Joe Pires
Raised in Dartmouth and a Rochester resident for more than 20 years, Joe Pires is running to protect the area’s standard of living and quality of life, he said.
A father of three, Pires is a member of the Old Rochester Regional School Committee. He is part-owner of basement waterproofing companies Pioneer Basement and Grate Products. Pires worked for Polaroid Corporation and earned associate’s degrees from New England Institute of Technology and Community College of Rhode Island and a certification from Boston University.
For Pires, a major issue facing the 10th Bristol district is the migrant crisis.
“We look at our state officials and what they're approving and what they're allowing and the money that's going to support a lot of these illegal immigrants, and most people feel that it's not fair,” he said.
The son of Cape Verdean parents, Pires said he watched his mother pursue and “achieve the American dream.”
“On the other side, when you have people coming in here who are illegal, they have a sense of entitlement,” Pires said. “I don't believe that they're going to contribute the way a natural or person who comes in properly, and that's what I'm seeing, and that's what I'm hearing from my constituents.”
He said he believes Massachusetts will go bankrupt if the migrant crisis continues.
“They're still human beings,” Pires said. “We need to figure out a way that we can accommodate but at a rate that we're not going to affect the quality of our life, and that’s what’s happening.”
Housing: Housing comes back to the migrant crisis, according to Pires.
“We didn't have a housing shortage before all this started, and now we do,” he said.
Pires said he thinks “the solution is not to add or bring in affordable housing,” which “was already happening at a comfortable rate.”
His approach would be “to look at the influx of illegal immigrants that are coming into this state,” Pires said.
“I believe we don't have a housing shortage,” Pires said. “We need to control the inflow of people that are needing houses or needing shelter.”
Healthcare: Health insurance is “getting out of control,” and many people Pires has spoken to have expressed displeasure with not being able to choose their doctors or being forced into health groups they otherwise wouldn’t have selected, he said.
The issue “ties back to having illegal immigrants taking up a lot of the resources from the healthcare industry,” according to Pires.
“Those resources are being strained, and we’re paying for it,” Pires said.
Pires spoke with an executive of an insurance company who said “there's a direct correlation between the illegal immigrants that are coming into the state and the high cost of health care insurance,” he said.
“She says our system wasn't designed to grow overnight,” Pires said. “It wasn't designed to grow at this rate of speed.”
Education: A member of the Old Rochester Regional School Committee, Pires said he thinks the school system is underfunded and that “there has to be means of either accessing grants or accessing programs.”
“We're paying an exorbitant amount of taxes,” he said. “It's our money. We need to figure out a better way to get that money back here.”
Pires is a co-director of Tri-Town for Protecting Children, a non-profit organization whose mission is “to protect children’s innocence,” he said.
The organization was born out of concern over material within libraries in the Old Rochester school district that some considered inappropriate.
As a school committee member, Pires said he looked for a way to compromise and create a solution that met the needs of both parents who found the material inappropriate and parents who found it “supportive” for their children.
“That didn't happen, and I think when that didn’t happen, there were parents that felt extremely disenfranchised,” Pires said, leading to the idea to set up Tri-Town for Protecting Children as a “resource of information” for parents who felt their tax dollars and rights as parents were being ignored, according to Pires.
“I’m not a book banner,” Pires said. “I’m an advocate for age-appropriate material. That’s where that all came from, and I’m proud to be part of that organization.”
Environment: Pires said he is “about clean, renewable energy” and is advocating that it’s done responsibly.
“We don’t do it in a way that it’s going to compromise our economy,” he said. “It’s not going to compromise the area that we live in. I think we need to approach it in a very responsible way, and we need to listen to data and research.”
Solar energy has “done wonders for us” and “hasn’t been as invasive,” though some land in Rochester “has been greatly affected by cutting down trees,” according to Pires.
“I probably would’ve pulled back on that, and I don’t know what the return on investment that has had,” he said.
But one of the biggest issues facing the 10th Bristol district is offshore wind, according to Pires, who said it is “completely obtrusive.”
“I know it’s doing us more harm than it is good,” he said.
Electric bills have gone up due to offshore wind, according to Pires.
“The return on investment is a failure,” Pires said. “It's a failure in so many different ways, and yet we're pouring a ton of money. You have offshore foreign companies that have bought into our area, and we're allowing it to happen.”
The fishing industry will also be affected, he said; the windmills, upon being connected, will prevent fishers from dragging through those areas, according to Pires.
“We're the largest fishing port in the country, and we're allowing outside entities to come in and literally destroy what we've built all these years,” he said.
Offshore wind also impacts sea life, according to Pires, who said whales, dolphins and other sea animals that need to have a natural ability to communicate and navigate are affected.
“The way that those piles are being driven into the ocean floor, it causes such a disturbance in sound decibels that are beyond what is acceptable,” he said.
