Allen Vander Meulen.
ADDENDUM: This article was updated on March 2 to include Vander Meulen’s campaign website.
(Editor’s note: The Lincoln Squirrel will profile Board of Selectman candidate Jennifer Glass on March 2. Click here for an earlier story about candidate Jonathan Dwyer.)
Allen Vander Meulen has been an IT executive and a minister. Now he hopes to parlay his experience in facilitating communication and “finding solutions where no one had even thought of them” into a new role as selectman in Lincoln.
Vander Meulen is competing with Jennifer Glass for the remaining one year in the term of resigning Selectman Renel Frederiksen. Also on the ballot for selectman in the March 27 town election is Jonathan Dwyer. He is running unopposed for the open seat being vacated by Selectman Peter Braun, who is stepping down after two terms.
After studying history at North Central College in Naperville, Ill., Vander Meulen spent 25 years in the information technology field in managerial and executive roles, “oftentimes fixing chaotic situations… I could come in, calm people down, and negotiate with both the IT folks and our clients,” he said. “I was good at it and I enjoyed it, but my focus was always on the people, not the technology.”
Living all over the country with his first wife, a conservative Christian, Vander Meulen attended all sorts of churches. “It gave me a real appreciation of the depth of the faith experience and the racial experience in this country,” he said. He subsequently decided to become a minister and earned his M.Div. degree from Andover Newton Theological Seminary in 2013. His father was a minister in Vermont but later became a professor of economics; “I went in the opposite direction, but it took me a lot longer to get to that point,” he observed.
Vander Meulen was a student minister at the Memorial Congregational Church in Sudbury and more recently a part-time minister at a church in Dalton, a post he is leaving in June. He has lived in the Boston area since 2006 and moved to Lincoln two years later with his wife Stephanie Smart, a chiropractor, and their seven-year-old son, who attends a private school in Lexington.
Lincoln appealed to Vander Meulen and his wife because of the open space and the town’s “leadership in zoning and conservation values,” he said. In the eight years since moving to town, he came to appreciate the supportive culture of volunteer town government.
“One thing I’ve noticed about Lincoln is that there are so many people who not only work hard at trying to build consensus and making sure people are heard, but who also really want people to succeed,” he said. He is now co-chair of the Housing Commission and expects to be involved one way or another with the South Lincoln Implementation Planning Committee. (If elected to the Board of Selectmen, he will resign from his other town positions.)
Like many Lincolnites, Vander Meulen is pondering the best way forward for the Lincoln School, which will have to be substantially repaired or replaced, most likely without state funding. “Replacing the entire structure, particularly doing it at one shot, is a bad idea,” he said.
A new school that attracts lots of young families may have unintended consequences, he added. “If we put in a big beautiful new building all at once, we could become another Sudbury,” where people move to town only for a few years and then leave once their kids are out of the house. When he was a student minister in Sudbury, “It was very apparent that was the case… people came, stayed for 12 years and moved, but people in Lincoln move here and stay,” Vander Meulen said.
Although more expensive in the long run, it would be wiser to rebuild the school a piece at a time, he said. This would also give the town a chance to adjust to changing enrollments without being “locked into a set of assumptions about how many students there will be.” An incremental approach would also lower the year-to-year cost by spreading payments over a longer period of time, Vander Meulen added, saying, “we don’t need to replace it all in the next five years or 10 years.”
Affordable housing, economic development
Affordable housing is another important issue facing Lincoln, which is in danger of falling below the state-mandated 10 percent minimum when the 2020 census is taken. “We’re right on the knife’s edge,” Vander Meulen said. If this happens, a developer could be allowed to build affordable housing as part of a large subdivision that normally wouldn’t pass zoning muster. Creating more affordable housing with incentives for accessory apartments would avoid large-scale construction while maintaining the economic diversity of Lincoln. “We need people in town other than those of us who are wealthy,” he said.
Vander Meulen is also in favor of more economic development, especially in South Lincoln, as well as measures to encourage people who visit Lincoln for one reason (such as going to Drumlin Farm) to sample other attractions such the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, or Codman Community Farm. He’d also like to make it easier for pedestrians to get from the library area to the deCordova, and along Route 117 from the police station toward Stonegate Gardens.
“When Allen approached me about running for the Board of Selectmen, I said great—not because we’ve been here forever, and not because he has any firm opinions about how Lincoln needs to change, but because he has the skill set to help the government achieve what they want to happen,” Smart said.
“I want everyone to have a seat at the table. People may sometimes be irritating, but they need to be listened to,” Vander Meulen said. “The emotion is always valid, so you need to understand why they’re feeling that way.”