Open Seat ‘Golden Opportunity’ Says Island Businessman Lasker

When State Representative Eric T. Turkington (D - Falmouth) announced he was not running for re-election, Timothy Lasker of Chilmark saw “a golden opportunity to pay back the community I absolutely love.”
The New York native and 30-year Martha’s Vineyard resident also said the general tenor of the Democratic Party was “taking a very positive turn” this year, and he wanted to be a part of that. “I’m not hearing a bunch of spin doctors, I’m hearing a bunch of forward-thinking leaders of the Democratic Party wanting to change the status quo and make all our lives better.”
Mr. Lasker has had some campaign experience in serving as co-chairman of Governor Deval L. Patrick’s campaign committee on the island in 2006, but this is his first run for a state-level public office. He currently sits on the affordable housing and planning committees in his hometown.
To effectively succeed Mr. Turkington would require “a combination of building off Eric Turkington’s accomplishments and doing my own thing,” Mr. Lasker said.
The candidate has started several businesses, the latest of which is Swift Wind Energy LLC, which focuses on developing wind energy systems for residential and commercial use. He has also served as a consultant for “large bureaucratic corporations,” and he believed his expertise in the business world “gives me an understanding of how bureaucracies function, and how to work within them to create efficiencies and arrive at a consensus to achieve mutual goals.”
“The Legislature is very similar. There are established hierarchies and established procedures that all need to be taken into consideration,” he said.
Mr. Lasker’s professional résumé includes: director of production and chief cartographer for Flashmaps Publications; manager of the training department for Scitex America Corp., a vendor of high-end computer systems catering to large newspapers and magazines; editorial systems manager for Newsday; assistant publisher and director of operations for The National, a sports newspaper; founder and CEO of Digital Image Bank Service; and founder of T.W. Lasker and Associates, a consulting company specializing in business development, marketing, and management.
“This is not going to be easy,” Mr. Lasker said of his possible legislative stint. “Every time I’ve heard about someone bringing up a new idea or approach for doing something, the response has been, ‘That’s not the way it’s done on Beacon Hill.’ ”
Mr. Lasker said his marketing skills would also come in handy in combating the misconception on Beacon Hill that the region is an affluent community. “One of the goals of marketing is to make people aware of what you want them to be aware of,” he said, “and I want other legislators to know the make-up of the Cape and Islands from a socio-economic, environmental, and educational standpoint.”
“That’s what the new state representative should have as a primary goal: he should challenge other legislators to understand fully what the issues are down here,” he said.
Listen First, Make Changes Later
Education, the environment, and the economy are Mr. Lasker’s three main areas of concern, and he outlined two approaches to tackling that first topic. “The first is very simple, and that’s to be appointed to the appropriate committees” that dictate education spending, he said. The other approach: directly engage lawmakers opposed to changing the Chapter 70 formula “and figure out why they’re resisting the changes.”
“They have to have a reason, sound or not, and they have to be listened to before you can change their minds,” he said. “I hope to reason with them and make them understand that the way things are set up now is not fair or equitable.”
Mr. Lasker said any changes to education funding should not include giving charter schools their own line item in the state budget, which he believed would make it vulnerable to lawmakers that oppose charter schools. The current funding method involves redirecting state aid that would otherwise go to public schools to charter schools, that allocation based on how many students in a particular district attend the charter school.
“On the whole, charter schools have bolstered the educational process for kids” and should provide public schools with new ideas on how to improve themselves, Mr. Lasker said. He noted that his youngest son was diagnosed with dyslexia—a condition he shares—and that the innovative instruction his son received at the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School helped him overcome his difficulties in math.
In his “Readiness Project” proposal, Governor Deval L. Patrick has proposed adapting charter school techniques to use in public schools, a move Mr. Lasker supports.
Mr. Lasker’s environmental agenda includes promoting simple conservation and the development of municipally-owned renewable energy generation facilities. Chilmark is in the process of drafting bylaws for residential wind energy installations that balance homeowners’ rights “that still respect the neighbors,” but the candidate leaned more toward solar energy for residential use.
“There’s no reason you can’t put a solar panel on your house today,” he said.
Mr. Lasker was also open to large-scale land-based renewable energy facilities, but preferred multiple-source projects than sole-source, i.e., a facility that generated energy through a combination of wind, solar, and geothermal sources rather than just wind.
Such a facility could be established on the Massachusetts Military Reservation, he said. In addition to generating clean energy for the region, Mr. Lasker said the facility would create new, permanent jobs for residents. A visitors center could help draw tourists and serve to educate the public on renewable energy technology.
Any renewable energy discussion inevitably turns toward the Cape Wind project, and Mr. Lasker said that project “is without a doubt the most-asked question I’ve heard on the campaign…opponents are definitely in favor of sustainable energy, but what they’re asking is, why is this the only plan we’re looking at?”
If elected, Mr. Lasker said he would investigate whether there was a way to, through legislation, guarantee that at least a portion of the power generated by the wind farm would go directly to Cape and Islands consumers “and if there were a way to help keep our prices at a certain level over a certain period of time.”
Mr. Lasker said such a price guarantee might alleviate the “anger and hostility” the project has generated among many residents. That ill will, he said, was caused by the developers’ inadequate public outreach efforts in the project’s early stages. “It’s a venture project of huge size, with no redeeming factors to the local constituency, except creating renewable energy,” he said. “That’s not the way it has to be.”
“From the get-go, the only way a project like this should or can work properly is by building consensus,” he continued, “and consensus happens when both sides give in a bit.”
Raising Taxes: The Last Resort
In looking at his priorities for his district, the region, and the state, Mr. Lasker recognized the need to find funding sources, but said he wished to avoid “the knee-jerk reaction of raising taxes” stereotypical of Democrats.
“We as a collective group have to do that only as absolutely the last resort,” he said. “When we raise taxes, we’re not putting our thinking caps on…and once taxes occur, they never pull back.”
Mr. Lasker said revenue could be found in the existing budget simply by looking for efficiencies in state government, finding ineffective programs and redundancies that could be eliminated to free up money. When looking at any spending item in the state budget, Mr. Lasker said he would “initially assume there is a valid reason” for it, “but I would ask, is there a better was we can do this more efficiently?”
If it became necessary to generate more revenue, Mr. Lasker believed the superior approach was to bolster business activity at the local level. He was particularly keen on reinvigorating the local fishing industry through deep-water aquaculture projects, and revitalizing local farms to produce goods for sale on the Cape and Islands.
The candidate said he was “in fact-finding mode” on Mr. Patrick’s proposal to build three resort-class casinos, “and I’m not against it per se.” He called the governor’s plan “extremely well-thought-out” and said casinos “would not be inherently bad for a community or the state if handled properly.”
“I know how this game works,” Mr. Lasker said, “but I’m not stupid enough to go up to Beacon Hill and act like I know everything…I’m doing a lot of learning on this campaign so far, and I’m listening to everyone, not necessarily just the people who agree with me.”
Mr. Lasker is divorced from his wife of 27 years, Sally, who he now called “one of my bigger supporters.” They have three adult children: daughter Nicole Outsen, a third-grade teacher in New Hampshire; and sons WIll, a student at Johnson & Wales University; and Whit, who just graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago.
Mr. Lasker’s official campaign website is www.timlasker.com.