Candidate Q&A: State Rep. Candidate Lucas Talks About His Maiden Campaign

This is the third article in a series of Melrose Patch Q&As with candidates seeking either the state Senate seat or state representative seat up for grabs in this fall's election.

Name: David Lucas
Party Affiliation: Republican
Candidate For: State representative representing Melrose and Wakefield Precincts 3-6
Challengers: Monica Medeiros (R), Eric Estevez  (R), Paul Brodeur (D)
Age: 38
Where you live and how long you've lived there: Melrose, almost entire life
Family: Married, 4-1/2 year old son and 1-1/2 year old daughter
Current occupation and former occupations: Attorney with law firm of Nigro, Pettepit & Lucas. Former part-time Melrose City Solicitor, still serves as city's special counsel in some litigation cases.

Melrose Patch: Have you ever held elective office before or run for office, and what made you want to run for state representative?

Lucas: I've never run for elected office and I've never held an elected position. What made me want to run now, I suppose, is I have a family, I'm a home-owner, a business owner, and over the last few years I've just gotten very, very disappointed — I'm trying to keep this positive (chuckle) — with how the state does business. While I've had to cut back on some of our expenses and I see everybody around me — friends, family and neighbors — doing the same thing, I see the state keep increasing its own spending. I see it plug its budget holes with increased taxes, one-time fixes. I've been encouraged to run in the past several years, but the timing wasn't really right. I figured that enough is enough — I need to do something about this, either put up or shut up.

Melrose Patch: Getting into some of the statements on your website: you state on your website, "we must immediately make Massachusetts more attractive to employers by," amongst other things, "Repealing the recent increase in sales tax that sends their customers to other states." This November voters will likely have the chance, in the form of a ballot question, to vote on just that — to rollback the state sales tax from 6.25 percent to 3 percent. Do you support rolling back the sales tax to 3 percent and regarding your stated support of repealing the sales tax increase from 5 percent to 6.25 percent, how would you adjust or make up for the $739 million the Department of Revenue has estimated that increase has brought in to the state over 10 months?

Lucas: I wouldn't at this time be in favor of rolling it back to 3 percent, because if we did that it would keep us from being able to afford other reforms that I think are more necessary — lowering the corporate tax, unemployment insurance reforms. These are other very important things that would help businesses grow and move to Massachusetts, unemployment insurance especially. It's much higher than any of our surrounding states. We have lost business to New Hampshire and Rhode Island as a result of the sales tax increase — that's definite — but I don't think we can afford to bring it back to 3 percent right now.

How do we pay for (rolling the sales tax back to 5 percent)?  You lower spending. You don't raise taxes, because in fact we have a $2.5 billion shortfall for next year because we have reduced income coming in. I don't believe in raising taxes to plug, year-by-year, a budget gap that's created by an increase in spending. We're increasing spending next year by 3.5 percent. That's why we have a shortfall.

Melrose Patch: Is there a particular area of the budget where you know you would want to cut?

Lucas: I don't think anything's off the table, but I know Health and Human Services has had a tremendous increase in spending. So that's something we have to look at very carefully, but nothing is off the table. My only major concern would be that local aid should be the last thing to get cut, because I think that a government that governs locally governs best. I'm pretty concerned with a lot of cuts that have been made to disabled persons. I've met a lot of people knocking on doors that are in very difficult situations right now. Unlike other departments of the state, or customers of those departments who might be able to do without certain things, there are people with difficulties in Massachusetts that are disabled that really cannot. They really can't. That would probably be one of the last things I'd look at to cut, that and local aid. But other than that, everything's on the table.

Melrose Patch: That ties into the next question: you brought up local aid on your website. You said, "It is time for the state to stop punishing Melrose and Wakefield for being fiscally responsible communities. We need to immediately reform the local aid formula, which bails out the politically connected cities that cannot balance their own budgets." Can you expound on that point politically connected cities that don't do a good job of their own budgeting, how they're bailed out and how you would reform the local aid formula?

