NEWS

THE TUFTS DAILY

VOLUME LXXXI, ISSUE 5

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MASS.

Thursday, sepTember 16, 2021

tuftsdaily.com

Lungo-Koehn and Falco to face off in Medford mayoral election, Mbah to take on Ballantyne in Somerville

by Alexander Thompson

Assistant News Editor

Somerville

Two Somerville city councilors look set to face off in the November’s general election for mayor to replace longtime Mayor Joe Curtatone after an extremely close preliminary election that saw first and third place separated by only 415 votes.

At-large City Councilor Will Mbah led the field with 4,498 votes, 30.07%, followed by Ward 7 City Councilor Katjana Ballantyne with 4,162 votes, 27.82%, according to preliminary results released by the city’s elections department.

Ballantyne edged out former City Auditor and Cambridge Health Alliance executive Mary Cassesso by just 79 votes, less than one percentage point.

William Tauro, the publisher of the Somerville News Weekly, picked up 2,215 votes, 14.81%.

Only the top two candidates, Mbah and Ballantyne, both Democrats, will advance to the general election on Nov. 2.

Slightly more than 15,000 people voted in the preliminary election, nearly three times the number of voters who turned out in 2019 when Curtatone and a leftwing challenger advanced into the general election.

Somerville’s Ward 7 city council seat, which includes much of the Somerville half of Tufts’ campus, also saw an intensely competitive race with Judy Pineda Neufeld (A’05), a consultant

see SOMERVILLE, page 2

ALEXANDER THOMPSON, TUFTS DAILY City Councilor Will Mbah leads all candidates in the Somerville mayoral preliminary election.

ALEXANDER THOMPSON, TUFTS DAILY Incumbent Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn leads all candidates in the Medford mayoral preliminary election.

Medford

Incumbent Breanna Lungo-Koehn and City Councilor John Falco came out on top of Tuesday’s three-way preliminary election and will advance to November’s general election for the Medford mayorship.

Lungo-Koehn netted 3,968 votes, 47.3%, to Falco’s 2,896 votes, 34.5%, according to unofficial results from the city clerk’s office. John Petrella, a retail consultant, received 1,431 votes, 17.1%, and was eliminated.

“I am grateful for the strong vote of confidence from the people of Medford in today’s preliminary election,” LungoKoehn said in a statement Tuesday night. “In every corner of the City, people from all different backgrounds responded to our positive message of progress and possibilities for our entire community.”

Falco said that the results reflected the city’s desire for change in a tweet after the results were announced.

“I can’t wait to continue to share my vision for a better Medford with you as we make our way towards the election in November,” he said.

Almost the entirety of Lungo-Koehn’s tenure has been dominated by the city’s response to the pandemic after she narrowly beat the previous mayor, Stephanie Muccini Burke, in 2019.

The incumbent has touted that response in her election campaign, focusing on the support her administration gave to small businesses.

see MEDFORD, page 2

Social media app Fuzemee gains over 350 student ambassadors at Tufts, raises $800,000 in seed round

by Flora Meng

News Editor

Fuzemee, the social media app created by Tufts acceptant Christopher Tsetsekos and beta-tested in March 2021, has raised over $800,000 in seed round investments, and recruited over 350 Tufts students as ambassadors for the platform.

According to Tsetsekos, Fuzemee allows students to meet new friends, find compatible roommates and discover events around campus. Tsetsekos was originally accepted to the Class of 2024, but has now opted to take a second gap year to pursue Fuzemee’s development.

In detailing his inspiration for the app, Tsetsekos described the lack of a centralized communication platform that caters to college students and how Fuzemee can bridge that gap.

“It’s just mind boggling how some leaders still use email lists or post the same message in multiple Facebook groups,” Tsetsekos said. “On Fuzemee, it’s a lot more efficient. If a student wants to just select one class year’s [events], they can do so right on Fuzemee rather than having to enter a whole new different page on Facebook.”

