State Rep. Alice K. Wolf

The MBTA’s proposed fare increases and service cuts will hurt riders, the environment and economic growth. Yet, imagine, this is only a one-year fix.

It is time for the Commonwealth to have a plan for putting the T on stable financial footing for the long term. No more magical thinking. There are no easy answers.

When we moved the MBTA to Forward Funding in 2000, we in the Legislature — along with the governor — made a fundamental mistake by requiring the T to fund over $3.3 billion in state debt in addition to the debt already on the T’s books. More than half of the state debt was for Big Dig-related projects. In addition, growth in the sales tax, the source of revenue tapped in the 2000 reform, has fallen short of projections. So since 2000 the T has struggled with a crushing debt burden, inadequate revenue and increased operating costs.

We, as a commonwealth, must invest in our public transportation systems for the sake of our residents and the health of our economy. This can’t just happen in the State House. We need consensus from the people of Massachusetts for the Legislature to act. When Rep. Carl Sciortino, D-Medford, and I filed legislation in 2007 and 2009 that would have provided the T with additional revenue through a gas tax increase, opposition from the public undermined support in the Legislature and eventually killed the bill.

Through this debacle we learned that it is important for those of us in the Boston metropolitan area to work harder at public outreach and education across the Commonwealth. There are a lot of misconceptions out there based on inaccurate or outdated information.

Forward funding and the 2008 transportation reforms have had a positive impact on T operations. I just read that the T may have the most advanced automated customer systems in the country. Furthermore, many management and labor issues that were of concern a few years ago have been addressed.

Everyone in Massachusetts benefits from public transportation, whether we rely on it for our daily commute, spend less time in traffic because there are fewer cars on the road, breathe a little easier due to reduced motor vehicle emissions or recognize its economic benefits for business and tourism. Seniors, teens, disabled and low-income residents can get around because of the T. We have to look past our individual frustrations and regional disputes to focus on the common good.

It will take a dedicated revenue stream to address the T’s unsustainable debt, maintain a state of good repair for T assets, improve overall MBTA service and meet the needs of residents in other regions. Two options that have been proposed are increasing the gas tax or tolling Interstate 93, but both options have major detractors. How come the Middle East oil cartel can make decisions that increase gas prices a dollar or two and people buy it, but we can’t raise the gas tax a much more modest amount without a public rebellion?

The era of magical thinking must end. Public transportation is essential for all of us around the state, and all of us have to pay for it.

Alice K. Wolf is the state representative from the 25th Middlesex District in Cambridge. She is the House chairwoman of the Joint Committee on Elder Affairs.

A message is projected onto a wall at Occupy Boston’s Camp Dewey late Thursday. (photo: mpeake)

With an eviction notice hanging for Occupy Boston’s Camp Dewey and the future of the movement in flux, here’s a suggestion for a way forward that could benefit literally everyone:

Take the energy that was going into The Boston Occupier newspaper (at one point called or expected to be The Occupy Boston Globe) and put it instead into Spare Change, the 19-year-old paper by and benefiting the homeless that is published by the Homeless Empowerment Project and run out of Harvard Square church offices.

Spare Change has some good content but is limited by the limited amount of interest people have in reading about the homeless. It could benefit by expanding its mission, both by being more practical (meaning directly useful to people beyond the homeless) and more urgent (meaning having news in it that matters directly to people beyond the homeless). That means being more about economic injustice in a practical and widely appealing way, which would bring more sales and possibly more advertising. The good news is that economic justice is a popular theme these days; the bad news is that the wider focus requires more expertise.

And the good news again is that this expertise is likely found among the energetic and idealistic people of Occupy Boston, which could use a print organ to speak more directly with people who don’t live online and get related tweets and video in real time. (And Occupy certainly wants to benefit the homeless, including those made homeless through the very specific kinds of economic injustice that have exploded over the past few years: debt, foreclosure, pension “reform,” market turbulence and so on.)

The content from Occupy websites can go into Spare Change, and the writers among Occupy can write directly for it on a variety of topics.

