Wey Wants To Put 25-Year Record To Work For Cape & Islands

Roger W. Wey of Oak Bluffs has been a fixture of town and county government on Martha’s Vineyard for more than 20 years. Now he’s looking to tackle state government.
“For the last 25 years I’ve helped people through public service, and I want to continue that,” Mr. Wey said. “I have the experience and the know-how to get things done.”
That experience comes primarily from a 21-year stint on the Oak Bluffs Board of Selectmen and eight concurrent years on the Dukes County Board of County Commissioners, and Mr. Wey is hoping to put that background to good use as the new state representative of the Barnstable, Dukes, and Nantucket District.
He called the departing State Representative Eric T. Turkington (D - Falmouth) “a good friend” and said he never would have considered running had Mr. Turkington chosen to run for a 10th term. “I have the greatest respect in the world for Eric,” he said.
While Mr. Wey wants to build on Mr. Turkington’s considerable body of work in the Legislature, he was advised by Mr. Turkington himself to find his own path. “When I first announced I was running, I said I would carry on Eric’s legacy,” he said, “and Eric said I should have my own legacy.
“But Eric Turkington was a team player. He represented himself very well in his community. He always made his opinions known, and I would like to carry on similarly,” Mr. Wey said. “I want to emulate his style of doing things, not his accomplishments.”
Taxes, Not Casinos
Mr. Wey has identified several issues facing residents in Falmouth and on the Islands alike, but before any of those can be addressed, the first step is to nail down funding sources.
Addressing water quality, which Mr. Wey regarded as “the top issue” for the region, has an advantage over other issues thanks to the recently passed Clean Water Act, which includes a zero-interest loan program through the State Revolving Fund. The loans are available to municipalities interested in reducing nutrient loading through sewering and other measures.
For other issues, Mr. Wey proposed new taxes that were appropriate to the area in need of funding. Affordable housing initiatives, for example, could be funded through a surcharge on real estate transactions, and health and human service programs could be funded by expanded “sin taxes” on tobacco and alcohol sales. “Both of those activities put people in the hospital,” he said, “so they should be taxed to fund healthcare.”
He also supported an idea that was recently rejected by the state: establishing toll booths on Route 93 near the New Hampshire border to fund transportation infrastructure maintenance. “That’s an opportunity for us,” he said, noting that on the New Hampshire side of the border “toll roads are everywhere.”
Funding education could come down to reallocating existing resources, Mr. Wey said, pointing out that the state’s Chapter 70 education aid formula has remained unchanged since 1993, even though it was supposed to be updated in Fiscal Year 2000. Chapter 70 was reformulated in 1993 to direct additional aid to school districts in poorer, urban districts and as a result, growth communities in areas with high property values but relatively low income levels were shortchanged.
Before sinking any money into Governor Deval L. Patrick’s “Readiness Project,” a package of proposals designed to improve public education in Massachusetts, Mr. Wey said state resources should first be dedicated to addressing state aid.
“It’s a good idea, but we need more input from educators, because there’s not enough information to back up a lot of what the governor is proposing,” he said. In speaking with local teachers, Mr. Wey said their immediate concerns were additional funding for preschool programs and to add teaching staff.
He balked at the idea of funding education through bonding, “because floating bonds catches up with you in the long run,” and he opposed generating revenue through expanded casino gaming. “That’s making money off the backs of people who shouldn’t even be there,” he said, believing that the resulting social ills—namely gambling addiction—would not be worth any financial gains.
Regardless of where the funding comes from, Mr. Wey warned that “these changes are not going to happen overnight,” indicating that the first step would be to change legislators’ misperception of the Cape and Islands as an affluent region.
“Their mentality is, ‘You’re all rich down there, look at all the big houses down there,’ ” he said, “but there’s so much unemployment, people have left the island in droves.”
Mr. Wey’s way of changing lawmakers’ image of the Cape: “Bring people down here and show them what goes on here,” particularly in the off-season when the local economy is at its slowest “and a lot of people are out of work…it’s all about education, and the only way I see to make [legislators] understand is to bring them down here physically.”
Once that understanding is achieved, Mr. Wey said it would be easier to direct state resources to the region, and that included maintaining the earmarks Mr. Turkington regularly secured for local projects. However, Mr. Wey indicated he had “mixed feelings” on the use of earmarks, torn between the desire to allot funding in a more open manner than attaching earmarks to the budget and the need to bring much-needed funding to the area.
The candidate was not at all on the fence on the topic of the Cape Cod Wind project. He approved of the project’s concept but not its location in Nantucket Sound. He instead supported a land-based wind farm on the Massachusetts Military Reservation, which he said would be “simple to build and maintain.”
He also preferred renewable energy projects owned by municipalities or private citizens rather than profit-driven corporations. He also advocated pursuing renewable energy on a regional basis, “which is the way we do things on Martha’s Vineyard, and that’s the way to do things: as a team, working together.”
Mr. Wey noted that the project is now awaiting a final record of decision by the US Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service, with that decision tentatively coming this winter. “The decision is out of our hands…if it went through, if it’s approved, then that’s the end.”
He added that he would “try to make this work the best I can” for Cape and Islands residents by working with the Cape Wind Associates, and was open to the idea of requesting earmarks in the state budget to promote eco-tourism in conjunction with the facility. “If it’s going to bring money in, why not?”

Fighting Unfairness
Additional tourism money would benefit the region, but Mr. Wey said improving residents’ quality of life required more than simply putting more money in their pockets. He referred to the growing need for more primary care physicians in the region, explaining that the shortage was, on a larger scale, due to the draw of shorter hours and higher pay for specialists, and locally by the lack of affordable housing for new doctors.
According to Mr. Wey, a loan forgiveness program, in which new doctors receive a break on their loans in exchange for working in an underserved area for a period of time, could alleviate the problem locally. With less money going toward loans, he said, new doctors could better afford to live on the Cape.
The trick to drawing these doctors to the Cape and Islands would be in ensuring that the state designated the region as “underserved,” and Mr. Wey said if elected, he would work with lawmakers to make sure the Cape was not slighted.
He also planned to work with legislators and state officials to revise the state-run FAIR (Fair Access to Insurance Requirements) Plan, which he deemed “the un-FAIR plan” for Cape and Islands homeowners. The plan of last resort sets its rates based on proprietary storm models that are not subject to public scrutiny, and those models have led to significant rate hikes for the region.
Mr. Wey noted that Massachusetts has not been hit by a named storm since Hurricane Bob in 1991, “so what does the state do with all our money when there are no hurricanes?”
“There’s a lot of unfairness around, and who does it affect? The less fortunate and those who can’t pay their bills. It shouldn’t be this way,” he said.
“I have an open mind, common sense, and I listen to what people have to say,” Mr. Wey said. “I’ve stood alone a lot of times for what I felt were the right reasons. I’ve made a lot of hard decisions, popular and unpopular, and that’s the hard part. The easy part is being true to the people you represent.”
Mr. Wey grew up in Winthrop before moving to Martha’s Vineyard, where he and his wife raised their seven children, all of them graduates from Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. He is the owner of Wey Construction Company on the Vineyard.
Mr. Wey’s official campaign website is www.rogerwey.com.