Calamity Before the Storm

THE NEXT ELECTION in Cambridge is seven months off, but anyone who ventures near the City Council chambers on Monday nights can sense the politician stirring within each councillor. Various citizen organizations are planning their slates and potential candidates are feeling out and bargaining for support. Some candidates have already held informal meetings for their supporters.

Cambridge will elect at large nine city councillors and six members to the School Committee (the seventh member is the Mayor, chosen by the councillors from among themselves). Independents are hoping to defeat the fractured coalition of the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA), the city's liberal good-government organization, and regain control of the two legislative bodies. The CCA won a narrow and contested victory at the polls two years ago.

Even though the major controversies of last year over the appointments of a new City Manager and School Superintendent have been resolved, the coals continue to smolder and, on occasion, a spark ignites. The CCA won one and lost one last season. But in succeeding to replace former School Superintendent Frank Frisoli '35 with the highly-touted Alflorence Cheatham of Chicago, it aroused the ire of half of Cambridge -- a Pyrrhic political victory at best. In losing the City Manager fiasco, the CCA also lost its majority on the City Council. Councillor Henry F. Owens III, a black attorney and millionaire heir of a moving company, broke with his fellow CCA councillors over the selection of a replacement for two-year incumbent manager John Corcoran, a soft-spoken man who had worked his way up through the city hall bureaucracy and whom some councillors found difficult to work with. Owens favored a black. James Johnson of Kansas City, while the other four members of the CCA coalition had settled on Harold Peterson, a member of a New York consulting firm. Neither side compromised and in late summer the Independents won out as Corcoran was reappointed.

The animosity between Owens and his former political bedfellows continues and there are few Council meetings during which some bitterness does not break the surface. Shortly after the city manager controversy last fall, the Council formed a subcommittee on cable television at Owens' suggestion. Contrary to normal Council procedure, Mayor Barbara Ackermann, a member of the CCA slate, passed over Owens and named Councillor Robert Moncreiff chairman of the subcommittee. Owens protested loudly and Ackermann replied that the maneuver constituted a "studied insult." Since that time Owens has attempted through several different motions to have himself named chairman. His proposals have usually wound up sitting on the table for weeks as other councillors seemed reluctant to take sides in what was becoming a personal dispute between the mayor and Owens. Owens does not hide his low opinion of the mayor, but his protestations often have the quality of temper tantrums that have fared poorly against Ackermann's cool.

COUNCILLOR ALFRED E. VELLUCCI, an irrepressible ham and everybody's populist, has promised to make cable television an important election issue this year. In addition to the insinuations tossed back and forth in the Council that certain people might have ulterior financial interests in bringing cable television to Cambridge, the question of privacy and surveillance via two-way cable hook-ups has been raised by People Against National Identification Cards (PANIC). As a result, the city fought a proposed MIT experiment to equip the Washington Elms housing project with cable TV and declared an 18-month moratorium on such franchises.

The heated-up political atmosphere was evident at Monday night's meeting when the policemen's union came before the Council and complained about the progress of their contract negotiations with the city manager. Arthur Yetman, spokesman for the police, made an emphatic point of reminding the councillors of the November election. Afterwards, Yetman hinted that some policemen may take leaves of absence to run for political office while the union would endorse candidates. However, anti-police feeling stirred in working class areas by the Largey incident will probably dampen the union's influence this year.

Besides cable TV, the police and political infighting, the lieu-of-taxes payments and expansion of the city's two large universities, the rising property tax rate and the distribution of the city's ever scarcer poverty funds among the lower class ethnic neighborhoods should provide fodder for the campaign. Landlords may unite behind one or more candidates in an effort to overthrow the city's controversial rent control law. Some candidates may espouse or oppose the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority's plan to convert Kendall Square into a commercial district in order to woo business or working class interests respectively. Cambridge's Plan E reform system of government and its complex proportional representation method of voting, which Independents and conservatives claim has worked against them in the past, could again be an issue this year.

While the city's black community is represented by Owens and Graham on the Council and Charles Pierce on the School Committee, the more populous Portuguese segment, largely located in East Cambridge, has no effective voice in either body. Whether it will make a dent in a political system still largely shared by old-line Irish and Italian pols and CCA liberals remains a question mark. Since many Cambridge Portuguese are not U.S. citizens and voter registration is low among those who are, the poor showing of previous Portuguese candidates will likely repeat in November.

At this time, Ackermann and two popular Independents, Walter Sullivan and Thomas Danehy, seem assured of re-election. Owens, who is certain to lose his CCA endorsement, and Frank H. Duehay '55 appear in trouble. Donald Fantini, an Independent member of the School Committee and an ardent Frisoli supporter, Leonard Russell, a three-time loser who trailed Duehay by only 36 votes the last time around, and Dom Christofaro of Cambridgeport should prove the strongest challengers.

Since the city does not have a spring primary to weed out the weaker candidates, the November ballot will be a lengthy one. With no lack of issues and aspiring office-seekers to exploit them, political controversy and confusion will be rampant in Cambridge this summer.