PROVINCETOWN — In the three-way race for a single seat on Provincetown’s select board, Lise King, 56, is the incumbent. Her argument for a second term is that she loves the work, she’s dedicated to it, and she’s increasingly effective in the position.
“It’s a big job to do well,” said King. “My commitment, and the time I’m spending on it — it’s like falling in love. The more I do it, the more I want to do it, the more committed I am to it, and the more I enjoy it.”
King lived a peripatetic life before finally settling in Provincetown. As a child, her time was divided between divorced parents. King went to school where her father lived, in Florida. Her mother is the Provincetown artist Bunny Pearlman, former owner of the East End Gallery. King spent her childhood summers here and worked jobs at Café Blasé and Franco’s restaurant. She earned a degree in history from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley.
After spending time in New York working on documentary films, King moved to the Rosebud Lakota reservation in South Dakota, where she married, had two children, and co-founded the Native Voice newspaper.
“I didn’t realize how privileged I was until I lived on the reservation,” said King. “Historic oppression, systemic racism, institutional bias — it’s where I realized how I wanted to spend my precious life, to use Mary Oliver’s words: making things better for the people who need it most.”
After a painful divorce, King returned to Provincetown with her children. She earned a master’s in public administration from Harvard, stayed for three years of fellowships in the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, and lived through a variety of housing arrangements before finding housing at the Stable Path development.
When it comes to town policy, King wants to both move quickly and engage a wider circle of citizens.
There is a natural tension between public engagement and efficiency, King noted. If you go too far for the sake of efficiency, she said, “by the time the project gets to us, it’s like it’s prepackaged, which is what happened with the police station.” Then, she added, “On the other hand, you can get bogged down in so much discourse, you get sidetracked.”
King supports going forward with a new station on the selected site on Jerome Smith Road, partly because there is already $8.6 million appropriated for that site, and construction costs are rising rapidly. She is also “100 percent for the VFW housing project.”
King noted the importance of discussing unresolved issues there, however. “For the people who gathered at that building for many years, it was an emotional space,” she said. Losing that is a cultural loss for part of the community, she said. “We’re looking at this like a gameboard, police here, housing there, moving pieces around,” she said. “I think we have to negotiate this.”
King looks forward to the results of the needs assessment for the fire dept., which may point to a professional, rather than volunteer, department in the future. “If we’re going to need to have new hires,” she said, “maybe housing at the VFW is a place they could live.”
Last June, King proposed an economic stabilization and sustainability committee to look at both near-term Covid recovery and larger issues facing the town. It was established last fall as an advisory subcommittee to the select board, and King pointed to its work as a model.
“With the support of my colleagues on the board, we’ve created this mini-think tank to come up with a lot of creative ideas, and dig into the meat and potatoes of how to get them done,” she said. “If you had people renting out basements for housing that were nonconforming, for instance, could they need help bringing those places up to code? We’ve talked about a Provincetown development corporation that could take on bigger housing projects.”
King said she has floated the idea of housing along the future bike path between Shank Painter Road and Herring Cove. “We’re pulling out the map and looking at where we can reclaim space,” she said.
“I’m getting more work done now than I ever have in my life,” said King. “I believe in a collaborative process, and it’s really great to be part of a team.”
Candidate King’s campaign website is liseking.com.
