Profile

I'm Mimi Panitch, and this is the websie for my campaign for City Council At Large in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Holyoke is a remarkable small city: it was founded by visionaries, people who looked at a bend in the Connecticut River and saw renewable power, industry, and a liveable urban center surrounded by hills and farmland. In its early days it was one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Along with many Northeastern cities it hit some speedbumps in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but it still has the core assets that made it so successful in its earlier days.

We have our own power company, that owns its own hydroelectric dam. We have one of the greenest and least expensive power sources in the Northeast. We have the core of a municipal fiber optic internet service; we haven't managed to build out full fiber to the home yet, but we can still get it done. We sit at the crossroads of New England, surrounded by great colleges and universities -- and also by local agriculture, a culture that prizes resilience, and most of all, a sense of genuine community. We have families that have lived in the same houses for generations; we have Holyokers who've been successful elsewhere and come back because this is home.

We have opportunities, but no one would deny we have real problems that need to be solved before we can be the thriving city we have the potential to be. I'm running for City Council because many years serving the city as a volunteer in other roles -- as a member and currently chair of the Planning Board, as well as roles on advisory boards and commissions working on issues like municipal wastewater treatment and community preservation -- have shown me that our City Council has been a roadblock to the work the city needs to do to let us live up to our potential.

This journal is here to offer you -- Holyoke voters, observers of Massachusetts municipal policy and politics, random passers-by -- more detail about the various issues I see facing us, and how I think we need to approach them than can be conveyed in a campaign flyer, or in five minutes at your door. Because it is a Dreamwidth journal rather than a conventional web page, it's set up to let you ask questions and offer comments right here. I hope you'll take advantage of that: one of the challenges and opportunities of democratic self-government is the ability to share our knowledge and our creativity with one another, to take advantage of our wide variety of backgrounds and the things each of us knows that others may not. It's a superpower, if we use it wisely.

Thanks for being here, and for reading.

A postscript: the basic Candidate Bio:

I grew up in Holyoke, and I'm a graduate of its public schools. I attended Bryn Mawr College and graduated from the University of Chicago Law School. I've practiced law in New York City, and in previous lives I was also the editor for Pocket/Simon & Schuster's Star Trek tie-in novels and was briefly a screenwriter with the Writer's Guild card to prove it.

Shortly after my return to Holyoke I was appointed to the mayor's financial review committee to assess ways to address the city's combined sewer overflow problem (basically we were dumping so much raw sewage into the Connecticut River, a result of our 19th century sewer system, that the EPA was threatening us with massive fines if we didn't clean it up). Mayor Pluta subsequently appointed me to the Planning Board. Every elected mayor we've had since then has reappointed me, and I currently serve as its chair. Right now the Board is working on the first comprehensive plan Holyoke has had in a quarter century. We expect to finalize it and release it after this year's election.