The final element to this, and another way to make Spare Change and Occupy practical and even more popular, is to make some of that content about cheap living in Boston. If anyone has advice about where to get the best, least expensive meals, goods and services throughout the area, it’s probably the homeless.

You could wind up with a Spare Change that’s one-sixth practical, buy-it-cheap news you can use; half Occupy content; and the remaining third homeless-specific content. That sounds more readable and more salable, meaning more profitable for the homeless Spare Change vendors who could badly use the money, than the current mix of 100 percent homeless-related content.

Then the unique human infrastructure of Spare Change can go to work. The paper has what no one else in Boston has now, not even the Metro (for which workers hand out papers silently and robotically): hawkers. People who already interact with passers-by to induce them to buy but can and should expand that to yell out what’s in an issue of Spare Change and draw attention to it. But they shouldn’t just be calling out, “Get your Spare Change here” or even “Get your Spare Change here, help the homeless”; they should be calling out the top, practical, urgent topics in that issue: “Get your Spare Change here! Mayors, FBI and Homeland Security may be conspiring against Occupy Wall Street!” (and “Five best breakfasts below $5! In this issue!”)

Theoretically, Spare Change and Occupy Boston have something no one’s had access to in quite a long time: town criers.

Occupy movements should be doing this everywhere there’s a paper for the homeless, if they’re not already.

The downside is that Occupy and the homeless could be inextricably jumbled in people’s minds, and that could work to the detriment of Occupy, given the perception of homelessness in the minds of the mass public — but that perception is itself an issue Spare Change and Occupy needs to address, since the economic-justice truth is that these days (and, really, always the case) anyone can be homeless, and more families and children are.

Even if its physical presence at Camp Dewey and Harvard Yard ends, Occupy can continue evolving into a political force, and a common media can be a way to do that.

Newt Gingrich speaks in October at the Western Republican Leadership Conference in Las Vegas. He visited Cambridge on Friday and advocated ending some child labor laws. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

The antics of the Occupy movement apparently crowds out a Republican suggestion to rethink child labor laws.

Newt Gingrich’s visited Harvard on Friday to screen his film, “A City Upon A Hill: The Spirit of American Exceptionalism,” and hold a Q&A. He is, perhaps not so coincidentally, running for president as a Republican and (among other things) wants to privatize Social Security.

Most coverage of the event focused on his heckling by Occupy protesters, with The Harvard Crimson saying “Many audience members were frustrated by the protesters. ‘Go back to your tents!’ shouted an audience member, prompting laughter and applause from many spectators. But Gingrich was unfazed by the interruption.”

Most of the Crimson’s coverage chided the protesters, summing up the rest of the event as follows:

Audience members pressed Gingrich on his stances on the issues of illegal immigration, female inequality, the educational system, and even beer.

It went into the most detail (three short paragraphs) on the topic of beer.

Unmentioned by the Crimson, and apparently uncovered by The Boston Globe, was Gingrich’s suggestion to eliminate “stupid” child labor laws. Politico quoted Gingrich at length:

“You say to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, 14, 16 years of age, fine. You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing … Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising. You go out and talk to people, as I do, you go out and talk to people who are really successful in one generation. They all started their first job between 9 and 14 years of age. They all were either selling newspapers, going door to door, they were doing something, they were washing cars.”

“This is something that no liberal wants to deal with,” he said, referring to the laws as “core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods.”

“It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid,” Gingrich said.

It was unclear what sort of pay the young janitors would get or what, under his plan, would happen to the adults holding those jobs now, some of whom are likely to be parents of poor children.

(Image: Truthout.org)

Last time I saw the American Dream was Tuesday, down at the unemployment office. He was looking pretty worn out, as if being unemployed for over a year was finally getting to him.

“How’s it going?” I asked cautiously, not wanting to step on any sensitive toes.

“It’s finally getting to me,” he answered. “It’s been over a year since I worked. And now my youngest, who I just finished paying for her college, lost her job and can’t find anything. She says there are no jobs.”

“Sorry to hear that,” I offered, starting to move off. But the American Dream grabbed my sleeve, arresting my departure.

