Sallee Lipshutz - VP

I am a strong supporter of the Area Council idea of participation in government at no dollar cost to the voter. I have been actively involved with the other working members of the ad hoc committee that organized the Waban Area Council, meeting monthly for over a year, helping to address many issues of concern to Waban citizens by facilitating communication between the City’s executive and legislative branches and Waban’s residents.

I have been leading the ad hoc monthly meetings of the group for the past six months, demonstrating both the organizational and leadership skills to manage this collaborative community organization. I am committed to the principle of transparency over expediency; I believe in community participation, along with its concomitant burden of reaching community consensus versus imposing political ideology; and I value opinions of all members of the community.

I also feel strongly that an Area Council cannot be a single issue organization and that to be an effective Councilor, a candidate must be willing and able to attend myriad meetings at City Hall that specifically affect Waban’s interests and to bring information from those meetings back to the community. Our group has been working with the Ward 5 Aldermen and City professionals to bring details of complex issues to the citizens of our Village, helping, for example, to provide updates on such issues as Angier’s reconstruction, Zervas’s expansion, Route 9/Route128 intersection’s mitigation, and Riverside’s traffic and infrastructure impacts on Waban.

I have lived in Newton since 1972, the most recent 34 years in Waban. A native of Trenton, New Jersey, I have also resided in Chicago, Durham (NC), and Philadelphia. I am Executive Vice-President of Regulatory Research Corporation, a consulting firm run with my husband, Nelson. It is also in Waban that Nelson and I raised our three children, all of whom attended the Newton Public Schools.

Over and above my involvement with the Waban Area Council, I have been a participant in the public life of Waban and the broader Newton community for four decades. I have served as a member of Newton’s Cultural Affairs Commission and co-chaired Springfest. I was active in the Countryside, Angier, and Newton South PTO’s, and served as President of the Brown Junior High School PTO. I also was President of the Congregation Mishkan Tefila PTA; edited the synagogue newsletter for three years and served on the synagogue Board of Directors as a general member as well as Vice-President of the Congregation. I am a graduate of Bryn Mawr College where I was Editor of my college yearbook and Class President. I have also worked in a Community Mental Health Center in Chicago and did graduate studies at the University Of North Carolina School Of Public Health, Chapel Hill, in the Epidemiology of Mental Illness.