a business litigator at Boston law firm WilmerHale for eight or nine years, and then left to become head of the civil rights division at the attorney general's office, and I served in that capacity for many, many years before becoming an attorney general. So issues of equity have always been important to me. You've got to have an approach that basically makes sure you're applying an equity lens to all your agencies. When you're talking about jobs or housing or access to health care, education, transportation, or mental issues, racial injustice disparities exist across all those realms. I think about the African community in Worcester I've come to know or the Vietnamese community, there are a number of folks in Worcester and Worcester County for whom English is not a first language. We need to do more to reach out to make sure that they are aware of the programs out there to help them. Chang-Díaz: There are huge disparities in access to early education and care based on both geography and what your income is. That's why we see our youngest learners coming into kindergarten already with huge disparities in terms of word exposure and experience with structured learning environments. So closing disparities begins in those earliest years, and then you look at my proposal for debt-free public college. This would be a huge boon for communities of color and immigrant communities. Let me also say there are some very specific tactical things like passing the Work and Family Mobility Act, that will allow all qualified drivers in Massachusetts, folks who have passed the road test or otherwise are qualified, but who lack federal immigration status to finally be able to access a driver's license in Massachusetts. Any person can grasp with common sense how much a driver's license is critical to accessing economic and educational opportunities. The housing situation in Massachusetts is getting out of control, and rents and real estate in Central Mass. are aggressively rising. How would you, as governor, address the situation? Chang-Díaz: Investing in our mass transit systems will help alleviate housing pressures, because it will facilitate the building of more housing in a broader array of communities across the state. When there's more robust transportation options, developers and families will be more willing to build and live in more places, which will alleviate some of the pressure on some markets that are really overheated right now, but we can't do it just with transportation alone. It means putting more funding into the development of affordable housing. at's why I'm a huge supporter of the HERO Act, which would increase the transfer fee when real estate is transferred, because that's a huge amount of money in this overheated real estate market right now. We can harness some of that to fund more affordable housing development across our state. And then we need to leverage creative tools like land trusts, which is something that I've seen have a lot of success in my district in Boston. Healey: It is critically important we have affordable housing for a range of incomes in this state. It is critical for the safety and well-being of our families. It's also necessary for our economy because I talked to too many CEOs across the state and housing costs are the reason why their employees are leaving and looking to move to Texas or North Carolina or Florida. And so we need to address this as an economic imperative. I talked about expanding our housing supply. That means doing it through addressing local zoning barriers and to increase our state resources and incentives. We have to target first-time home ownership, and this will also help us close off the racial wealth gap. We need to really work on overall increasing economic mobility of our lower- income residents in public and assisted housing through workforce development opportunities, and I've supported what Gov. Charlie Baker has done in terms of creating units around transit stations. is interview was conducted and edited for length and clarity by WBJ Staff Writer Alexander MacDougall. 4% Shiva Ayyadurai (R) 0% Josh Caldwell (D) 7% Sonia Chang-Diaz (D) 19% Geoff Diehl (R) 11% Chris Doughty (R) 34% Maura Healey (D) 0% Dianna Ploss (I) 1% Kevin Reed (L) 0% Orlando Silva (D) 24% I haven't decided yet. Maura Healey (D) 34% Geoff Diehl (R) 19% Chris Doughty (R) 11% Sonia Chang- Diaz (D) 7% 4% Shiva Ayyadurai (R) Kevin Reed (L) - 1% I haven't decided yet. 24% Democratic Party candidates Sonia Chang-Díaz and Maura Healey have emerged as the front runners for the governor's nomination ahead of the party's convention on June 3 in Worcester at the DCU Center. W PHOTO | COURTESY OF MAURA HEALEY COMMITTEE

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