Candidate for Ward 7 City Councilor: Devin Romanul
By Ellen Putnam
Photo From Devin Romanul
Current Ward 7 City Councilor Devin Romanul, who is running for a second term on the City Council, calls local government “the cause of my life.” He sees his work on the City Council as supporting his goal of “making Melrose the best city in America to raise a family.”
Romanul and his family have lived in Melrose for over a decade, and his three children attend the Melrose Public Schools. He volunteers at his children’s schools and coaches youth sports.
Romanul has career and volunteer experience in various aspects of state and local government. He has a Masters degree in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he subsequently worked on the school’s Project on Municipal Innovation. In 2018, Romanul became the Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at Fuse Corps, where he has worked since then. In this position, he helps the leaders of cities across the country launch and fund initiatives to promote resilience, health, economic development, housing, justice, and education.
It is his experience working in and with local government and his love of and aspirations for Melrose that have led Romanul to seek reelection to the City Council.
“My vision is to make Melrose the best city in America to raise a family,” said Romanul, “and that requires: providing a world class education for kids; incredibly safe and well-maintained streets and sidewalks; responsive and well-trained public safety personnel; and a whole host of services like parks and libraries and events that give our families the best opportunity to thrive. Anytime I’m voting or filing legislation or creating policy, I think about: how do we make Melrose the best city in America to raise a family? It’s that constellation of my personal connections, my professional background, and my vision that I believe are uniquely well suited for this moment.”
In service of his vision, Romanul named three areas as central to his work as a legislator: robust community engagement; doing the legwork and getting provable, data-driven results; and radical transparency.
“There is no level of government that you experience more viscerally than city government,” he said. “You feel that pothole. You know what’s happening in your kids’ schools. You know if the Fire Department doesn’t show up (although they always do, here in Melrose). I don’t believe there’s any higher office than serving in city government.”
“We have a wealth of personnel and human resources here in Melrose,” Romanul went on, “These are tremendous strengths. Melrose is a great city, and Massachusetts is a great commonwealth. But our Achilles’ Heel right now is consistent funding. We have so much going for us, and yet we need to have more consistent resources to manifest the kind of city we want to have.”
“Proposition 2½ is a problem,” he continued. “It kneecaps cities’ ability to govern effectively, so they have to hold override votes in order to prevent catastrophic cuts to city services. I am shocked that our state legislature, which is full of former mayors and city councilors, has not engaged in more meaningful reform. And some of our role on the City Council is to lobby other forms of government on issues like this.”
The $13.5 million property tax override that Melrose voters will see on the ballot in November, said Romanul, “is irrefutably something that our community needs, and to that end I will be aggressively campaigning for it.”
“As a steward of our city’s budget,” he went on, “I am terrified for what Fiscal Year 2027 (FY27) could hold, were we to not increase our revenue stream. Fairly drastic cuts were necessary to balance the budget this time around, and if the override does not pass, we will be making similar drastic cuts - things that we couldn’t have even envisioned being on the table just a year or two ago. Things like closing a school; closing the Council on Aging; a profound downshifting of resources for public safety, education, and public works - those would all be on the table.”
“Nobody wants to see their taxes go up,” Romanul said, “I totally sympathize with that, but when you look at our primary cost drivers, it’s impossible to ignore. Saying that the city has to live within its means sounds good and feels good, but when healthcare costs are going up 12% and cost-of-living increases in our contracts are 3% per year and we can only increase our property taxes by 2.5%, by definition we are having to cut core services every single year.”
“When you interrogate how people feel about city services,” he went on, “whether they want their road paved every 30 years or every 80 years; if they want potholes filled within days or possibly never; if they want their kids in a classroom with 20 or 30 other kids; if they want their police officers well-trained and well-rested, or if they want them to have been on the job for 24 hours straight, and you start to add those things up, the math just does not work in its present configuration.”
“It’s a sad state of affairs,” Romanul concluded. “We cannot break the law. We have to balance the budget, and we cannot increase resources without the voters’ permission. So I will be fully dedicating myself to passing the override. I would rather lose my race and see the top tier of override pass, than win my race and see the override lose.”
Photo From Devin Romanul
To encourage community engagement among his constituents in Ward 7, Romanul created a 10-part video series on Facebook explaining the city’s FY26 budget to voters. “There are eight to ten hours’ worth of legwork that go into each budget hearing,” he said, “and I try to condense that into two or three minutes. I’m proud to put every penny we spend onscreen, and say directly to the camera ‘here’s what we’re spending our money on.’ It’s the first time anyone’s done this, as far as I know, and I want to keep doing it.”
He also conducted what he believes is Ward 7’s (and possibly the city’s) first universal budget survey and listening tour. “I personally visited every home in Ward 7,” Romanul said, “that’s 1800 doors. And 10% of households in Ward 7 responded to my budget survey. A ton of the free cash orders that came down this year were informed by this data. I curated all of the information, sat down with the mayor, the city’s CFO, and several department heads, and said ‘Here are the places we’re seeing problems. Here’s how Ward 7 is feeling.’”
Romanul sees education as his top priority as a lawmaker. “I think the most important role city government has is to provide a world-class education for every child in our community, and that requires sustainable funding.”
According to Romanul, Melrose needs to provide “competitive compensation” for educators - “our teachers do heroic work, and we should not shortchange them,” he said. He also noted that the district needs meaningful professional development for staff, instructional coaches, and a curriculum development team, all of which have been reduced or eliminated over the last two budget cycles.
