City Council Candidates Enter Race

All nine current members of the Cambridge City Council—plus an assortment of nine Democratic, Libertarian, and even Republican challengers—declared their candidacy last Friday in the first hurdle leading up to the November citywide elections.

The July 29 deadline required candidates to gather at least 50 signatures supporting their bids for two-year terms on the City Council. All nine of the incumbents have been in office since at least 2002, meaning that, if Cambridge voters approve the same slate of candidates yet again, they would be represented by an identical Council through 2008.

Already emerging as one of the election’s central issue is taxation. Both property values and tax rates continued to increase in 2005, and the Boston Globe in January predicted the average Cambridge homeowner’s tax would rise by more then 10 percent this year.

Fourteen of the contenders debated tax policy Tuesday at a forum at the Cambridge Senior Center, with challengers claiming that climbing taxes are pricing Cantabrigians out of their own city to make way for wealthy condominium dwellers. The forum was sponsored by the Progressive Democrats of Cambridge, which endorsed seven candidates at the meeting.

“The very large tax increase, I think...was done in an unfair and disrespectful way,” Jesse Gordon said in an interview. Gordon is a first-time Democratic challenger and 1994 graduate of the Kennedy School of Government whose Web site allows visitors to find out “which homes got whacked” by the new assessments, said in an interview.

University-related issues also figure to surface during the election campaign, particularly in discussion of tax policy.

Because Harvard is an educational institution, much of its Cambridge real estate is tax-exempt. In lieu of taxes, the University customarily pays a voluntary sum to the city—which will amount to about $2.4 million in 2006.

Craig Kelley, another challenger and a former Marine, called Harvard’s arrangement a “lousy way to do business,” and said that if elected, he would consider ways to expand Harvard’s tax bill.

“What it means to be a nonprofit today is different than what it meant a hundred years ago,” Kelley said. “[Harvard and MIT] are not nonprofits in the sense of mom-and-pop nonprofits.”

University construction controversy will likely surface in the election as well. At the City Council’s midsummer meeting Monday, several residents of the Kerry Corner neighborhood came to protest the ongoing construction of a graduate student dormitory on Cowperthwaite Street across from Dunster and Mather Houses [see story, page 8]. And one challenger, Lawrence Adkins, is a past president of the Riverside Neighborhood Association.

Rounding out the slate of challengers is James Condit, a Libertarian; Andre Green, a 24-year-old Republican; Robert Hall, Sr.; Bill Hees, a second Libertarian; Robert La Trémouille, a longtime Cantabrigian who frequently denounces environmental destruction in the city; and Sam Siedel, an urban planner and 2001 graduate of the Design School.

On November 8, the nine contenders will face the entire membership of this year’s City Council, including Mayor Michael A. Sullivan, Vice Mayor Marjorie C. Decker, and Anthony Galluccio, who was easily the most popular candidate in both 2001 and 2003.

Under Cambridge’s intricate election system, citizens can vote for as many candidates as they wish, but must rank them in order of preference. Any candidate who meets a pre-determined quota of first-place votes is immediately elected, and the votes are recounted until all nine spots have been filled. The mayor is later chosen by the Council from among its members; Sullivan, for example, was picked for the office in 2001 despite garnering only the seventh-highest amount of first-place votes.

At least one challenger, Green, said he would reexamine the election process if elected to the Council.

“There’s no person anyone can come to and say, that’s my councilor,” Green said. He added that instead of scrapping the system entirely, he would consider adding neighborhood-based members to the Council.

And at least three current councilors—Decker, Galluccio, and Kenneth E. Reeves ’72—are in favor of making the mayoral election a direct one, although the City Council voted down such a proposal in May, noting it had no runoff provisions.

—Staff writer Brendan R. Linn can be reached at blinn@fas.harvard.edu.