Currently, Fuzemee also has an extended ambassador network that works to spread its reach across college campuses nationwide, including over 350 Tufts students and 5,500 nationwide, according to Tsetsekos.

Matt Lane, a Tufts ambassador for Fuzemee, discussed his role in working with the platform.

“Now that I’m in my fourth year here, I know a lot of people that run clubs or are presidents of fraternities and sororities, and so I’m able to be a main point of contact between the social life on campus and the people that work at Fuzemee,” Lane, a senior, said.

Lane described how Tufts students have responded to the app’s launch and features.

“I think a lot of kids are really excited about it,” Lane said. “I think Facebook is what a lot of [student organizations] use or they use email chains, and the feedback I’ve gotten is not a lot of people use Facebook … so I think Fuzemee is a really strong solution to that issue and will hopefully help clubs with tasks, expand their outreach and streamline their communication.”

Alexa Amorosino, another Fuzemee ambassador, shared how the app had a positive effect on her class as they were trying to make social connections during the pandemic-limited year.

“[Last year], it was so hard to meet people … and we had really limited stuff that we could do,” Amorosino, a sophomore, said. “We were always talking about how there should be an app on college campuses to plan events that have invites to public and private events. And then Fuzemee literally is that and we were like yes, finally this app is here, we want to be a part of this.”

Madeline Delaney, another campus ambassador, discussed some of the next steps that the team is taking to help promote Fuzemee across campus.

MICHELLE LI / THE TUFTS DAILY

A student scrolls through Fuzemee.

see APP, page 2

SPORTS / back It’s great to be #1: men’s soccer knocks off Williams, Wesleyan

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Madeleine aitken Editor in Chief

— EDITORIAL —

MARIEL PRIVEN KATE SEKLIR

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The Tufts Daily is a nonprofit, independent newspaper, published Monday through Friday during the academic year, and distributed free to the Tufts community. The content of letters, advertisements, signed columns, cartoons and graphics does not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Tufts Daily editorial board. EDITORIALS Editorials represent the position of The Tufts Daily. Individual editors are not necessarily responsible for, or in agreement with, the policies and editorials of The Tufts Daily. OP-EDS The Op-Ed section of The Tufts Daily, an open forum for campus editorial commentary, is printed Monday through Thursday. The Daily welcomes submissions from all members of the Tufts community; the opinions expressed in the Op-Ed section do not necessarily represent the opinions of the Daily itself. Opinion articles on campus, national and international issues should be 600 to 1,200 words in length and submitted to opinion@tuftsdaily.com. The editors reserve the right to edit letters for clarity, space and length. All material is subject to editorial discretion and is not guaranteed to appear in the Daily. Authors must submit their telephone numbers and day-of availability for editing questions. ADVERTISING All advertising copy is subject to the approval of the Editor in Chief, Executive Board and Business Director. continued from page 1 for nonprofits, leading Becca Miller, who works for a food policy nonprofit, 934 votes to 902 votes, or 37.2% to 35.9%. Alex Anderson, a healthcare researcher, was eliminated from the race after receiving 354 votes, 14.1%.

This is the first local Somerville election in 26 years in which Curtatone’s name did not appear on the ballot.

The mayor was first elected to the city council, then called the Board of Aldermen, in 1995, before being elected mayor in 2003.

Mbah, who appeared to be in position to replace Curtatone on Tuesday, has positioned himself as the furthest left in a deep-blue city that gave over 85% of its votes to Joe Biden. Mbah is touting endorsements from the Sunrise Movement, Boston Democratic Socialists of America and Our Revolution Somerville, a Bernie Sandersaffiliated political group.

Mbah has pledged to up the percentage of affordable housing units developers are required to include in development projects, cut the police budget and implement a mandatory recycling and composting program.

Mbah immigrated to the United States from Cameroon in 2011 and would be the first Black person to lead the city. He was elected to the city council in 2017.

Mbah thanked his supporters early Wednesday morning and said he would continue to share his vision for the city in the lead up to the general election.

