MARBLEHEAD — Elected to the state legislature in 2008, Rep. Lori A. Ehrlich takes the long view on creating change for public good, especially when it comes to making a local intersection safer.
Ehrlich’s more-than-10-year effort to make the Vine, Village and Pleasant streets intersection safer has paid off with state money helping to cover design costs for intersection safety improvement work.
At one point in her bid to secure state transportation money for the project, Ehrlich, a Democrat, convinced former Gov. Deval Patrick to come to town and view traffic during times of the day when Veterans Middle School students walk to and from school.
“Kids pour into the intersection and there’s too many roads coming together in one place: It’s a recipe for a disaster,” she said.
The pandemic has all but eliminated pedestrian traffic from the crossroads, but Ehrlich cited the safety project as an example of ways persistence on her part has paid off for Marblehead.
Helping local officials match town money with state funding is just one of Ehrlich’s responsibilities as state representative for Marblehead, Swampscott and a corner of Lynn near the Swampscott line.
She’s pushed for five years to end college campus sexual assaults, first by filing a bill to gather anonymous information on campus safety “from the students who are living it.”
Since 2015, Ehrlich’s legislation has been expanded into a comprehensive proposal aimed at injecting fairness into campus-assault prevention and enforcement policies and ensuring students have online information to assess campus safety.
“Too often, people choosing colleges look at academic rankings and glossy brochures rather than what students think,” she said.
She has a powerful ally in getting the bill passed into law this year: House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo. She called DeLeo’s support critical during a legislative year when the Massachusetts House and Senate are “dealing with multiple crises,” including COVID-19’s health and economic impacts.
“The Speaker has been a fierce advocate for this bill and he reaffirmed his support for its passage,” she said.
State Sen. Brendan Crighton is Ehrlich’s ally on legislation establishing a commission to study journalism in underserved communities. The House included the proposal in legislation outlining economic development spending priorities.
“That will result in a good start to preserving the free press on which our very democracy depends,” Ehrlich said.
Other priority initiatives include taking aim at “bad faith assertions of patent infringement.” Ehrlich said federal officials have left it to the states to regulate “patent trolls” who obtain overly-broad patents on innovations with no plans to turn the patent into a marketable product.
She said innovators seeking to market products end up defending their patent in court or are confronted by trolls demanding exorbitant payments to waive a patent challenge.
“Innovators are turning to us because they are held hostage,” she said.