“The reduction in school staff absolutely breaks my heart,” Romanul added. “I would love to have seen a budget that didn’t cut a single teacher, but given that schools are the number one cost driver in our city budget, that is mathematically impossible.”
“Free cash is a one-time expense,” he continued, in response to suggestions from the public that the city use its free cash reserves to fully fund the schools. “We may have had $5 million in free cash, but we can’t fund $5 million in year-over-year teaching expenses. That starves our one-time needs, and is a horrific budgeting practice - one that Melrose has relied on in the past, to our detriment. Free cash will not always be there. My votes this spring for free cash prioritized school funding for non-recurring expenses, like funding the Special Education Stabilization Fund and investing in Chromebooks, playground equipment, LED lighting for security, roof repairs, and electrical improvements. I voted for those expenses to preserve the integrity of the remaining funding that we do have. We could have seen higher levels of disinvestment if not for those expenses.”
City infrastructure is another area that Romanul believes is essential to support. “We need robust longitudinal funding for road and sidewalk improvements,” he said. “We have 80 miles of roads in Melrose and we can pay to fix one mile each year. Most roads are built to last 25-30 years - and one truck driving on a road is like 7000 cars. Just look out your window: is your road going to last 80 years?”
“We also need to be forward-thinking about climate resilience,” he went on, “and planning for infrastructure to handle increasingly volatile weather events. I’ve been proud to champion a ton of infrastructure investment, especially in Ward 7.” Romanul, along with the rest of the City Council, recently appropriated money for the design of a project to rebuild the southern half of Lebanon Street, all the way to the Malden line. “It will be multimodal,” Romanul noted, “with sidewalks the entire length,” improving the experience for all users. The city also recently received grant money to prevent flooding at Lebanon Street and Sylvan Street.
Photo From Devin Romanul
Affordable housing is one area that Romanul would like to see the City Council do more work on in the next session. “We have a regional housing crisis,” he said, “and we are leeching population to other regions of the country. I want my kids to be able to stay here. Housing policy can feel like pushing on the ocean,” he added, “but every city in the country has to do their part, and so does Melrose. That doesn’t mean we have to grow in a way that is incongruous with our values or our city’s character, but we need more housing diversity.”
“I would love to see Melrose get into supporting first-time homebuyers in our community,” he continued, “although that is very far from our financing abilities right now. We’re trying to support people who don’t want to get squeezed out: we just doubled the property tax exemption for qualifying veterans and seniors. And I would love to think about how we expand other housing initiatives.”
“I would also like to pilot baby bonds,” Romanul went on. “I do a lot of work in cities across the country to narrow the wealth gap, and that is one way to do it. Melrose can't possibly fund baby bonds such that they serve as inflection point in someone’s life, but even putting $1 in a bank account on a child’s behalf can signal to parents that Melrose believes in your kid, and we think you should start investing now.”
“And how do we think about our government being more reflective of the era in which we live?” he continued. “So many of our processes are so paper-centric: registering your kid for kindergarten, starting a business, shutting down your street for a block party. It’s emblematic of the disinvestment in our city services across the board. We should not make people navigate bureaucracy, and we should see ourselves in more of a customer service orientation.”
“It also fits into the transparency and accountability piece,” Romanul went on. “I’m working with the mayor’s staff right now on building a city report card, where residents can look online at different things we want to be graded on as a city. We have a lot of that data available, but we’re not displaying it. And how do we think about exercising more creativity in partnership with other communities, with nonprofits, with the private sector?” he concluded. “I’m hoping to bring more of my professional expertise to bear on moving the needle on some of these issues.”
Romanul’s easygoing personality informs his approach to legislating and working with other city councilors. “We all have our own lived experience and opinions,” he said, “and all eleven members have arrived at the City Council through a different path. I listen to people in the community on any given issue, and I try to listen thoughtfully and respectfully to my colleagues. I try to find areas of compromise and red lines, and then to be forthright with the public about how we came to our decision.”
Romanul offered the discussion around the city’s new snow clearing ordinance as an example of his legislating style. “I received dozens of complaints from residents in Ward 7 about a small handful of people who weren’t removing snow. We don’t have a residential snow removal ordinance, so I researched every surrounding municipality: who does what, what are the penalties, what timing do they give? Then, I designed what I thought was a thoughtful piece of legislation to try to map out a solution.”
“It was an almost unanimous opinion on the City Council that something should be done,” he continued, “that people should be responsible for keeping their sidewalks safe, but we couldn’t agree on how to do it. We had some really frank discussions, with councilors saying, ‘I don’t feel someone should be fined for this,’ - a really robust, respectful debate, and we finally came to a compromise. I’m disappointed I didn’t get everything I wanted, but I’m the kind of person who, if I can accomplish 30% of the goal, that’s better than 0%.”
In Romanul’s opinion, “legislating is not about being strident and angry and bombastic. You never abandon your values, but that doesn't mean you have to be uncooperative and antagonistic.”
When he isn’t working on municipal issues, either at his day job or on the City Council, Romanul said, “I love hanging out with my family. They’re a cool group. We make a lot of music together.” (Romanul’s parents are both professional musicians, and he and his wife met in a theater production where they were cast as romantic opposites.)
Romanul and his wife, Abbie, are advocates for research into ALS, and they worked with Mayor Jen Grigoraitis last year to create a proclamation for ALS awareness. And he’s an avid baker: his first job was working in a kitchen.
Romanul is also a dedicated runner, which he incorporated into a video where he did “a running tour of Ward 7” and pointed out all the potholes he found. (There were over 30, and Romanul said that after he reported them, they were all resolved within a few days.)
