Election 2025: Nick Priest for Select Board

This article is a part of the Burlington Buzz Election 2025 Series, in which we profile each candidate for election. This year's election is on April 5, 2025, and our mission is to make it easy for all registered voters to vote by ensuring the community has access to information about the candidates and issues on the ballot. ELECTION CORNER

Lifelong resident Nick Priest is running for another term on the Select Board for the Town of Burlington. As in 2022, he and Mike Espejo are running uncontested for their seats on the town’s executive board. Nick talked with the Buzz about his experience, accomplishments, and priorities going into the the 2025 election.

Professionally, Priest works in communication with a specialization in advertising and marketing. It won’t come as much of a surprise with this background that one of his main priorities when running for Select Board was enhancing the communication between the town and its residents. He was motivated to run for office, in fact, after a government review committee was formed with what he felt was insufficient advertising. “You've got new people volunteering saying, we want to do this,” he said. “Why not even interview or consider us? Like why is this happening so fast?”

Priest lost his first bid for office in 2018 when he ran against long-time incumbents, Joe Morandi and Mike Runyan, but won in 2019 in a run against Chris Hartling and Bob Hogan.

Also close to Priest’s heart is urban planning; he minored in urban planning at Worcester State and said that coursework, combined with his data-driven orientation in his day job, gives him a well-rounded perspective on economic development and the vision for the long-term growth of the community.

Within a year of his initial election to the Board, Priest said, the pandemic arrived and put all of local government into reactive mode. He’s proud of the work the Select Board did in collaboration with the Town Administration and other town boards to ensure the health, safety, and economic viability of town as the way people did business shifted rapidly. Still, he’s eager to continue working to help the town realize its vision post-pandemic, including putting items from the recent communications audit and plan into practice.

Priest acknowledged there was little talk of the audit after it was completed and the findings presented to the Board, but there is a position carved out in this year’s operating budget for a communications role within town administration. “This role is kind of crucial,” he said, “just like the Economic Development Director,” a position Priest said he advocated for and supported and which has worked on various initiatives to support the business community and therefore the economic vitality of the town at large.

Priest is also excited about the upcoming government review that the Board will be conducting in consultation with the Collins Center of UMass Boston. “We need to look at how we operate because we haven't changed ever,” he said, adding that this audit would help streamline processes and internal communications and lessen the siloed nature of the work being done at the municipal level. He sees much opportunity for cross-collaboration between departments that serve the same folks, such as Burlington Youth & Family Services, Burlington Public Schools, and the Police Department. He’d also like to look at the organizational structure and possibly create opportunities for professional growth within departments.

This is also a time to evolve as a town in how the future of business development is envisioned, said Priest. “Once the highway came in, we were like, yeah, absolutely, let's put business over here. Let's reap the benefits of that and have the [tax] offset. It made sense. But now we're kind of hitting a point where we have to start being more proactive with how we do business. Otherwise we're only going to find ourselves behind the curve.”

This might mean making tough decisions regarding land that the town owns or wants to own in the future. Priest said the Board still hasn’t decided whether or not they’ll renew the lease for Mount Hope School, which is currently housed on town land. “I think the reality is that we're so hard pressed for land from a municipal standpoint, how do we not take it back?” he said. Availability of land is a constant point of contention in conversations about upcoming building projects, and Priest said it would be nice to have more space for when new projects come up.

On the topic of building projects, they’re just going to cost a lot, said Priest, and while he wishes the current projects (the police station and Fox Hill School, which have already been approved, and the high school, which expects to seek approval this year) had been more spread out, one thing the town can do now to mitigate their tax impact is seek ways to pay down the debt more quickly so taxpayers won’t take as much of a hit.

While these things can be hard to explain to residents and business owners who are worried about an increasing tax bill, said Priest, this—along with the rest of the Select Board's work—is all in the service of building a Burlington all residents will benefit from in the future.

Nick Priest, along with Mike Espejo, is running unopposed to retain his seat as a Select Board member. Learn more about the Select Board and visit our Election Corner for more information about the April 5, 2025, Burlington Town Election.