Mayor Vellucci Comes to Tea

Cambridge Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci yesterday blasted Harvard's recent decision to charge its employees $10 per month for parking on Harvard property.

"I wouldn't pay the parking fee, if it was me," Vellucci said in an address yesterday before the School of Education's Student Association.

Vellucci said the University's action will aggravate the city's "acute parking problem" by driving a large percent-age of the employees' cars into the already-jammed Cambridge parking facilities.

"Fifteen years ago I suggested that they tear up all the trees in Harvard Yard, in all the yards at Harvard, and turn this land into parking lots," Vellucci said.

Disturbed

"They rioted about it for two days." But it got results, he said. M.I.T. "took the hint" and built several multi-story parking buildings; Harvard built one.

This time Vellucci has sent a "very strong letter to Dr. Pusey and Company" urging that the University open up still more of its property for free parking for its employees.

He lamented, however, that it is nearly impossible to get anything done these days and turned his talk to the drug problem.

Spreading

Vellucci warned that the drug problem exists "not only at Harvard, but is reaching into every community in Cambridge."

People down at City Hall, he continued, talk about the problem all the time, but it's all "only razzle-dazzle and hocus-pocus. I want to do something, " he said.

So Vellucci recently proposed that a $1000 reward be offered for information on small drug-pushers in Cambridge, and $10,000 for larger dealers. "The proposal was sensational," he stated, "and it woke everyone up."

After he had provoked the outcry, he sidetracked his own proposal into committee. It had served its purpose.

"But the fact remains," he stressed, "that unless you get on the ball and hit them over the head, the people who run things won't do anything but talk."

Asked about thumbing and panhandling in Cambridge streets, his view was sympathetic. "I did all the things a long time ago that kids do now. I once slept in Central Park for a week."