John O'Leary running for Lida Harkins' Open Representative Seat

John O'Leary

Lida Harkins will not seek re-election for the 13th Norfolk House seat she has held for over 20 years, opting instead to run for the Norfolk, Bristol & Middlesex Senate seat previously held by Senator Scott Brown. Open seats held by an incumbent for this long tend to attract many candidates when they finally open up.

• John O’Leary (R)
• Jerry Wasserman (facebook) (D)
• Denise Garlick (D)
• Gary McNeil (facebook) (D)
• Joshua Levy (facebook) (R)

Who are these candidates?

Jerry Wasserman and Denise Garlick are both long serving Needham Selectmen. McNeil and Levy are new to politics. John O’Leary was the leader of a number of state agencies under Governor Romney and is a nationally recognized expert on government efficiency. Even in this field, that includes two accomplished public servants, John O’Leary is a standout candidate.

John O’Leary

John O’Leary is a nationally recognized expert on making government more efficient.

In 2004 he won the Pioneer Institute’s Better Government Competition for his ideas on reforming the Civil Service system in Massachusetts. He’s also a research fellow at the Ash Institute of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

He blogs about making government more efficient at the Ash Institute’s “Better, Faster Cheaper” blog. They are full of really great practical ideas for how to help government provide better services at lower cost.

For example, he promotes the establishment of 311 systems, where citizens can call in to request public services. Or putting better communication systems on municipal vehicles ( like cameras and GPS ) to improve services. He has a nice short article about 5 ways to use technology to improve government services.

He’s a co-author of If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government. It gets 5 stars on Amazon, and has many rave reviews, and many from national political leaders, like this one from Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson:

A clear-eyed look at how to get the best out of our public institutions. Instead of easy answers, the authors offer practical suggestions for successful execution in a very challenging and complex environment. A must-read for political leaders.

You can hear him talk about his book in a video here. He comes off as very practical and very knowledgeable.

He has many opinion pieces published in national newspapers, like the Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. Here are two I could find:

• The Washington Post, about how governments can solve big problems
• The Harvard Business Review – about how to deal with voter’s lack of confidence in government
• Commonwealth Magazine – about unemployment insurance reform
• Commonwealth Magazine – about reforming civil service rules

O’Leary was also on CSpan last month talking about ways in which governments can succeed or fail and the lessons for our own government.

One of the things that’s really striking about O’Leary’s world view is that he focuses on how you make big projects successful, as something different from the decision about whether the program itself is the best way to solve a problem. He’s surprisingly non-political about his approach to problems. He seems to be data and results driven. He approaches solving government problems from an engineering perspective – which is not surprising for an MIT graduate.

O’Leary is a long time Needham resident, and a member of the Needham School Committee. But he’s also no stranger to state level politics. He was leader of three state agencies under Governor Romney. He was:

• Commissioner of the Division of Unemployment Assistance
• Chairman of the the Civil Service Commission
• Assistant Secretary for Administration and Finance

O’Leary graduated from Needham High School in 1980, and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He was a Vice President at Scudder Kemper Investments and the Director of Business Process Reengineering at Lycos.

O’Leary is clearly the leading Republican candidate. As it stands now, it’s likely that O’Leary will be competing against either Garlick or Wasserman in the general election. Massachusetts doesn’t often get someone of this caliber running for State Representative. We need more of this kind of creative problem solving in the Legislature.

Jerry Wasserman

Jerry Wasserman

Jerry Wasserman has been serving in Needham politics for years. He’ has been Selectman for 11 years, on the School Committee for 9, and he has been a member and past president of the Suburban Coalition for 14 years. The Suburban Coalition is a statewide organization which advocates for the needs of municipalities to the state. They are one of the organizations which tries - for example – to protect state local aid and chapter 70 funds to municipalities.

He has been involved in three other statewide organizations which advocate for municipalities and local officials:

• Local Government Advisory Committee
• Massachusetts Municipal Association
• Massachusetts Selectman’s Association

So one great thing about Jerry Wasserman is that he has already been dealing with statewide issues for years. He knows the problems that our towns have with funding critical services – like schools –  and has had to deal with statewide budget issues. He’s a strong proponent of increasing local aid.

Denise Garlick

Denise Garlick

Denise is a Needham Selectman, and a member of many local Needham especially related to health ( Needham Board of Health, Needham Coalition for Suicide Prevention, Neehan Opportunities, Neeham Emergency Management Committee, Neeham CARES, Needham League of Women Voters etc. ) She certainly seems like the kind of person who is involved in bettering the lives of people around Needham.

She is a member and a past president of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, a union for nurses. The MNA is a supporter of a number of bills that would mandate minimum staffing levels for nurses and bills which would outlaw replacing nurses with less trained, lower cost health care workers for some jobs. They are also one of the unions that fight against efforts to reform health insurance for state workers. They also advocate a bill which would establish a state funded Nursing Advisory Board. It’s worth looking at their legislative priorities. I don’t know enough about the particulars of these bills and if they would benefit the general population, but these bills are, to a large extent, designed to benefit the profession of nursing.

She was a strong supporter of the MNA separating from the ANA. This is part of an effort by a number of large state level nurses’ unions for forming a new national nursing 150,000 member “super-union” by joining together the MNA with the California Nurses Association, and the United American Nurses Association. One of the main reasons for the split was because the ANA did not support the “safe staffing” bills proposed by these subsidiary unions.

Proponents of “Safe Staffing” say that, with hospitals under pressure to cut costs, that patients are put in danger by low staffing levels and by exposing patients to health care workers with less training. Opponents of the “safe staffing” bills counter that these union concessions, which remove flexibility to make reasonable staffing changes to lower cost staff for jobs that don’t require as much medical training. I’m not sure how much these bills benefit patients – but one thing is for sure – it benefits nurses. There really isn’t any grass root citizen support for these measures. It’s something promoted by the nurses’ unions.

Gary McNeil

Gary McNeil

Gary McNeil is also a lifelong Needham resident. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts’ Wallace E. Carroll School of Management and a MBA in finance from Boston College. Before earning his MBA, he worked for the City of Boston Elections Division and with the Massachusetts State Lottery. He has also been a 3M sales executive for 15 years.

He is a conservative Democrat who is opposed to raising taxes. And he cites that he is a big proponent of public education, because he still has kids in the public schools. His priorities are education, the economy and jobs.

Joshua Levy

Joshua Levy

Joshua Levy is a clinical research assistant conducting language research among stroke patients at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston University. He is a lifelong Needham resident. He received degrees in linguistics and music from McGill University in Montreal.

He’s a fiscal conservative, free-market Republican. He believes that when governments impose constraints on markets that this leads to inefficiency and waste.  He seems like a student of Austrian economics.

His approach to improving the economy would be by lowering the commercial tax rate and to improve education, especially for Massachusetts growth areas like science, technology and health care. He would either reduce the sales tax back to 5% or ensure that the additional funds are directed to needed services.

Updated: John O’Leary sent me more references to his articles and TV appearances.

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