Latest Election Prompts Evaluation of System

In the wake of the recent controversial Cambridge mayoral election and the resultant allegations of ultimatums and acts of back-stabbing fit for daytime television, some city councillors and local politicos are suggesting that the way the city's mayor is elected be reevaluated.

Currently the nine city councillors vote to elect the mayor from among their own ranks.

In Cambridge, the mayor's role is restricted to being the chair of the council and the chair of the school committee.

A city manager is in charge of other city business.

"The elections are very hard-fought when a city council elects a mayor; [almost] everybody wants to be mayor, and sometimes there are hard feelings as a result of the election process," says recently-elected Cambridge Mayor Francis H. Duehay '55.

The January Election

The recent election left a particularly strong set of hard feelings.

In the first balloting, Councillor Katherine Triantafillou received five of the nine votes, topping Councillor Michael A. Sullivan.

Triantafillou was a member of the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA) party; she has since disaffiliated.

Sullivan was and is a member of the Alliance for Change (AFC) party.

After then-CCA member Triantafillou appeared to have won the election, AFC member Anthony D. Galluccio switched his vote to Duehay.

All the AFC members followed suit.

Duehay then switched his vote from Triantafillou to himself, and the CCA members, with the exception of Triantafillou, then switched their votes to Duehay.

Independent Councillor Kenneth E. Reeves '72 did not change his vote in favor of Triantafillou, leaving the final vote in favor of Duehay, 7-2.

At the council's next meeting, Councillor Timothy J. Toomey Jr. filed a motion to reconsider the mayoral vote.

The motion failed, with a 5-4 vote supporting Duehay's motion that the mayoral elections should stand.

Disputes Over the Election

City councillors as well as local politicos have voiced different explanations for the unusual sequence of events that led to Duehay's election.

In a Feb. 12 press release, Duehay stated his version of the events.

Duehay contends that Councillors Kathleen L. Born and Henrietta Davis had supported him from the beginning, while Triantafillou had supported only herself.

According to Duehay, Triantafillou gave an ultimatum to the CCA that either they vote for her, or she would "release" Reeves from his commitment to vote for her, which would result in an AFC member being elected.

Thus, Born, Davis and Duehay voted for Triantafillou, preferring a CCA candidate if Duehay could not win, the press release says.

Reeves, who had declared his support for Triantafillou in November, has a different take on what happened.

"All you have to do is look at the Monday of the election; the people on the CCA who voted for Katherine Triantafillou and then, before her face, changed their votes...lied to her and were unable to be truthful," Reeves says.

However, Robert J. Winters, a local political analyst, disagrees with Reeves' assessment of the situation.

"Everyone on the council knew that Triantafillou had, at best, two out of nine people supporting her," Winters says.

"It was ridiculous, because the CCA councillors didn't support her-never did," says Winters.

Winters is a preceptor in the Harvard math department as well as publisher of the Cambridge Civic Journal, an e-mail newsletter providing political analyses of city happenings.

Triantafillou could not be reached for comment.

Shortly after the January election, Triantafillou told The Crimson, "I believe [the mayoral election] should be done differently."

"The process needs to be open to some sort of public scrutiny," Triantafillou said. "This way, it's an ugly contest of personalities."

Will There Be Changes?

Reeves has been one of the most vocal advocates for a change in the way the mayor of Cambridge is elected.

"With the treachery and dishonesty in this last mayoral election, it would make sense for the people of Cambridge to elect their own mayor either in the Worcester way or to directly elect the mayor and do away with the city manager altogether," Reeves says.

In the city of Worcester councillors who want to serve as mayor designate as much on the ballot, and the councillor who receives the most votes becomes mayor.

Duehay does not advocate a new electoral system at the moment but says he would not oppose a review of the system.

"All governance procedures deserve periodically to be reviewed, especially when there is acrimony among city council members," Duehay says.

David L.K. Trumbull, chair of the Cambridge Republican City Committee, says the conflict surrounding the recent election stems from the city's use of the title "mayor," even though the city has what he describes as a "weak mayor" system.

"A lot of all of the interest about the election of the mayor and the bad feeling that got generated in this last [election]...has its origin in the use of the term 'mayor' for an office that isn't really a mayor's," Trumbull says, referring to the Cambridge mayor's limited power.

"I would be all for abolishing the title of 'mayor,'" Trumbull says.

But most councillors and local political analysts do not expect changes anytime soon in the way Cambridge elects its mayor or in the role the mayor plays in city government.

"I do think that people are better represented through the city council/city management form," Duehay says. "Decisions are shared in Cambridge; political power is shared."

"The discussion has come up largely in the form of public commentary, and as introduced by Triantafillou," Winters says. "You have to put the proposal for a change in that context."

"I think a managed city is the right way to go," Winters says.

Sullivan says he does not expect a change in the mayoral election system anytime soon.

Yet others say the system ought to change.

Most sources, regardless of their thoughts on the electoral system, agree that there will likely be no further challenges to the Duehay mayorship.

"One of the highest values in government is stability, and we don't want to add to the treachery the instability of changing the titular mayor every week--nobody thinks that serves the best interests of the people," Reeves says.

"I would not anticipate [a change] anytime soon, because I think the council is now going to settle down to its work," Sullivan says.

History of the System

The current election system dates back to the 1940s.

In 1915, the city had a so-called "strong mayor" form of government where the mayor, elected by Cantabrigians, managed city affairs. City councillors were selected from the city's districts.

Governmental corruption, including the imprisonment of the mayor and the "snow incident"--snow was not cleared from the streets due to the City Council's inactions--led to a reform movement in 1938.

As a result of this movement, the state legislature, added a fifth option for governments within the Commonwealth. This option, which is the current governmental system in Cambridge, offers a package with proportional representation and professional city management that includes the council-elected mayorship.

This style of government, known as "Plan E" because it was the fifth option, was passed in 1940.

According to Edward G. Samp, a former election commission chair for the city, it is "very difficult" to change the governmental style.

In order to do so, Samp says, the city would have to hold a convention with elected delegates, who would make a recommendation to the city; the issue would then appear on a ballot, and the residents of the city would vote on the situation.

"We've never had [a convention]," Samp says. "It would be quite a sales job to convince voters that we would have to have a convention."

Plan E did, however, come up for review on the ballot five times after it was originally adopted.

"People equated the defeat of Plan E with going back to the old ways," Samp says, explaining why Plan E was never abolished.

Cambridge's two political parties, the CCA and the AFC, also rose from debate over Plan E.

"The roots of the CCA were rooted back in the early part of the century with the more academic, elite parts of the city," says Winters.

The CCA advised adopting a proportional representation system. "They've been around as long as the city charter has been around, and in a certain sense, [they] represent it," Winters says.

"Originally, [the CCA] was formed to bring in all types of political opinion," says Samp. "The problem was that in a city in Mass, the Democrats control the range of government, and if you were to have partisan elections, all you would have would be the majority party electing somebody."

The AFC in this era was composed of Democrats from old Cambridge families "who felt that the way to keep their people in power was to elect them in a partisan way," Samp says.

Today, according to Trumbull, the CCA considers itself true to its origins as a "good government group," and has become identified with a somewhat radical group in the city; the AFC, meanwhile, is a more centrist liberal group.