City Transparency

Transparency and Visibility – Interview on July 1, 2025 with Gardner Mayor Michael Nicholson

Question: We’ve covered this a bit, but tell us again, in the last few years since you’ve been mayor, what has the city done to expand city transparency?

Answer: We’ve done a lot. Like I said, we mentioned our YouTube channel. I’ve got to give a shout out, again, you never do anything in a silo and there’s always a team behind everything you do. City Councilor Elizabeth Kazinskas is the one who started the city’s YouTube channel when she was acting mayor and that’s taken off. The views we get on that from people who are just looking to see what happens here, there’s sometimes people who would have never had the moment to go to city hall because of the time of the meeting or not even know the meeting was happening and being able to just sit and watch it. The number of people who utilize the golf course who watch the golf commission meetings always astonishes me because they actually have a chance to watch them now. That’s just one example, but it’s the city council, it’s the school committee, it’s everything down to the development review committee that’s there too. That was one of the things that when I first got elected mayor, myself, at the time, Council President Kazinskas, and at the time, school committee vice chair Pelavin, signed a directive from the three of us that all of the boards and commissions that met under our respective purviews, because I appoint most of the city’s boards and commissions, the city council president appoints the standing subcommittees of the city council, and the school committee vice chair appoints the subcommittees of the Gardner school committee, that all of those were to be filmed for upload for the city’s YouTube page so that we could get that increased transparency out there and people could actually see what’s happening. We do that with the agendas. The school committee now has their full packets posted with their agendas. The city website is constantly being updated with more information so that people can see what we’re doing. These interviews that we do with you here, the interviews I do with WGAW on a weekly basis or monthly on WPKZ, where people can know what’s going on. The mayor’s updates that we do on a monthly basis now, for now, and we’ll see what happens in the future. We got an award for transparency with the city’s project map that’s on the city’s website that’s currently being updated. There’s a lot that we’ve done in terms of transparency because that’s our main goal here in government is to make sure people know what we’re doing on their behalf, and we’ve increased it a hundredfold since I’ve been here as mayor, and I’m very proud of that.

Question: And it doesn’t hurt when you get invited to the White House to talk about Gardner, and it doesn’t hurt when you become elected the president of the Mayor’s Association, which gives you another opportunity to promote the city.

Answer: Yeah, I’ve had a lot of opportunities, and I’m very proud of that. Being President of the Massachusetts Mayor’s Association and being able to work with my colleagues around the state does, one, help boost Gardner’s profile a lot by sharing what we’re doing here in Gardner so that people are now copying us in several other locations around the state, but also bringing back ideas here to Gardner, too. Between being president of the Massachusetts Mayor’s Association, I’m a commissioner on the governor’s local government advisory commission that helps advise the administration on how the bills and proposals and initiatives that the governor’s administration issues, how they impact us here on the local level. We meet on a monthly basis with the lieutenant governor and the different cabinet secretaries to see how we can come up with the best outcome for cities and towns, no matter what the bills that are being proposed at the state level and debated in the statehouse. Working with Mark on their board as the chair now, soon to be, you know, I’m the only one who’s currently nominated for the next term of the chairmanship for the MART advisory board. Again, with Mayor Squalia as the vice chair.

Question: Gotta stop doing such a good job.

Answer: And just trying to figure out how we can get Gardner’s footprint greater in the state conversations, in our federal conversations, and in our regional conversations. If you look at the bus routes that we’ve, you know, been able to get greater feedback and make greater responses from MART, including the increased bus shelters that are in the city now at the bus stops, so they’re not just open air bus stops anymore. Getting state funding, getting federal funding, because when we’re able to tell our story, it puts the face to the name and shows that it’s not just an application that gets sent in with the other hundreds of applications that people are reading, but actually know what’s going on in the backyard.

About the “Alert Service” in Gardner from a 2023 Interview

Question: Now let’s speak about alert service. The City of Gardner has made advancements in keeping its citizens informed and alerted to potential danger and important happenings as they occur. What can you tell us about that?