“My heart is full Somerville,” Mbah wrote in a tweet. “Thank you to everyone who put their time and energy into making this result possible.”

Ballantyne was elected to the city council in 2013 and has since served two terms as the body’s president.

Ballantyne, who immigrated to Somerville with adoptive parents from Greece as a young person, has tried to position herself as the climate candidate, frequently highlighting her work authoring the city’s Green New Deal and stringent building energy efficiency requirements while on the city council.

In a statement on Tuesday night, Ballantyne thanked Somerville voters and said she looked forward to the campaign for the general election.

“We’ve shown that Somerville voters want the next mayor to share our progressive values, be an inclusive leader, and have the skills and experience to lead our dynamic city on day one,” she said.

One barometer of the candidates’ political position in leftwing Somerville, Ballantyne supported Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary while Mbah backed Bernie Sanders.

Tauro, a fierce critic of Curtatone who wielded his newspaper as a cudgel against the mayor with little regard for fact-checking or journalistic convention, said that he voted for Donald Trump in 2016, though he later said he regretted the vote, according to Boston.com.

Tauro’s central campaign planks were the removal of a bus-only lane on Broadway and an increase in the number of parking spaces.

Tauro, though he received less than 15% of the vote, announced on Facebook that his campaign will contest the primary election results due to alleged fraud.

“Due to the many discrepancies and alleged mishandling of the election ballots and results, the Tauro Campaign is pursuing legal action and an investigation into the several matters that appear questionable,” Tauro wrote in a post.

APP

continued from page 1

“[Tsetsekos] and the other Fuzemee guys are coming in a week or so to campus, and I think their physical presence will help bring …a lot of attention to the app once they’re physically here to talk and meet with people,” Delaney, a sophomore, said.

Tsetsekos elaborated on Fuzemee’s present and future plans for ambassadors as well as its current reach at Tufts.

“We’re hoping to incentivize our ambassadors in the future with paid compensation to refer the app to their friends,” Tsetsekos said. “As of now, all they do is promote the app to their social media channels. Since yesterday, in about 12 hours of launching [the app] at Tufts, we attracted over 10% of the whole Tufts undergraduate student body to sign up on Fuzemee … so it’s around 600 students who have signed up to our app in just the second half of the day.”

In reflecting upon Fuzemee status as a social media app in the market, Tsetsekos emphasized its focus on college needs from the perspective of college students.

“Fuzemee is unique because it was created by college students for college students,” Tsetsekos said. “Tufts is the first school that we have launched [at], and we’re using this [opportunity] more or less as a pilot to learn from our user base and to keep improving our product so we can expand to other schools with better functionality than we had before.”

MEDFORD

continued from page 1

However, Lungo-Koehn’s administration has also been wracked by a number of scandals in recent months, including the resignation of the budget director, a Black woman who accused the mayor of creating a hostile environment, as reported by the Medford Transcript .

The city’s director of veterans’ services also accused the mayor’s administration of not paying him for five months of work and demanded an ethics investigation around the same time, the paper reported.

Falco, who served on the city’s school committee from 2010 to 2015 before being elected to the city council, has focused on the city’s development and how it will spend millions of dollars in federal money from the American Rescue Plan.

Medford voters chose between 14 candidates for school committee. Each voter chose six candidates, and 12 advanced to the general election.

Incumbents Mea Quinn Mustone, Jenny Graham, Paul Ruseau and Melanie McLaughlin, as well as newcomers Sharon Hays and Andrew Milne, led the election with between 8.2% and 5.41% of the vote.

Notably, all six of those candidates are backed by the progressive group Mobilize Medford.

Incumbents Kathleen Kreatz and Paulette Van der Kloot placed seventh and eighth and will advance to the general election along with Robert Emmett Skerry, Cheryl Rodriguez, Colin Walsh and William Giglio.

Darlene Mattuchio and Kerry Laidlaw placed 13th and 14th, respectively, and were eliminated.