“My son moved in with me,” he continued, the story beginning to gush out like a cataract. “Guess how much he owes from his college loans …”

“I don’t …”

“Guess,” he pushed, almost desperately. “I hear this figure in my head when I lie down to sleep at night. Guess — oh, hell, I’ll tell you — $240,000! Almost a quarter-million dollars in college loan debt! ‘Who are you borrowing from, the mafia?’ I asked him. But he just kept saying, ‘Sorry, Dad.’”

“A quarter of a million dollars; that’s a lot of money,” I opined.

“And it was compounding daily!”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? I paid the debt down to $200K. Now my ex-wife and I pay off the interest each month, keeping it at $200K. But once my unemployment runs out, she and my son will be on their own.”

He ran his hands through his disheveled hair, causing me to comment, “You don’t look so good, you know?” And it was true. Ordinarily, the American Dream is a very buttoned-down, upbeat guy, but this morning it looked as though he’d been up all night wrestling with a feverish lover or an unsolvable problem.

“The well’s almost empty,” he said through a dry mouth. “Unemployment’s running out, my savings are gone, may stock holdings, including my 401(k), are next to worthless, and my son, as I mentioned earlier, has moved back in and taken over my family room.”

“Well I have some good news,” I said happily. “I got a job! This is the last time you’ll see me hanging around these gloomy environs,” I added, giving a meaningful look around at the roomful of unemployed misfits and shirkers. “I’m back to a real paycheck starting next week.”

“Doing what?” he asked, clearly trying to hide his envy.

“I’m a lobbyist,” I answered, feeling somewhat out of my comfort zone. Normally I don’t speak about my livelihood with someone who has the weakness of character to be out of work. No matter that we were friends or acquaintances. Not able to resist bragging, I added, “I’m a great lobbyist really! I only lost my previous job because of jealousy and my boss hated me. I used to lobby for ‘financial interests’ such as banks, brokerage houses and lenders of all stripes. Hey, I was the one who lobbied to make it impossible for student debtors to declare bankruptcy on their student loans.”

“But my son …” the American Dream said, realizing the import of what I had just said.

“Yes, I lobbied for the bill that will ensure your son is in debt for most of his natural life. You and he are lucky. Had I had my way entirely — or my client’s way, really — the interest rates on his loans would rise automatically every fifth year. Republicans liked it, but they were worried; they’d just guaranteed the drug companies that the U.S. government wouldn’t use its bargaining power to lower the price of drugs for the elderly. Didn’t want to be seen as giving away the store.

“Then there was my work against Wall Street Reform,” I continued, uncertain that the American Dream wished to hear about my dismantling any real financial reforms proposed by congress or the president.

“If it wasn’t for me,” I crowed, “People like you who by no fault of your own find yourselves broke, in debt and about to lose your homes could have previously sued the banks, investment houses and hedge fund managers who turned your family’s home into a worthless investment vehicle. Now, you have to sue Bernie Madoff because he’s the only one taking any responsibility for screwing up our financial system.

“Too bad Bernie didn’t hire my lobbying firm before the pyramid collapsed. We could have gotten him an exemption in the ‘too big to fail’ category. Or something.”

Obviously uncomfortable with me talking about my triumphs, the American Dream asked me about my new job and its responsibilities. “Is there anything you’re doing that you can be proud of?” he asked pointedly.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I answered huffily. “I’m proud of everything I’ve done. Our system is set up so that everyone has freedom to participate. If the rich have more money to buy a larger slice, well that helps all of us; puts more money into the economy. At least into my economy!”

“You’re not answering the question,” he reminded me.

“My job is to help Congress rewrite regulations,” I answered proudly. “All the new regulations and restrictions congress recently enacted are preventing jobs, business growth and other opportunities.” I explained. “As are all those environmental restrictions.”

“Wait a minute,” the American Dream said, seeming to suddenly awaken. “Are you telling me that the financial sector, which caused our economic emergency because no one was watching them, now wants to use the economic emergency itself as an excuse to eliminate any rules or regulations they don’t like!”

“Exactly,” I said. “And I can be proud of playing a small role in that effort. I can also be proud of the small fortune I’ll get paid to do it.”

As the American Dream started to silently walk away, I asked him, “Where are you going?”