Answer: Our Code Red system is something that we try to utilize a lot as a way to really get information out to the public if there’s something immediate going on. This is what we use whenever there’s a snowstorm coming and we need to let people know about a parking ban. It’s also what we utilized throughout the winter storms that we had regarding power outages that were occurring, regarding different ice events that happened before in the wintertime that were here. It’s our immediate way of letting people know what’s going on, be it a water main break, a storm coming, a public safety incident. Things of that nature is what we really use to get that out there in an immediate fashion. But we also utilize our local media stations, you know, Gardner Magazine, The Gardner News, WGAW, all of our press partners that are out there. Our city’s YouTube page is still very active in getting the actions of government into the comfort of people’s homes so that they can see what we are doing in City Hall on their behalf each and every day. At the same time, we continue our video on demand service through our cable television department. That way they have some of the older videos that are up there as well that they can pull back from. There’s a lot that we can do, and there’s more we should be doing too, and I think growing our social media presence is a goal that we have in the future. But really, you know, making sure that our website, our social media platforms are up to date, our YouTube has the latest videos that are going on, and keeping in constant contact with our partners in the media and the press to make sure that as much information we can give to the public is going out as possible.

Question: Now, in the event of an emergency, can you tell us how emergency management works in the city of Gardner?

Answer: Yes, if there’s an emergency going out right now, the first person I normally hear from is one of the two chiefs, the fire chief or the police chief. They’ll normally loop both myself and our emergency management director, Paul Topolski, in on the situation. We’ll, over the phone, figure out how best to handle it. If it’s a long-term situation like what we had with the power outages that caused people to be without heat for an extended period of time, those conversations really have everyone at the table in terms of how are we planning on moving forward with shelters, with food services, with warming centers. Those are long-term plans. If there’s an immediate situation that comes up, you know, some of those things can be handled directly by the chiefs and myself if it’s a, you know, we expect this to be a short-term situation. But for the long-term situations where you have those natural disasters or long-term planning involved, that’s when we bring everyone to the table for those.

City Transparency – from a 2023 Interview

Question: These days we all know that YouTube is a popular platform used by many throughout the country and yet Gardner is among just a unique few in the nation with weekly mayor’s updates and consistent meeting availability. What else can you tell us about what Gardner has accomplished with regard to transparency?

Answer: I think it’s something that has always been a goal of us here in City Hall and it’s something that I’ve said multiple times too is that the work we do here each and every day is work that we’re doing on behalf of the residents who put us here into these positions be it either by voting for people like myself and the City Council or by paying our salaries with all of our other employees who are here through the you know property taxes and the other money that’s being spent here in Gardner. So that’s why we want to make sure we are as transparent as we always can be. That’s why the mayor’s updates exist. We’re always looking for new ways to get information out to the public. We’re constantly trying to keep up to date on our social media platforms and our city’s website. We have an open checkbook function on the city’s website right now where you can see where every penny that is spent by the city is spent if you go to that transparency tab on the city’s website. These are all things that we’re doing to make sure people know how we’re you know keeping our fiduciary responsibility to our taxpayers here, how we’re working to build them a better community and what’s going on around the city because if you don’t know what’s happening in your own backyard then we aren’t doing our job here in City Hall.

Question: So what is the roadblock that keeps other cities and towns in the rest of the country from doing things like Gardner is doing them?

Answer: You know I don’t know because it really doesn’t take that much effort to do this. If you’re already getting the work done on the back end there’s no reason you can’t share that with the public. I think there’s a you know there may be a concern about how much time it takes or what what needs to go into getting that out there but you’ll see you’ll notice once you start with those things it’s really not as bad as it sounds and it’s really a quite a light lift to do for a lot of reward.

Question: Well let me ask you this, last year when there was an issue with taxes and you proactively got information out there so that you could explain the situation how things work in the state of Massachusetts, did it not actually make your life easier and the work easier because you’ve got less calls because you inform people ahead of time?

