Candidate for Ward 6 City Councilor: Cal Finocchiaro
By Ellen Putnam
Photo From Cal Finocchiaro
Cal Finocchiaro is running for a second term as Ward 6’s representative on the City Council “because I like helping people,” she said. “As ward councilor, I’m able to be the contact person for issues - I’m able to help make changes and help people with problems that come up.”
“My first few months on the job,” she described, “I met a woman who needed the sidewalk in front of her house repaired. Her husband was sick, and he couldn’t make it across the broken sidewalk with his walker - a neighbor had to come out and help every time they left the house. I promised them that I would see what I could do. Eventually, the city was able to replace the sidewalk, and the husband was able to get out of the car and push his walker to get to their front stairs. I wouldn't have been able to do that, and help those people, if I weren’t in this position.”
“I grew up here,” Finocchiaro reflected, “and so I love being able to give back and make some decisions about where the city’s going.”
Finocchiaro’s background might seem a bit unconventional for a position on the City Council. “I don’t have a business background,” she said, “although I’ve owned two businesses. I have a degree in Psychology and Creative Performing Arts.” Finocchiaro has worked in fields as varied as cancer research; as a wedding florist; and, currently, running an interior design business.
She also coaches girls’ track at Melrose High School, and has served on a number of boards in the city and schools. “I love being involved,” she said, “When my youngest graduated from Winthrop, I saw the opportunity to run for City Council and get involved in a different way, and I took it.”
“What’s important for people to realize, if they’re considering running,” Finocchiaro went on, “is that, as long as you care enough and you’re willing to learn how the city works - if you’re curious enough and want to put some time into learning how to write a city ordinance, if you care enough about certain decisions and votes - then that’s really what you need in order to do this job.”
“I typically like to approach things with a compromise,” Finocchiaro reflected. “I don’t think that everything needs a hard-and-fast ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Obviously, on the City Council you ultimately have to vote on something, but if we’re putting together an ordinance or trying to figure out where to appropriate money, I often try to find a middle ground. We have so many different people on the Council who have different viewpoints, and I try to work together first instead of saying yes or no, or voting hard against things.”
“My parents always instilled in us to try to rise above, and be kind no matter what,” she went on. “It can be hard to do - people get wrapped up about certain issues and they forget we’re all just humans. We all have things that we’re passionate about, but I try to always treat people with kindness, regardless of if I agree with them or not.”
“Melrose is a small community,” Finocchiaro reflected, “even though we have 30,000 people. It’s a tight-knit group of people, which is really nice - you don’t find that in every small city.”
“But our biggest challenge,” she went on, “is that people don’t realize that we have not been investing in the city as much as we should have been over the years. We’ve taken things for granted.”
“Going forward,” Finocchiaro continued, “I’m trying to help people understand that the city does need more money in order to progress. We need to repair our infrastructure - the old buildings that make our city beautiful. We invested in the library, but so many other parts of the city need help. Three of the elementary schools need to be reworked or rebuilt. I think we need to rethink our approach: it’s OK to pay a little more in taxes in order to invest in our city a little more.”
Photo From Cal Finocchiaro
“People have gotten used to Melrose being a very affordable place to live in comparison to cities around us,” she went on. “We haven’t passed overrides regularly. We’ve gotten used to living with older schools. We have low taxes if you compare us to other cities, and it’s great that the city has been affordable - we don’t want to push people out - but the reality is, we’re a bedroom community. We don’t really have commercial tax representation in the city. We’ve gotten by over the years, but now things are so much more expensive.”
“A lot of people who I’ve known for a long time have asked me, ‘What’s different now? Why can’t we stay the nice, affordable, quaint city we’ve always been?’ But we’ve been putting aside the notion of raising taxes for so long and we haven’t been reinvesting,” Finocchiaro added, “so people have become comfortable not paying high taxes. It can be hard for people, especially when they’ve been here for so long, to accept, but we just really need more money.”
“As a city councilor, I like to talk to people,” Finocchiaro went on. “I find that one-on-one, people often ask me questions about finances, about the override. It’s hard, because the City Council doesn’t have a ton of leverage: we get the budget, and we can only subtract from there; we can’t add in anything new. But I see being on the City Council as an opportunity to advocate for what I think is right in the city, to be able to talk to people about it.”
“We have this whole discussion about townies versus people who just moved here - I hate that,” she added. “But having grown up here, having that historical vantage of what the city was, gives me a broader perspective. My parents still live here, and they’re on fixed incomes.”
Finocchiaro, along with all of her colleagues on the City Council, supports all three override questions that will be on the ballot in November. She also appreciates that the three override questions, which have generated a lot of discussion in recent months, will provide voters with the opportunity to have more voice in the direction the city goes in.
“I think there was a lot of time and effort that went into presenting the three different dollar amounts,” she said. “I know a lot of people are upset about how the questions are being presented, and they have valid reasons for feeling like that, but overall, it’s going to give Melrose an opportunity to choose the override amount. It will let the community speak about what they want and what’s important to them.”
“Nobody’s ever going to be happy with everything we do, whether it’s one question or three,” Finocchiaro reflected, “but what I’ve learned in this position is, you’ve got to do what you think is right and move forward.”
Photo From Cal Finocchiaro
Finocchiaro is concerned about the idea of mistrust in the city that she feels is a theme among some residents. Finocchiaro herself, when she first ran for city councilor, shared that she was running, in part, to find answers for the questions she had: now, having found those answers, she aims to share her confidence in the current administration with her constituents.
“I tell people: this is a different administration,” she said. “Every administration brings their own good and maybe not so great to the city - that’s the way it works. You’re never going to love a mayor one hundred percent. But what happened over the past five or six years has nothing to do with this current administration. I think our mayor is doing an excellent job. She has been very transparent.”
“I do think, specifically with this override, that mistrust is something that holds people back from wanting to vote “Yes” on more taxes,” Finocchiaro went on. “Like anything else, it’s a game of telephone. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and a lot of people don’t have time to research things for themselves, so they just take at face value what people say, even if it’s not correct. I try to use my position to talk to people and give them the correct information - to try to help them to trust a little bit more.”
Talking about her approach to legislating, Finocchiaro shared, “My first concern, if we’re looking at a tight budget and we’re appropriating funds, is to look at safety issues first. If the ceiling is falling down at one of the schools, if there’s something affecting the safety of pedestrians that needs to be fixed, I will appropriate money for that first.”
“In general,” she went on, “I think my approach is pretty commonsense. I look at: what’s going to benefit the community the most? I read everything and make a decision separate from any politics - it always comes from what’s best for our community. I look at each vote individually.”
Finocchiaro reflected that one of the most difficult votes she’s made on the City Council so far was during this year’s budget season, when Councilor Ward Hamilton proposed eliminating the budget for Memorial Hall. “It was challenging for me to make that decision because I love Memorial Hall and I appreciate the people who keep it running, and the last thing I want to do is to close it,” she said, “but ultimately my decision was based purely on numbers.”
“Everybody on the City Council has their own perspective and no one’s ever doing something with ill intent,” she went on. “It’s all coming from passionate places - but you vote how you’re going to vote and sometimes it’s more difficult than others.”
Finocchiaro is married to her high school sweetheart - they both attended Melrose High School - and they live with their three sons and three rescue dogs. “I love animals,” she said, “especially dogs. If I had a farm, I’d own 100 dogs.” Finocchiaro (whose family name is Makredes) is third-generation Greek, and she reads, writes, and speaks Greek. (Fun fact: you can find Finocchiaro’s mom’s delicious Greek food for sale at Buckalew’s General Store!)