Biography - Warner for Mayor

Marc Warner has a Ph.D. in transportation systems from MIT and an M.S. in public policy and management from Carnegie-Mellon University. As president of Warner Transportation Consulting, Inc., for the last 29 years, he has conducted management, policy, and planning studies for transit agencies and state transportation departments throughout the United States and internationally. He has directed more than 50 projects with values from $10,000 to $265,000 and has consistently delivered results on-time and on-budget.

His education and experience have allowed Marc to develop strong skills in organizational audits, performance assessments, collective bargaining, development of equitable fiscal policies, data analysis, legal and regulatory evaluations, establishment of capital priorities, procurement issues, and persuasive writing and confident public speaking. These are skills that would all be helpful in the role of mayor of Northampton.  

He moved to Northampton from Cambridge in 2005 with his wife Bonnie Burke, a Smith College graduate. He and Bonnie have two children: Jeffrey, 15, and Douglas, 13.

"I first came to Northampton on a project I did in 1998 for the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission," says Warner. "I'd spent a day with staff collecting data at the parking garage behind Thornes. I walked around town and loved the place.  Seven years later, my wife and I bought a house."

Warner was an active member of Northampton's Charter Review and the separate Charter Drafting Committee that prepared the new charter approved by city voters in 2012. He has also served on the city's parking and passenger rail committees. In his civic roles outside of Northampton, he has been a board member and the treasurer for more than 15 years of Common Cause of Massachusetts, an organization that promotes honest and accountable government.
 
He is a Democrat, and has three times been elected by the Democratic City Committee as a delegate to the state convention. Warner also moderated the 2013 state Democratic platform hearing in Northampton, and the 2019 candidate forum sponsored by the Bay State Village Association and the Florence Civic and Business Association.
 
Warner expresses a strong commitment to core democratic principles, citing government as an active and positive force for society, taxation based on a fair and shared sacrifice, strong schools as a community responsibility, and the separation of church and state.  He notes, however, that "party affiliation is less important to me than are integrity and basic good governance. Lawmakers should choose policies based on powerful arguments about the broad public good, and not on loud arguments by powerful players.  Government should then implement those policies through fair and efficiently managed programs."

Marc Warner is a frequent contributor to the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Boston Globe. You can see his dozens of op-eds and letters to the editor on many civic issues in the op-eds section of this web site.

You can learn more about Warner Transportation Consulting, Inc. at warnertransportation.com