Lucas: As an example, the city of Lawrence gets about 80 percent of its budget from the state taxpayers, which is crazy. The formula is based primarily and almost exclusively on property assessments and population. So, if you have poor assessments in a big city, you get tons of money into your district. It doesn't matter how well you manage it and, in fact, I think Lawrence is a prime example of a city that not only cannot manage itself, but is actually corrupt in doing so. I think we have to add some kind of factor into the formula that rewards the communities for growth in assessments, as opposed to punishing you for growing your assessments. That's probably the best way of doing it. What it does is gives a city or town an incentive to develop itself, come out of a jam, manage itself better and be more fiscally responsible.

Melrose Patch: Among the ideas listed on your website are: expanding tax credits for hiring employees; tax deductions and tax-free earnings for contributions into college savings accounts; tax credits for working parents who must pay for early education or expensive childcare in order to make a living; and an increase the in property tax abatement, particularly for seniors and veterans. Obviously all that costs money. Is this a case where you're looking to cut the budget to find this money?

Lucas: Yes. Just as an example, if you give tax credits to working parents for kindergarten and nursery school, they're going to go to work and they're going to make income. That income is going to be taxed. So, I don't see it as being a negative on the budget, it'll either be tax neutral or it could even be a positive.

Melrose Patch: By putting these people in a situation where they can go to work, you're saying it ends up balancing out?

Lucas: There are many young parents —who are lucky enough to find a job right now — who literally cannot go to work because how much they would get at the end of the month, after paying for day care, is maybe a little bit more than staying at home. Who wants to sacrifice staying home with their child if they're only going to net say, $100 a month? It's not worth it.

Melrose Patch: Moving on to the some broader-based issues going on at the state level. Last month, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care struck a deal with state regulators to voluntarily limit its insurance rate increases for individuals and small businesses. This goes back to April when the state insurance commissioner announced he was rejecting the premium increases the industry proposed for small businesses with up to 50 employees, which he deemed "excessive," followed by the state Division of Insurance appeals board ruling against the Patrick administration in favor of Harvard Pilgrim. Is this kind of intervention a way to prevent health insurance costs from climbing higher and higher, or is this only a temporary stopgap? What can legislators do to control health care costs?

Lucas: It's only a temporary stopgap, without a doubt. I don't disagree with it; I do not think the state should be dictating how much of an increase the insurance companies can make. I thought the way this administration handled it was poor. But I am definitely in favor of the governor reaching out to the companies and trying to negotiate something during tough times. I think that's a great idea — there's nothing wrong with that at all. But it is a temporary fix. Telling a business how much it can charge its customers is not going to lower the prices. It might put them out of business, but it's not going to lower prices. If you need to lower the cost of health care, you can't just dictate the cost of health insurance. When you require everybody to buy health insurance and you require the health insurance companies to provide certain types of coverage, that literally increases the price because the demand just went skyrocketing for it.

One thing I think they should do — they somewhat touched upon this in this past fiscal year, but really went nowhere with it — is requiring providers to publish their rates online. If hospitals and doctors did that, it would give the consumer the opportunity to shop around; it would, in fact, even give the companies that are providing the insurance the opportunity to negotiate their provider rates better. Right now, there's just no incentive for somebody who has great coverage or free insurance coverage to choose a hospital. If somebody breaks their toe, they can say, 'you know what, I want to go to Mass. General, I want to go to the best doctor in the country to fix my toe. It's not costing me anything — what do I care?' When in fact, they can go to Melrose-Wakefield Hospital and have the same job done at probably, I don't want to guess numbers, much less the cost than what one of the Boston hospitals would cost. I feel if they did that and gave people incentive to shop around, it would definitely lower the cost. It wouldn't do it overnight, but it would do it over a period of time.

Melrose Patch: This year, the House indefinitely delayed on an 83-75 vote a proposal to require the state to verify that anyone over 18 who applies for state benefits is legally in Massachusetts. The amendment approved by the House prohibits the proposal from taking effect until Health and Human Services studies its impact on the state's economy and a new bill to require the verification is filed and approved. What would you have voted on this proposal and your thoughts on how the state can tackle the thorny issue of illegal immigration?

