Liberals May Gain Majority

If it doesn't rain this Tuesday, Cambridge liberals have a better than even chance of walking off with a fifth seat on this year's city council. While the Independents are lying low, smoothly predicting that they'll again earn a majority on the nine-member council, the reformers--better organized than at any time in the recent past--have been furiously registering new voters (almost 6000 all told) who on election day may put them over the top. And while Independents are downplaying the issues, claiming that this election will be decided purely on the basis of personalities, liberals are pushing the questions of rent control and the protection of neighborhoods against high rise development in the hopes of convincing enough of those new voters that they have a stake in showing up at the polls November 4.

According to liberal Councilor Francis H. Duehay '55, reformers have about a 50-50 chance of capturing that crucial fifth seat, with their triumph depending on a turnout of 70 per cent or more. Aside from the successful registration drive, what makes Duehay's prediction realistic is the relative unity of Cambridge progressives this year. Frustrated by their defeat two years ago, reform elements--backed by professional and university-affiliated groups in the city--have submerged their differences in an issue-oriented coalition under the banner of Cambridge Convention '75. Last spring the convention endorsed a slate composed of the four incumbent liberal councilors--Duehay, Barbara Ackermann, Saundra Graham and David A. Wylie--and four others, in an effort to improve their chances of capturing a majority of the city council.

On the other side, the Independents are counting on the advantages of incumbency to see them through. Even in the best of times, Cambridge's unique and inordinately complex system of Proportional Representation voting makes it extremely difficult to unseat an incumbent. The lackluster nature of the campaign so far--the result of what liberals fear is an unwarranted complacency among city voters--may make the task even more difficult this time. Mayor Walter J. Sullivan said last week that there are no real issues in this campaign--"it's strictly personal." As a result, he said, the candidates whose names are already familiar to Cambridge voters face a high chance of turning up again on the new council.

Militating against Sullivan's prediction, on the other hand, is a split in the ranks of the Independents, old-style Democrats who draw their strength from working-class and ethnic sections of the city. Last time the five Independent councilors--Sullivan, Daniel J. Clinton, Thomas W. Danehy, Alfred E. Vellucci and Leonard J. Russell--ran together on an "Independent Slate;" this alliance was splintered after the election, however, when Sullivan and Russell decided to support the liberals' choice for city manager in return for their own election as mayor and vice-mayor.

Wylie and other liberals maintain in fact that what little progress has occurred in city government over the past two years-notably the appointment of City Manager James L. Sullivan and new heads of the Cambridge Police Department and Housing Authority-is the lucky product of this temporary split in the Independent coalition. Unless they gain a fifth liberal on the council this time, Duehay said, Cantabridgians will be the victims of "regression at the worst, status quo government at the best." Non-incumbent Mary Ann Preusser (CC '75) said she sees the recent changes in the city as only indications of what could come. "We've had the hors d'oeuvres before what could be a feast," she said.

If reformers are trying to create issues where the Independents claim there are none, it is because they know that voter apathy represents the biggest stumbling block on their path to political control. "The major problem is that people think because they have rent control and a start on police department reform, because they have low taxes and have stopped the Kennedy Library, that somehow there's nothing to fear," Duehay said.

What people should fear from the re-election of an independent-dominated council, liberals contend, is, for one thing, the discontinuation of rent control in its current form. Liberals have previously mustered five votes in favor of rent control only because of Vellucci's defection from the Independent side. Recently, however, Vellucci has proposed a measure called "vacancy decontrol," which would allow landlords to raise rents once an apartment becomes vacant.

Independent councilors have traditionally opposed rent control because, in Clinton's words, it is 'poorly administered" and "has turned landlord and tenant into combatants." Russell and other Independents also accuse the Cambridge Rent Control Board of being "too much pro-tenant."

The related questions of development and planning comprise the second major battleground for reformers and moderates this fall. While rent control has emerged as the single most talked-about issue in this unusually quiet campaign, city development and rezoning represent, according to Wylie, Cambridge's most important long-term priorities. No candidate favors wholesale destruction of neighborhoods or, alternately, a complete halt to development in the city; the distinctions between moderates and liberals are largely a question of emphasis, but they are significant nonetheless. Convention '75 candidates applaud downzoning-which limits the number of units that can be built in a given area-and stress the importance of preserving neighborhoods against the encroachments of the universities and commercial developers. Independents focus instead on the need to bring businesses and high rent housing into Cambridge to increase the property tax base, a task they say would be facilitated by the end of rent control and the curtailment of downzoning. At the other extreme, non-incumbent John Brode '52 (CC '75), formerly a co-founder with Saundra Graham of the radical Grass Roots Organization, points to what he calls a "causal link between high rise buildings and crime," and argues that tax dollars from development are eaten up by the cost of providing increased city services. Brode favors abolishing the property tax altogether and replacing it with a state-imposed graduated income tax.

Beyond these two issues, the opposing camps have been engaging in a primarily rhetorical war, with virtually everyone coming out, not too surprisingly, against crime, high taxes and of course those perennial whipping boys, the universities. When it comes to Harvard, the candidates trip over one another in their anxiousness to establish their credentials as bona fide critics of University expansion and the University's failure to increase its "in lieu of tax" payments to the city. Some candidates, like Brode, say that a simple shift in the attitude of University officials towards the community would go a long way towards relieving town-gown tensions. "The scientists at MIT are far more humane than the humanists at Harvard" when it comes to working with the community, Brode said. Harvard administrators are "above being questioned by mere people," he said. "They just haven't thought about their position in the community and what they're doing in it."

One exception to the parade of candidates attacking the University is Denis Barber '60 who maintains that the University "gives a lot more to the community than what it takes." Barber calls accusations of "land-grabbing" by the universities "unfair" and "exaggerated" and says that "poor Harvard is just ceaselessly and unfairly maligned."

Bad-mouthing the council these days is becoming almost as fashionable as criticizing Harvard. John J. Courtney, another unaligned non-incumbent, said that the mayor, who presides over council meetings, would be replaced by a "ringmaster with a whip," since the "city council is nothing but a circus."

Joseph F. Tichanuk, former president of the city water workers' union, said he's spent "more time at council meetings than most councilors." An advocate of rent control and increased development to create more jobs, Tichanuk compares his battle to unseat the incumbents to "fighting a windmill."

If any unseating of incumbents takes place this fall, the candidates to watch as the election returns drift slowly in (with PR voting, it often takes a week to figure out the winners) will be the four non-incumbents on the CC '75 slate. Of the four-John Brode, David Clem, Eric Davin and Mary Ann Preusser-each claims that he or she will be the lucky winner if CC '75 picks up a fifth seat, and the complexity of Cambridge voting makes it hard to tell the bluffers from the true believers. All four, of course, embrace the CC '75 platform, with Brode stressing rent control and Clem, the preservation of neighborhoods. Preusser, who has an additional endorsement from the Massachusetts Women's Political Caucus, has her very own issue-making child care available to middle income families. The goal of her campaign, she said, is "to raise the consciousness level of citizens and city councilors."

Whether CC '75 will come out on top this year depends a great deal on whether reform candidates can convince city voters that rent control and neighborhood preservation are truly at issue this year. If they fail, the voters are likely to pull the levers--or sit the election out-very much as they have in the past, and November 4 will see Cantabridgians endorsing two more years of the same.Councilor ALFRED E. VELLUCCI and Mayor WALTER J. SULLIVAN face off at the city council meeting last week.