Councilor-at-large candidate Colleen Bradley-MacArthur

Colleen Bradley-MacArthur did not plan to run for City Council when she moved to Waltham 18 years ago. She decided to enter local politics in 2016 after becoming involved with Mothers Out Front, which advocates for clean energy solutions and sustainable community infrastructure.

“With Mothers Out Front, I spoke in front of the City Council, [and] I just remember feeling like ‘I wanna be here, I wanna be in this room,’” Bradley-MacArthur said.

The following year she became a campaign manager for a friend’s Waltham City Council run. 

“Eventually my friend asked, ‘Do you want to be the woman behind the woman or do you want to be THE woman?’” Bradley-MacArthur recalled. “And I said, ‘I think I want to be the woman.’”

Bradley-MacArthur grew up in Beverly, Mass., where she remembers feeling like the city didn’t emphasize protecting its woodlands and conservation areas. Because of this, Waltham’s dedication to preserving open space is especially important to her.

“There are so many opportunities to go into the woods or be part of nature in the city,” she said, noting that Hardy Pond, close to her Lakeview home where she lives with her husband and son, and the Moody Street bridge, where she enjoys watching happenings on the Charles River, are favorite spots.

As for indoor spaces, Bradley-MacArthur values the Waltham Public Library and wants to ensure the city will go ahead with planned renovations in a timely manner so it continues to provide important educational and social services.

Bradley-MacArthur, who has a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism from Emerson College, has been involved with the WCAC-TV community access channel in the past. Nowadays, Bradley-MacArthur volunteers with The Waltham Land Trust, Chaplains on the Way, Fuerza and Healthy Waltham.

If elected for another term as councilor-at-large, Bradley-MacArthur said she hopes to continue getting the public involved with city government by providing more public hearing opportunities for important issues.

To keep citizens in the know about government happenings, she introduced a resolution in May 2024 to have city meetings posted primarily on the city website instead of a bulletin board outside City Hall. 

Bradley-MacArthur said she also will continue pushing for a municipal composting program, which would separate food waste that attracts rats to trash cans and dumpsters into a separate receptacle. She hopes that this, combined with more frequent trash pickup, will reduce the city’s rodent population.

As the city seeks to update its zoning rules, Bradley-MacArthur wants the City Council to make a final decision on the specifics of the zoning code sooner rather than later.

“We need to act quickly so that we don’t lose the existing multifamily housing that we have and we gain the ability to increase multifamily housing and a diversified housing stock. This means anything from ADUs to single-family homes and everything in between,” she said.

Bradley-MacArthur said she is well aware that federal decisions have affected Waltham. She specifically cited the national increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity, noting her concern about how the arrests will impact the community in the long run.

“It separates breadwinners from their families,” she explained. “The people that are taken are part of not only an economic but a cultural ecosystem. Some of these folks were volunteers or community housing advocates. That’s a huge issue in my mind because our community will just not look the same in even four months from now.”

Bradley-MacArthur said she has a different view of the city budget than many of her colleagues. “A lot of times at City Hall when the budgets come in, people operate with a deficit mindset,” Bradley-MacArthur explained. “They think, ‘We have no money, we need to save money for a rainy day.’”

She asserted that Waltham is currently facing a “rainy day” with allocated federal grant money in jeopardy. She said the city has more than enough resources to deal with it.

“We are a well-resourced city and we can devote, in my opinion, more resources to the schools, our city services and our first responders without having to impact the taxpayers at all,” Bradley-MacArthur said.