Here are the remarks I gave last night when letting my committee know my decision to recuse:
After the School Committee meeting on October 15th, several individuals wrote into the SpeakUp Natick portal requesting that I recuse myself from voting on the possible closure of Johnson. The substance of these messages, sent to the full committee, carried a familiar refrain. The messages - often using the same language – said some version of the following:
Catherine Brunell should recuse herself from deliberating and voting on the closure of Johnson because she lacks objectivity, as her children go to school there and she is from that neighborhood.
I asked myself the question if there was any merit to the request for me to recuse myself and started to do some research about why people recuse
From what I can tell from the minutes, in Natick, It’s never happened before - not with the Kennedy, Wilson or the High School - not even for members whose children were to attend the future rebuilt school or who lived in physical proximity to these schools.
There was no historic precedent to the sentiment that I should be recusing myself because my children could possibly be impacted. That makes a lot of sense to me and to many other people I have spoken to b/c individuals run for School Committee and local office because they are interested in local issues, which oftentimes impact them and their neighbors personally, as local issues are – by their nature – local.
Nevertheless - I received another request, this time from someone who gave her name, is a town meeting member and on the Zoning Board of Appeals. I called her and asked her why she made the request. What she said about proximity and zoning had merit so just to be quite certain I reached out to the Massachusetts School Committee Association. Their advice was that any time there is a potential conflict in matters like this one can use the ethics commission to determine what one ought to do.
I want to be clear - I did not have to call the commission but I chose to because I wanted the certainty that only that body - the State Ethics Commission - could provide: that my vote could not be challenged under an ethics complaint or eventually end in an ethics violation.
Based on precedent in Natick and what most other public officials have told me, The answer I received was at once unexpected and illustrative of a broader point.
The unexpected part is that I must recuse myself from the discussion and vote on Johnson, but not because my kids go there or because I can’t be objective. Instead, the Ethics Commission ruled that I need to recuse because of a presumed financial impact on our home, and therefore, I have a personal financial stake in the decision.
You can imagine I asked 100 questions, asked several posed by our own School Committee lawyer and our chair. The consistent answer was that the ruling is binding and that I would need to pay for “an independent real estate appraisal” which would need to specifically say that the closure of Johnson would have no impact on our home value. The attorney explained they need “a serious document with careful analysis.”
So for the last day, my husband and I have called appraisers and loan agents who could provide just such an analysis or help explain the process. The real estate appraisers have more questions than I have answers (what is going in place of the school, when will the school close and where will the kids eventually go to school?). I also learned that appraisers appraise the current value of your home right now, not the future value or a future decision.
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So that brings me to my decision to recuse. In the community forums we were pointed to research that identifies that school closures do negatively impact home values (maybe as much as 7.2%), tonight, you may hear the opinion of the assessor's office that he “very hesitant to say that the closing of the school will decrease values in that neighborhood.” I know this because we wondered if the ethics commissioner would accept the assessor's letter as proof that I could participate. It does not qualify.
To me, this gives all of us a reason to pause and to try to better understand what the impact might actually be about losing a school in the downtown area. I am bound to recuse myself by law and it is my hope - speaking only as a member of this community now - that because my colleagues who are bound by different laws when they vote, will seek to understand the full impact - to our homes, and more importantly our children - in much more detail before taking any action.
Julie - thank you for going on this roller coaster with me the last few days and thank you for letting me explain my decision.