CCA Dominates School Board; S. Africa Referendum Passes

The Cambridge School Committee will have its first progressive majority in more than two decades when newly elected members assume their jobs in January.

Cambridge Civic Association (CCA) candidate Glenn S. Koocher '71 eked out a 61-vote victory over independent incumbent David Holway to retain his seat, a final vote count of last Tuesday's elections showed late yesterday.

Another CCA liberal, first-time candidate, Henrietta Attles, will replace Holway on the committee. Koocher and Attles, along with fellow progressives Sara Mae Berman and Alice Wolf, will give the CCA a 4-2 margin on the six-man committee.

Returns still being tabulated also indicate that all six referendum questions on the ballot, including one asking the City Council to withdraw all city funds from banks doing business with South Africa, will pass.

Nukes, History and Health

Returns from three of the city's wards show that voters are favoring all of the referendum questions by at least 2-1 margins. The questions call for an end to licensing of nuclear power plants; protection of the "historic scale and character" of Harvard, Porter, Central, Inman and Kendall Squares; enactment of a national health insurance plan; support for the presidential candidacy of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.), and placement of zoning restrictions on Cambridge institutions, including Harvard.

The South Africa divestiture question was leading by the smallest margin, approximately 2-1, a check of selected precincts showed.

The votes had been tabulated in Wards 1, 2 and 3, which includes some of the city's more conservative areas. In Ward 6, precinct 3, which includes voters in the River House and the Yard, the vote was better than 3-1 for an end to city deposits in banks lending money to South Africa.

No Nukes

Student voters supported the referendum calling for an end to licensing of nuclear power plants by a margin of more than 5-1.

"We will bring up the energy issues the first time the city council meets." Cliff Truesdell '66, an organizer of the drive to pass the anti-nuclear referendum, said yesterday. "We expect these measures to be passed--we expect the city council will take heed of this overwhelming mandate," he added.

The referendum ballots are the only votes left to be tabulated in the election, which took place exactly a week ago.

The school committee race was not decided until late last night when ballots cast originally for Joseph Fitzgerald were distributed among Koocher, Holway and Attles.

Under Cambridge's complex proportional representation system, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If a voter's first-choice candidate is eliminated or collects a surplus of votes, the second-choice vote counts.

"This will mean not having to have long drawn-out negotiations around patronage jobs," CCA executive director Lin Sasman said last night. "In the past members have had to bargain and trade off patronage jobs for support on issues," she added.

Workers redistributed the second-choice votes on ballots cast for Fitzgerald, David Kennedy and David Blackman yesterday, as an afternoon that had looked gloomy for Koocher at the start grew progressively brighter.

"I pulled many more second-choice ballots from Kennedy and Fitzgerald than I expected," Koocher said last night after his victory was announced.