HOLYOKE –  A longtime Holyoke City Council member has recently announced that she will be seeking election to the office of mayor.

City Councilor At Large Rebecca Lisi announced her campaign for the city’s highest office on Jan. 11 with a socially-distanced press conference on the steps of the Holyoke Public Library. Lisi was joined by her husband Damian and son, Lucien, who enthusiastically waved a foam finger with Lisi’s name on it throughout the conference.

Lisi, who has spent the last 14 years as a councilor at-large for the city of Holyoke, gave her speech in both Spanish and English and first acknowledged that the gathering took place on “Nipmuc and Pocumtuc land.”

Lisi, who was born in Long Island, NY, and moved to Massachusetts in 2002 after graduating from Binghamton University, first began her career in activism and politics with Clean Water Action not long after moving to the commonwealth. This job, she said, “truly changed my life.”

“It was with Clean Water Action that I learned the value of shoe leather. It was long hours going door-to-door, year-round, talking to people about legislation that may not have been high on their radar,” Lisi said.

She moved up quickly within the organization and found her passion for the “helping empower everyday citizens, reminding them how important their voices were to the democratic process.”

“And in talking to people about the power of the political voice, I’d finally found my own,” she said. This, Lisi explained, was around the same time she moved to Holyoke and a seat on the City Council opened. up.

“It was then that I decided to take those same skills I learned canvassing and begin knocking for my own City Council campaign,” she said. Now, more than a decade later, she’s using those skills to knock on doors for a new political campaign. While there are some differences in the campaigns, she said one position remains the same, “A good politician knows how to listen.”

“Never assuming I knew what was best for Holyoke, but an earnest searching for ways to find commonalities in our stories, thinking about how to combine and find compromise among our various interests and building connections between groups and issues,” she said.

Should she be elected to the position of mayor, she said her priority would be to help “our city build bridges that connect us.” She said, “Holyoke’s ‘power to grow’ rests in each and every single one of us. My job as mayor will be to develop our opportunities that let your talents, your visions and your passions create a bridge to our collective tomorrow.”

One of those bridges, she said, would be between “‘old’ and ‘new’ Holyoke,” that “connects families who have lived in Holyoke for generations to those who love Holyoke enough to make it their home for the first time.”

So far in her tenure as a City Council member, she said she’d tried to do this by “working hard to ensure that our historic building stock and urban identity is not lost.”

“I was out front fighting for the green renovation of the Lyman Terrace, the preservation of Mater Dolorsa church and the adaptive re-use of our historic mills for revenue-generating marijuana manufacturing,” she said. The city, she explained, was in need of “aggressive legal strategies that hold absentee landlords accountable,” for historic buildings after years of neglect

Additionally, Lisi said as mayor she would “work closely with the Office of Planning and Economic Development to make sure we are marketing the city, expanding indoor grow operations and bringing small shops and restaurants back to the urban core.” She added that she would also work closely with Holyoke Gas and Electric to make sure the city had “natural gas capacity and municipal fiber internet capabilities,” to ensure Holyoke’s growth as a city.

Fiber internet, she explained, had become as much of a necessity as heat and hot water throughout the coronavirus pandemic. “Which is why a strong, consistent internet connection can no longer be seen as a luxury. It has become a utility, and a matter of equity,” Lisi said.

Another initiative she would take should she be elected as mayor, would be to create neighborhood associations. These associations, she explained, would be “funded out of the budget of the mayor’s office or with Community Development Block Grants.”

“These groups would be established to support new and old residents working together to create neighborhood events and programs,” she said.

To do this, and to ensure the city has “robust public education facilities, effective public safety initiatives, or efficient trash and recycling programs,” Lisi said “we need to get Holyoke’s in-house financial functions in order.”

“I can assure you that I will have the experience needed to manage the city budget and I will carefully guard taxpayer money. By implementing financial best practices we can improve our financial standing and avoid falling into another state receivership,” she said.

Lisi said while the city’s stabilization account was healthy and growing at this time, Holyoke was lacking a capital investment plan. Should she be elected, she said she would “set up a capital investment stabilization account and develop an investment plan that will get us back on track with predictable purchases and maintenance timelines.”

For more information on Lisi, her experience and her platform, she encouraged her supporters to visit facebook.com/votelisi or her website votelisi.com.