“For psychotherapy,” he answered sullenly. “All this crushing debt and uncertainty is driving me crazy.”

“Word of advice,” I told him. “Sign up quickly. I’m working on a bill right now to drop that coverage from your health plan.”

Paul Steven Stone is a writer and novelist living in Cambridge. Author of the novel “Or So It Seems” and the story collection “How To Train A Rock,” he works as director of advertising for W.B. Mason. He can be reached at PaulStevenStone@gmail.com.

The balance of power between the City Council and city manager is out of whack. As Robert Winters wrote on his Cambridge Civic Journal, “The authority of a city manager does tend to grow with tenure,” and with Robert W. Healy holding office since July 1, 1981, his authority is mighty indeed. Having been setting budgets and hiring, firing, appointing and dismissing throughout City Hall for 30 years, he has vastly more knowledge of its workings and the infrastructure in place to get things done than could even the longest-serving city councillor — Ken Reeves, who has been in office for 22 years.

Yet the City Council is the policy setting arm of the city (in the language of the Plan E charter, it “shall have and exercise all the legislative powers of the city, except as such powers are reserved by this chapter to the School Committee and to the qualified voters of the city”) and the city manager is, our charter says:

“the chief administrative officer of the city and shall be responsible for the administration of all departments, commissions, boards and officers of the city [and shall] act as chief conservator of the peace within the city; to supervise the administration of the affairs of the city; to see that within the city the laws of the commonwealth and the ordinances, resolutions and regulations of the city council are faithfully executed; and to make such recommendations to the City Council concerning the affairs of the city as may to him seem desirable; to make reports to the City Council from time to time upon the affairs of the city; and to keep the City Council fully advised of the city’s financial condition and its future needs. He shall prepare and submit to the City Council budgets … Such officers and employees as the City Council, with the advice of the city manager, shall determine are necessary for the proper administration of the departments, commissions, boards and offices of the city for whose administration the city manager is responsible shall be appointed, and may be removed, by the city manager.”

But for all that, the city manager seems to set a lot of policy. Just to name some recent examples, it is said universally that Healy decided to appeal the Malvina Monteiro lawsuit against the city, despite his involvement in it; and it was his decision to create the Cambridge Review Committee to look into issues surrounding the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.; and when the council has asked him not to send police officers to Israel for training, he does; and when the council asks him to take down surveillance cameras, he doesn’t.

“The council looks utterly foolish, we look powerless,” said Reeves in October 2009, as another Election Day loomed. “We’re not involved in policy or anything on too many matters. We need to be informed on what we can and cannot do.”

An opportunity

At the time, councillor Sam Seidel welcomed “an opportunity to learn, relearn, rethink” council powers and responsibilities, including some that may have drifted into the city manager’s portfolio over the years.

“Councils come and go, but the city manager sticks around,” Seidel said even before that, when he first ran for office in 2005. “Healy has been very successful at managing the city, and as a result has garnered a lot of power.”

But that opportunity to relearn and rethink never happened, and the council looks just as powerless now as it did two years ago, and surely even more complacent and willing to let the city manager do the heavy lifting. It is dispiriting, for instance, that it fell to a citizen to bring forward a suggestion (which Seidel says councillors like!) to give the city’s safety inspectors the power to fine offenders. Councillor Henrietta Davis may exclaim during a meeting about “How long does it take for us to enforce a zoning violation!” and the council can hear several years’ worth of complaints from residents about noise, garbage, rodents, work-hour violations and structural damage at a single development at Yerxa Road and Rindge Avenue — but it never occurs to our incumbents to give inspectors the same powers held by their peers throughout the state and nation?

And why would Healy ever give up power to a feckless set of councillors that can’t even get its act together enough for a look at whether it’s surrendered its rightful powers over the decades? From his perspective, it probably just looks like it would screw up what he’s created: a resounding fiscal success, with low tax rates that make Cambridge the envy of the commonwealth and constant refreshment via award-winning capital projects such as the Cambridge Main Library and four upcoming school revamps (atop similar excellent high school, athletic facility, police station and youth center projects).

