Photo: Tom Caputo

Nearly a year after securing his first full three-year term on the Belmont School Committee, Tom Caputo is thinking of a higher calling having taken out nomination papers for the Board of Selectmen.

In a conversation with the Belmontonian, Caputo appears ready to start a campaign to wrest away the seat from its incumbent, Jim Williams. 

In his “elevator pitch” for the position, Caputo points to many challenges facing the board in the near future and his skills to find solutions. 

“Simply put, the town has a bunch of critical decisions that we need to make in the coming years, questions about the new high school, major capital projects, traffic and those will all require thoughtful, creative solutions where lots of people with different backgrounds come together to create workable solutions,” he said.

“It all has to be done under which will continue to be a challenging fiscal environment. My time on the school committee, my experience on the [Belmont] High School Building Committee has given me both an understanding of a lot of those key issues and a passion to do more and be a part of trying to solve those problems.”

“I’m excited to continue to contribute to the town and its residents,” he said.

Both Williams and Caputo have yet to return their nomination papers to the Town Clerk’s Office. All town-wide office seekers and town meeting candidates have until Feb. 13 at 5 p.m. In September 2017, Williams said he would not run for re-election but did so including several caveats that would change his decision. 

Caputo was appointed to the School Committee in Nov. 2014 to replace Kevin Cunningham who resigned. At the town election in April 2015, Caputo ran uncontested for the two-years remaining in Cunningham’s term. In April 2017, he won a three-year appointment with 3,014 votes running with Kate Bowen to fill two slots.

For the past year, Caputo has been senior vice president for product at Cambridge-based CarGurus, a publicly-traded online car shopping website founded in 2006 by Langley Steinert, co-founder of TripAdvisor.

Caputo matriculated at Dartmouth then headed to Stanford where he earned an MBA and MS in electrical engineering. He started his career at Microsoft.

A decade-long resident, Caputo lives on Richmond Road with his wife, Sarah, and 11-year-old twin daughters.

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