Answer: Oh absolutely a hundred percent and that’s one of the reasons why if you can get out in front of an issue absolutely get out in front of it as quickly as you can because the amount of calls we expected to get versus what we ended up getting as a result of the way that the statutes related to the way the taxes had to be given last year was tremendously lower than what we thought it was going to be and that’s because people already had the information we got the postcards out to the public we got the code red calls that we had the informational videos put out it’s something that we share the information and people just understood and that really helped us out.

Question: When you get together with other mayors from other cities do they give you information as to the types of calls on the number of calls that they get and can you compare that to Gardner?

Answer: Yeah you can we share that on occasion each community is different so it is a little different here and there. What I can say is different for sure when we get together with officials across the country is how they have access to the public asking questions there are certain communities that are only appointment-based rather than having an open-door policy like we have here at Gardner City Hall there are certain communities that close their doors on a certain day of the week to allow employees to catch up on efficiencies that are only available by phone which is absolutely okay in the way that work gets done at City Hall so long as you make sure you are still picking up that phone and really keeping up to date with what the public is out there it’s just ways to get your message out to the public and show what’s going on in City Hall is the biggest common factor among those conversations and it’s sharing ways that that happens that’s the best way to describe that.

Voting from a 2023 Interview

Question: Let’s talk about voting. Easy voting. There’s a lot of talk around the country about voting, accessibility, and frankly, lots of problems. Somehow, however, the city of Gardner has accomplished success in making voting an easy process. What’s the secret?

Answer: And I think this goes back to what we talked about earlier, Warner, where it’s getting the communication out there from the start. If people have questions on, you know, I want to be able to early vote, I want to be able to mail-in vote, I want to know how to do this, how to do that, where is my polling location, what time is it the polls open on election day, we’re always going to issue that information up front from the start. The new Votes Act has made it so that we are required to do mail-in validating for all local elections. The only difference between local elections and state and federal elections right now is that we aren’t required to do in-person early voting. So, answering those questions on especially where we may have a special state primary election, or excuse me, a special state senate election this year with the recent resignation of Senator Anne Goby, finding out now that we have a state election and a local election what process needs to be done, what way and when will those elections, and we know the municipal election will take place the first Tuesday of November, we don’t know when the state special election will take place yet, but when we find out we’ll get that information out as early as possible. And when you do that, people have an understanding of what to do and that’s the best thing we can do.

Question: Let’s be specific, if Gardner only had one polling place, people would have to wait longer to vote. But Gardner has a larger number of polling places for a city of its size. What can you tell us about that?

So, by state law, we are required to have a polling location either in every ward or in a ward adjacent to it. So the most Gardner could go down to is two because of the five wards that we have, you can say that there are wards and precincts adjacent to each other in at least two of those locations. But what we’ve done is we’ve made it so that every ward in the city has their own location so that people don’t have to travel far one. And like you said, we want people to vote. If people are going out to vote on their lunch break, they’re not going to spend their entire time waiting in line and still not be able to eat if they get to the ballot box within the time they have for their lunch break. If people want to vote, they should be able to vote and we should make it as easy because we’re American. And that’s the thing, that’s the tenets that our whole country was built off of, is people having a say in how their government runs and who their elected leaders are. And they shouldn’t have any roadblocks in the way of doing that. So that’s always going to be a priority that we have.

Question: By having more polling places, how much does that increase the cost of voting at each election?

We spend about $15,000 per election we have here. If it’s a state election, we’ll actually get reimbursed that funding from the state. If it’s a local election, that’s borne by the city. It adds a couple of personnel here and there to be our wardens, our clerks, and our different poll workers that are there and the officers who do the details at each location. But it’s worth every penny just to make sure that people have that right that’s guaranteed here in the United States just to go out and vote. It makes things easier for people to do it. It makes the elections more efficient and easier to run because when you have a smaller ballot count per polling location, there’s less of a margin for error that comes there because rather than having all five locations in one and having to deal with all of that with one set of staff, you have a larger staff counting a smaller portion of the overall amount of ballots that are turned in. So it really makes it more accurate and effective in your practices that are there. So it really does help in the long term.

Question: Well, maybe they’ll adopt some of Gardner’s policies on a national level.

Answer: Let’s hope. Let’s hope. Gardner’s always willing to be the trendsetter.