City Council Hopefuls Declare Candidacy

A geese activist who says that city and state agencies have conspired to murder his fowl friends.

A neighborhood leader who organized the charge against a tunnel Harvard hoped to build under a busy city street.

A lifelong liberal who began her political career in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and who wants to spread the wealth of Cambridge’s universities to the city’s struggling unemployed.

These are just a few of the 10 outsiders who have announced that they hope to gain a seat in Cambridge’s hall of power, the Cambridge City Council.

Since Tuesday—the first day that nomination forms could be submitted—candidates have been registering in droves.

All of the current councillors are expected to run again, toughening the odds against outsiders.

But this year’s upstarts—like every crop of challengers in the city council election—have at least a fighting chance.

Under Cambridge’s electoral system, a candidate must win just one-tenth of the votes to win.

This means that, in a city of about 100,000 people, a candidate had to win just 1,670 votes in order to win a seat on the council in 2001.

According to local political pundit Robert Winters, Cambridge is the only city in the entire country that still uses the so-called “proportional representation” (PR) voting system, which is specifically designed to allow smaller political parties and interest groups to gain a voice in local government.

“It’s sort of an oddity that we’re the only city in America that still uses it,” Winters says.

But the system is one of the “purest” forms of democracy, he adds. The PR system has historically attracted dark horse candidates and long shots—from hard-core Libertarians to members of the Green Party—who want to gain a toehold on the mainstream, as well as long-time denizens of the neighborhood-based politics in the People’s Republic of Cambridge.

In the PR form of democracy, every kind of candidate—and every kind of platform—get their day in the sun.

Save the Geese

One of the 10 challenger candidates, Robert LaTrémouille, surveys the sloping riverside clearing, sparsely vegetated and concealed from the Memorial Drive traffic above. He squints one cobalt eye and stares with the other at the patch of river showing through waterside foliage. His jaw is set hard.

“There were two types of killings,” he says. “Some were bloody. They’d leave the bodies on the ground.”

Others, he explains, were less overt—poisonings, or surreptitious slayings. There have been 10 so far this year, he says. All have taken place in this same locale.

LaTrémouille crosses the clearing and gestures with his hand.

“The leader-in-training was shot to death, his body mutilated,” he says. He had only recently adopted an infant whose own mother had disappeared abruptly.

“There he is,” La Trémouille cries proudly, pointing. “We call him Junior.”

The twice orphaned two-year-old struts confidently across the sparse grass and hisses at a companion. He is a white goose, one of three species to live in the small green area just downstream of the Boston University bridge—a habitat that has been intentionally destroyed, LaTrémouille says, by local development programs attempting to clear the nesting area. He blames them for what he believes has been the systematic killing of the white geese since 1998.

LaTrémouille has become the leader of a Cambridge enclave of advocacy for the geese. He condemns what he describes as the past ambivalence of Cambridge’s elected leaders on the issue, and the this summer, he is organizing an effort to take part in government himself.

LaTrémouille, who regularly publishes a newsletter called Mother Goose News, will run on an environmental platform centered on his beloved geese, accusing the council of acting weakly and ineffectually in cases of environmental injustice.

“I don’t see a single councillor who is fit to be reelected,” he says. “I’m seriously considering getting the attorney general in here to help deal with a lot of the major destruction.”

The Field

Winters says he expects most of the contenders not to garner enough votes to win a council position.

In the wake of a council term that Winters says has effectively lacked major controversy, he expects to find little overturn among the existing council members.

Nonetheless, Winter considers long-time mid-Cambridge neighborhood leader John Pitkin, who quietly led the charge against Harvard’s plan to build a tunnel beneath Cambridge Street, a formidable contender.

Winters says Pitkin—who narrowly lost a 2001 bid—is the one non-incumbent nominee who could walk away from this election with a seat on the council.

“Of all the incumbents or challengers, he probably has the longest record for public service,” Winters says.

Pitkin, who led the Mid-Cambridge Neighborhood Association for 16 years, declines to name any particular policies that he would promote if elected to the council.

Instead, he says, his goal would be to provide direction to council, specifically mentioning improved city schools and town-gown relations as two of his goals.

“I would like to see the city change the direction that it’s going in,” he says. “I think the city is well managed, but in the world today, good government takes more than management. It takes leadership, and I think that’s something we need more of.”

Laurie Taymor-Berry, who registered as a candidate on Monday, says she plans to begin an active campaign to bring her priorities—addressing issues facing low-income residents, people of color and jobless young people—to the forefront of Cambridge public consciousness.

“I will pick up the nomination papers tomorrow,” she said on Monday, “and begin what we call the long walk. Walking from door to door.”

A lifelong activist who started her work in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Taymor-Berry says that she is motivated largely by ideals of mitigating economic disparities in the city.

“I strongly believe in the ideas and principles that go back to the New Deal and the social security act of 1935,” she says. “Cambridge is an economically solvent system overall, but there are several pockets that are not reaping the benefit of the high tech and the expansion.”

Taymor-Berry says she wants to harness the prosperity of Cambridge’s universities and burgeoning industry to help support residents currently struggling to find jobs. She proposes that Harvard and MIT pay local property taxes, from which they are presently exempt.

She is also a member of the Committee for Cambridge Rent Control, which proposes to return rent control—which was ended by a statewide ballot referendum in the mid-1990s—to Cambridge.

A Little Help From Friends

In Cambridge, where 400 votes do not make for victory but signal a distinguished loss, success in the polls is based on personal recognition more than bought publicity, Winters says.

“You don’t get elected on billboards or sky writing, you just have to have people who know you,” he remarks.

On the basis of name recognition, Winters expects Anthony D. Galluccio, who performed best in the last election by a landslide, to hold his present seat.

Depending on the strength of some of more promising contenders, he says, one or two of the other councillors—particularly those who have been relatively silent over of the past term—may have to fight hard for their positions.

Others registered for the upcoming election include Carole Bellew, Jeffrey Blanson, Matt De Borgalis, Daniel Greenwood and Craig Kelley. Robert Hall Sr. will be running for the third time, while Boston University administrator Ethridge King, who garnered nearly 400 votes in the last election, will be running against the incumbents once more.

The PR voting system, in which the field of at least 19 will run this year, has been operational in Cambridge since 1941. In this system, voters rank the candidates one through nine, rather than simply voting for a single candidate of their choice.

The so-called “number one” votes are most important.

The quota—or number of votes necessary to win—is equivalent to one-tenth of the total number of number one votes.

After a candidate garners enough number one votes to hit quota, all additional ballots with that candidate’s name in the number one slot are “transferred” to the candidate whose name is listed in the number two slot. The transferring continues down the line until a full slate of nine candidates are elected.

Proportional representation gained popularity in the 1930s, Winters explains, institute in small towns and big cities alike. Even New York City tried the system briefly.

Proponents of the election program upheld it as a means of bringing fringe groups into mainstream politics.

But local governments began to abandon the system, Winters says, when election outcomes started becoming too unconventional for political taste.

Today, Cambridge and its so-called Plan E elections stand alone.

The plan has been contested in the years since its adoption, but Cambridge, unlike other cities, has always voted to keep the electoral program.

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.