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Jan 15, 2007 9:32 pm US/Eastern
Residents Speak Out During WBZ's Town Meeting
by Jon Keller
BOSTON (CBS4) ―
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Jack Williams speaks with a panel member during our Project Mass. Town Meeting.
WBZ
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A panel of 20 people from different walks of life were invited to participate.
WBZ
WBZ-TV's team of reporters will be tackling issues such as education and government accountability in our series "Project Mass."
There were plenty of problems and plenty of people concerned about them during our Town Meeting Monday night.
Between the eyebrow-raising results of our latest Fast Track survey and the comments of our citizen panel, one thing is crystal clear, Gov. Deval Patrick has his work cut out for him.
"It's so hard to figure out whether to be optimistic or not" -- hard for our on-air town meeting members, and for everyone else.
WBZ-TV's exclusive Fast Track finds only 32 percent of you are more optimistic about the future of Massachusetts, while 38 percent are more pessimistic and 29 percent are on the fence.
Why the pessimism? "We're not too sure if there's gonna be enough funding around, if there's gonna be program cuts in the future," said Dean Chin of Stoughton.
"We're losing people and jobs and what we have to do is build our state in a way that's robust enough to give jobs and opportunity and homeownership to people," said Geoff Beckwith of the Mass. Municipal Association.
But how do we do that when people are fleeing the state in droves?
Asked about moving out of Massachusetts, a whopping 61 percent of our Fast Track respondents said yes, they've considered it. Only 37 percent said they haven't.
"I see a lot of people moving away to South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, thinking that they're going to be able to buy something better and that they're going to be able to afford a better style of living," said Michelle Fermin of Dracut.
"I've lived in Massachusetts all my life and I don't want to leave but at the same time the housing costs are so high, coming straight out of college, I got fees to pay back, I got loans to pay back, its gonna be so hard to pay back the loans, I probably have to live at my mother's house for awhile," said Antoine Coleman of Worcester.
No relief in sight for mom's grocery bill, I guess.
You can watch the entire one hour
town meeting on right here on our Web site. Jon Keller will be taking questions from them and from visitors to our website directly to the governor for special reports later this week.
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
