When I have a real problem to solve, I turn to Ron Ricci.
Ron stands out among the selectman candidates as a “doer” in town, with a proven track record of achieving results. I know this firsthand from working with him on the Bare Hill Pond pump system project over the past three years.
I first met Ron when I made the initial presentation to the town’s Community Preservation Committee for supplemental funds for the pump project. Ron asked the tough questions, and then, unlike anyone else, he actually offered to help us solve them. When we struggled with the engineering challenge ahead of us, Ron proposed solutions. When all the bids for outsourcing construction management came back unaffordable, Ron was the first to suggest that we could do this ourselves with the talent we had in town. He then personally signed up to manage a particularly complex piece of the project and delivered.
As a town, we have paid countless dollars to consultants and spent countless hours in meetings to analyze over and over again the same fiscal and affordable housing issues for the past five to nine years—without providing any solutions! We need new leaders who will not just talk about what needs to be done, but will instead lead us to actually do something about it. Ron will take the fight to the state house to fix the structural problems with 40B legislation and Chapter 70 funding. He will put his commitment into action to find the funds to reduce class sizes and keep our schools strong. Ron will keep the focus on affordable housing for our existing seniors, and not on new families that load our taxed school system even more. As a small-business owner himself, Ron knows what it takes to attract new businesses to town to build our commercial tax base.
Harvard has some real problems to solve. We should turn to Ron.
Bill Johnson, Warren Avenue
Pond pumping system project leader
