Vincent Cannistraro
Editor’s note: This is being published simultaneously with a profile of Peter Braun.
By Alice Waugh
For Vincent Cannistraro, how things get decided in town is just as important—maybe more so—than the actual decision.
“I think the town could benefit from a more collaborative approach in the ways we do things sometimes, whether it’s the schools, the Route 2 project or anything,” said Cannistraro, who’s running against incumbent Peter Braun for a three-year seat on the Board of Selectmen. “I just feel we could do a better job of making people feel heard and being more up front. I’m more about process than about one particular issue.”
Cannistraro, 48, has lived in Lincoln for 13 years and has three children, two of whom are students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, where he serves on the advisory council. He is also president of Lincoln Youth Soccer. Earlier this year, he served on the School Building Advisory Committee (SBAC), which was formed to recommend pathways after the $49 million “preferred option” for renovating and adding on to the Lincoln School did not garner enough support at Town Meeting to move ahead.
The SBAC concluded in its report (Lincoln Squirrel, Nov. 21, 2013) that the schools did in fact need almost everything outlined in the statement of interest (the document submitted to request state funding for some of the construction costs). But Cannistraro, citing his background in construction and engineering, still believes the school’s problems could be addressed without a project of the size that was rejected.
“Don’t tell me that a new school costs $50 million and to repair the school is going to cost $30 or $40 million. Be honest with me,” said Cannistraro, who worked for 21 years at J.C. Cannistraro, the Watertown construction company his father founded in 1963. He has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Tufts University and a graduate certificate from Harvard Business School.
“I’m not sitting here saying the best thing to do with the schools is ‘new’ or ‘repair’ or ‘nothing’,” he said. “My issue is that the town should make an informed decision.”
Residents need to see a “simple and straightforward” document that outlines the costs and benefits of various repair and construction options, Cannistraro said. “If we want a nice cafeteria, it will cost this much, or we could have breakout rooms in just the lower school, or just the middle school,” he said. “We could have an A and a B and a C… but they really fought that way of thinking.”
SBAC chair allegations
The SBAC’s operations were also not as transparent as they should have been, said Cannistraro. “If you look at makeup of the committee, it was picked to the path of least resistance. They picked a lot of people who wanted the preferred option,” he said. Additionally, he said, SBAC chair Steven Perlmutter was called and asked to be chair before the group had met for the first time.
But Perlmutter disputed that notion, noting that he voted against the preferred option at Town Meeting. Although he said he was “called by a couple of people who said ‘you should be on this [SBAC] committee, or you should be chair’,” he said he was initially reluctant because he was not experienced in serving on town panels but eventually decided to “throw my hat in the ring” as a public service.
“I don’t recall anybody, including myself, expressing that they wanted to be chair of the committee” when members went around the room at the first meeting, he said, adding that the vote to elect him as chair was unanimous, to the best of his recollection.
Asked if he supported the findings in the SBAC’s final report, Cannistraro said he was “quite disappointed in the first version,” saying it “made it look like we’re on the take from the School Committee.” He expressed concern to SBAC chair Steve Perlmutter, who “did a good job considering the position he was in… he did legitimately try to address any concerns that I raised,” he said.
“I worked very hard to make the second version at least somewhat more sensible,” Cannistraro said. “Little by little, we took out a lot of the dogma and replaced it with wording that I thought was more accurate and responsible.” While he was not completely happy with the final result, he “decided it was better to be part of the team,” he said.
Route 2 controversy
Given the controversy over the tree-cutting for the Route 2 project, Cannistraro said he “finds it ironic” that Conservation Commission co-chair Peter Von Mertens wrote a letter to the editor of the Lincoln Squirrel in support of Braun’s reelection. “If I were on the Conservation Commission, I’d be fit to be tied,” said Cannistraro, who wrote in his own letter to the editor that the tree-cutting was “the single biggest conservation tragedy that Lincoln has seen in over 50 years” and that “town oversight was sorely lacking when it was needed most.”
Cannistraro also expressed concern about a September 2013 Boston Globe report on single-family home prices in Massachusetts that showed Lincoln’s median home sales price dropped by more than 13 percent from 2005 to 2013 while prices in other nearby towns either did not decrease by as much or even rose over the same period.
“It’s been a tough economy and housing values have gone down, but Lincoln seems to have gone down more, relative to our peers. Have we been losing ground?” he said. “What that tells me is that the town be a little bit more diligent in looking at other ways to do things.”