Happy New Year! Welcoming 2022
Happy New Year!
I am honored and excited to represent our Belmont community as your mayor in 2022. There is much work to be done as we continue our hard work from previous years: ensuring we remain fiscally sound, maintaining and upgrading our infrastructure such as street improvements, as well as embarking on new challenges, such as moving to district elections. All this must be done while we continue to navigate COVID and the challenges the pandemic continues to bring.
As your mayor, I’m committed to maintaining and improving those aspects of our city that make it a great place to live and work. At the city council meeting where I was unanimously voted in as mayor, I made the following remarks regarding my aspirations for us as a community:
Remarks from December 14, 2021 City Council Meeting:
Tonight is such a special night for me. I am so honored that my colleagues here on the council and our community trust me to represent Belmont as your mayor and move the council and city forward. I’ve watched three of my colleagues on this virtual dais serve in the role of Mayor over the years and I learned through each of you that we lead as a team and will continue to do so. So thank you, fellow council members and teammates.
One of the results of the pandemic is that most of us were forced to stay in our homes for longer periods of time than ever before. In fact, if you weren’t an essential worker (for whom we are very grateful), you likely spent more time at home in 2020 and even 2021 than normal. And even though society has opened up more in 2021 than in 2020, many of us now find ourselves working from home or having to stay closer to our houses and our neighborhoods than we might have before the pandemic.
In this way, the pandemic and shelter in place has really reinforced how important our HOME is. This place we live, the community we are a part of, and the neighborhoods where we spend our time. And now that we are in year three of the pandemic, it feels like the right time to intentionally reconnect to one another, to the community we love and have chosen to be a part of. Being part of a community as special as ours provides us all with a sense of belonging, of inclusion, and of purpose. The past two years have really reinforced how important Belmont — as our collective home — is to all of us who live, work, or spend time here.
My hope is that this year, we as a community can reaffirm what we love about Belmont: our diversity, our shared rich history, our beautiful parks, open spaces and hiking trails, the sports complex where we gather to play, and our neighborhoods.
We come from diverse experiences and backgrounds, but whether you’ve lived here for 60 years, 6 years, 6 months, or you are growing up here now, we all share a collective identity in that we have chosen to make our home here, in this city, and we are bonded by that.
As we in your city council progress through the next year with the usual integral operations and decisions to be made regarding our budget, public safety, road maintenance and various other civic responsibilities, I urge us all to reconnect to one another and for each of us to find ways to enhance and appreciate those aspects of Belmont—our home—that we cherish so much.
If you weren’t able to join the meeting that night, portions of the swearing in and my remarks to our community can be watched here:
Julia swearing-in.mp4 - Google Drive
I’m looking forward to working together and all that 2022 brings for our community!