When a phone rings or buzzes with a text in the Massachusetts political sphere, there’s a good chance Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll is on the other line.
Her contacts list includes a who’s who of state and local officials. That was apparent during an early December meeting of Gov. Maura Healey’s Competitiveness Council, when there were technical issues with getting audio from Sen. Paul Feeney, who had logged in from home. After several attempts to fix the problem, Healey turned to Driscoll and said, “Why don’t you just call him?” Driscoll dialed away and put him on speaker.
Driscoll, who is quick with a joke and a text message, was laughing about the incident days later as she sat down for breakfast at the Gulu Gulu Cafe, a self-styled “bohemian outpost” in her hometown of Salem, down the street from a torture museum and across from a comic book shop. A burly member of her security detail took a seat at a table behind her, while an aide, Isabella Lanata, was seated one table over and tasked with getting Driscoll into the car by 10 a.m. so she could make an 11 a.m. event at the State House.
“The car ride used to be a joyous time to like, listen to music or NPR, and it is not anymore,” Driscoll said with a chuckle. “It is a workspace. And so you’re constantly making phone calls or responding to emails or texts and things like that. And I take constituent services very seriously, as a former mayor. People reach out to you, and I want to get back to them or get their query addressed. You can’t always meet every demand or inquiry, but you’re not going to say you didn’t hear from me, if I can help it.”
She has an iPhone, for those wondering. Better for security, and it’s easier to share PDFs than with a Samsung. She still pines for the days of the Blackberry. “I succumbed to the Dark Lord of Apple,” she said. “It was efficiency. That’s what drove it. I still feel like a sellout.”
I asked her about her communication style, recalling my personal horror at seeing Healey walk through the State House and hold the phone close for a voice-to-text message. “You should see the texts,” Driscoll quipped.
She indicated a preference for texting. “I took piano lessons as a kid, and then I gave it up to play basketball, because it competed with practice,” she said. “Vividly, I recall my mother saying, ‘You’re really going to regret this. You can play piano your whole life. You’re not gonna play basketball your whole life.’ But I think practicing all those scales, my fingers are pretty dexterous.”
Her mayoral approach to the statewide post means when there’s a problem, she hears from people. “People are struggling planning for next year. I’m very close with mayors and municipal leaders,” Driscoll said. “Unless you have a lot of new growth coming in, meaning new developments happening in your community that can provide additional tax revenues, it can be really, really hard to make the math work for the expected increases you’re going to have on July 1 and be able to also keep taxes affordable for individuals who live in the community.”
I had promised I wouldn’t spend the entire time inquiring about her phone habits, so while we waited for the waitress to come and take our order, I asked about Gulu Gulu, which was her choice for breakfast.
She knows the owners, Steve Feldmann and Marie Feldmannova. They had originally opened in Lynn in 2005, and she helped convince them to branch out into her city in 2007. Feldmann has been a “key part” of this corner of Salem, Driscoll said. “Most of these buildings downtown, they were not alive in 2005, there were a lot of vacancies. There wasn’t a solid revitalization plan. We really worked to try and make sure there were active first-floor uses that could serve the community,” she said. “I’ve been to drag brunches here, we’ve had town hall meetings about issues here, around housing.”
Driscoll, a “Navy brat” born in Hawaii, made Salem her home in 1986, when she was a college student. “My grandparents lived in Lynn, and so the North Shore was a little familiar to me. I went to high school in Florida, and I wanted a different pace,” she said.
She ended up at Salem State College, which had a competitive women’s basketball team, and remained in the city. “It’s a place that really always just felt very livable to me, like sea captain mansions just down the street, tenement houses where people worked on the docks, and Derby Street, you know, like it’s got a livability that I really appreciated,” she said.
The waitress interrupted to ask for our orders. I went with an egg and cheese sandwich, while Driscoll asked for a scrambled egg and hash with sausage for protein.
Driscoll got her start in Salem city government as a college intern working for the planning department. She remembered running down to grab the Salem Evening News, which came out in the afternoon. “In Riley Plaza, the center of town, there’d be an orange flag they’d hang on this little shack where they sold the newspapers,” she said. “And that’s when you knew the Salem News was out.”
Two former reporters are in her kitchen cabinet: David and Heidi Guarino, fellow Salem residents who’ve gone on to become a communications adviser and an educational consultant, respectively. “Katie PB” – Katie Prisco-Buxbaum – is running the Healey-Driscoll reelection campaign and also a cabinet member.
Driscoll was a political science major with a history minor at Salem State, but local government wasn’t on her radar. She needed an internship, and through her coach, she landed in the planning department. “At that time, the planning department was the place the switchboard sent calls if they didn’t know what [the person was asking for],” she quipped. But in that perch she witnessed the power of helping people, from informing them about their trash pickup day to helping improve a neighborhood block.
The throughline to the mayor’s office is obvious from there. Less so in running for lieutenant governor, I noted. The officeholder serves as the governor’s No. 2, and chairs the independently elected Governor’s Council. The last lieutenant governor to get elected governor was the late Paul Cellucci, but he ended up leaving for an ambassadorship.
“One of the reasons I like this role,” Driscoll said, “is being able to influence resources and shape policies in that beautiful, big, shiny building in Boston where a lot of good things come out of and happen. But it’s also being able to get out in the community, because when you’re on a main street, or when you’re talking to a local official or speaking with a school committee member, that’s when you actually know what’s happening.”
Cities and towns need partners at the state level, she added. “Infrastructure costs, how we fund schools, how we think about connecting the dots between a strategy for economic development that you might have locally, and actually operationalizing it, that’s collaboration,” she said. “If you have really vibrant communities, you’re going to have a vibrant Commonwealth. It’s not a hard math problem to figure out. It’s just, how do you actually do that work and do it with fidelity. And I thought I could help.”