Lucas: I would have voted against sending it to Health and Human Services to make an indefinite study that's going to go absolutely nowhere, and I think it's just typical of what Beacon Hill has been doing for the last several years. Instead, they wasted all of our time discussing casinos for about three months, only to do closed-door negotiations within the last 30 days and end up giving us nothing as of July 31. I thought it was just very typical of how our state government works and, quite frankly, it really brought light to one of the reasons why I'm running,

Melrose Patch: The state passed an education bill earlier this year that targets underperforming schools, expands the authority of school superintendents in struggling districts to fire teachers, and increase both funding — and the potential for more — charter schools. What are your thoughts on this bill? Did it go far enough, not far enough, too far?

Lucas: I think it's a good start. I like the fact that it raised the cap on charter schools from, I think, 2 to 4 percent. I know the Senate version had no cap and I think they could have raised the cap much further than 4 percent. I don't understand why the state Legislature is still afraid to accept a concept that worked, that was started 20 years ago almost and has actually worked.  So I'm glad that they raised the cap. The funding formula is obviously a little better for the district schools. Over time, the district will get back 225 percent of what they lose per student from their foundation budget (over six years; previously, the district received 200 percent of its per pupil expenditure for each charter school student from that district over three years). That has always been a concern amongst school superintendents, department heads and some parents: that the charter school — specifically the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School for Melrose and Wakefield — is taking money out of the district. This sort of removes that argument, I think. The charter school is still paying for the student for six years. It could have gone further. I think they should have given a little more power to superintendents in order to handle the local labor issues. It did somewhat.

Melrose Patch: Speaking of education, what's your position on the state education board voting to adopt national academic standards in lieu of the state's own standards?

Lucas: I have two concerns with this. The first is our education system in Massachusetts is one of the best in the country. It's probably the only thing that attracts businesses to come here, because of the percentage of our population that have college degrees,  the standards that we have. It's the one thing that we've one right consistently. And we just threw it up in the air. I'm concerned that our state government is doing this just because of the possibility of a maximum of $250 million is dangling in front of its face. We're going to have a $2.5 billion shortfall next year; a quarter of a billion dollars is going to do very little, if anything. Plus, I don't think that Melrose and Wakefield will see much of a dime from that. I think it'll go again to the big cities that do not fund themselves, that do not manage their own budgets well. I was disappointed in that very much, as a parent especially. I'd like to have my kids grow up in Melrose where I live, where I grew up. I want them to be educated here and I want the best education for them. I don't believe that the national education standards are equal to or greater than what we have now, because if that were the case, we would have those standards. We would have had those standards and I would have demanded them as a parent.

My second concern about it kind of goes beyond state government. I've seen the federal government almost takeover our financial system; I've seen them take over General Motors; I've seen them try to take over the health care system; and now I see them trying to take over the education system. I think local government governs best. I think a lot of voters right now are concerned of what's happening at the federal level. I've talked to many people who have told me that.

Melrose Patch: The stock answer for any legislator, when asked about their main priority or concern on Beacon Hill, is the budget and specifically local aid. Besides the budget and local aid, what is your main priority if you are elected to the Senate?

Lucas: Making Massachusetts more attractive to business, definitely. We still have an unemployment rate that's over 9 percent. I think that's unacceptable. That's been going on too long. The only way we're going to get out of that jam is to help businesses create jobs, help them come to Massachusetts, help them grow here. The way we do that is lowering the cost of health insurance; lowering the cost of unemployment insurance; rolling back the sales tax; and rolling back the corporate tax. And, most importantly, giving businesses a more predictable financial atmosphere. Businesses need to have a long-range plan of what it's going to cost them to come here and do business here, or to be here and grow here, over a several year period. When you change the tax structure, whether it's capital gains, or corporate tax, or unemployment insurance, over and over, it's just too unpredictable.

The best example of that is what happened with the film tax credit. It was a great idea when it started out and it brought businesses here, both start-ups and large companies from California to come over here to produce movies. But once the state Legislature realized what potential tax income they could take from it, they capped the credit. That just caused many companies to say, 'well ,wait a minute, we don't know what's going to happen now over the next two to three years,' and you can't make a movie in a month. You have to have that kind of predictability to understand what's going to happen. I want to make Massachusetts more attractive to businesses by giving the state a predictable atmosphere of lower taxes that will cause companies to come here, grow and create jobs.