But there’s some legitimate question as to whether Cambridge’s success is attributable to Healy so much as Healy’s success is attributable to Cambridge. The city is, after all, across from Boston and possessed of three major institutions of higher learning; it’s been a center of industry and innovation all the way back to the days of ice carving and brick making, and its real estate has been desirable back further than that.

Such is the power of Healy that even such a gentle surmise sounds like heresy to some, but the magical thinking that has enchanted so many on the council doesn’t work on every member of the general public.

Magical thinking

That magical thinking — or failure of critical skills — is on display when councillors Tim Toomey, Davis and other suggest that after a dozen years of litigation in the Monteiro case, the 16 boxes of legal documents and transcribed testimony from the case hold some kind of detail that will cause the city to see it all in a whole new light, as though we’re all in or watching a very long, dull M. Night Shyamalan movie, and that somehow the city’s highly paid lawyers not only couldn’t make a judge and jury see this twist, but couldn’t even articulate it so it could filter out into the city. And that for some reason no public official can explain it either, even though it’s in those boxes somewhere and the cases have been settled. Toomey’s suggestive comment is that, since jurors cleared the city of discrimination but found it guilty of retaliation — which still seems like $4.5 million worth of a bad thing — “Certainly we cannot predict how a jury’s going to find. We saw the case of the [inaudible] in Boston, the woman in Florida … was found innocent, a lot of people felt otherwise.”

If he’s trying to say Casey Anthony was really guilty when she was found innocent, doesn’t that mean Cambridge managers could actually have been guilty of the charges they were cleared of? And, anyway, which looks worse: That the city retaliated against women of color? Or that there’s incredibly obvious exculpatory evidence in those boxes that its lawyers, at hundreds of dollars per billable hour atop the $146,902.23 we pay our city solicitor annually, couldn’t use to save us from three multimillion-dollar settlements and two embarrassing appeals court findings? And it’s Healy who does the hiring.

Maybe the jurors and judges were just too dumb to grasp it, but elected officials claiming so should remember that Cambridge is a city that’s packed pretty much border to border with accomplished professionals and holders of advanced degrees, not to mention some outright geniuses in various innovation industries and academic settings. This is the city where school officials can’t even plan campuses in peace because there are too many architects among the parents who want a say. We even have some pretty bright candidates for City Council this year, and most indicated during the campaign that an O. Henry ending to the Monteiro saga seemed sort of unlikely.

For instance, Tom Stohlman has three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including for the no-dummies-allowed field of chemical engineering, and here’s what he said about council hopes that the public shares its blind faith: “It is appalling that the city manager and the City Council have refused to release the details of all the settlements and the ‘secret’ discussions regarding the cases. Despite having ample time to do so before the election, they have deprived the voters, the challengers and the rest of the city of the chance to be informed. If they continue to do so, we may never have the chance to learn from what happened and avoid the same outcome in the future.”

(What’s even more interesting about this is that it was Toomey who said at a Sept. 27 candidates forum: “I think the city is very transparent in everything we do. And we have a very active citizenry. So I don’t think there are any secrets out there that people don’t know.” Maybe a next step for Toomey would be a policy order asking for a report on how many Freedom of Information requests were filed with the city in the past two years, how much the Law Department planned to charge for each and how those cases were disposed. And he might ask himself: If the council sets the policies, and he discovers the city manager’s Law Department is less than “very transparent in everything” it does, and that in fact there are “secrets out there that people don’t know,” what will he do about it?)

Is our council ready?

With Healy’s contract ending Sept. 30, it’s possible a brand-new city manager will soon be running Cambridge, and that person may come from outside the city. Especially in this situation, the balance of power will fall back to the council, and it will find itself setting a lot more actual policy and holding a lot more actual responsibility.

Is our council ready?

Although the shorthand of Cambridge Day’s guide to city manager issues reduced the positions to “pro-Healy” and “anti-Healy,” this election isn’t about him — and it’s more than possible to be pro-council without being anti-Healy.

For some, this election is about having a City Council that lives up to the charter and is, at the least, on par with the city manager in terms of power.

And they may think the council needs a bit of new blood to achieve that.

Having posted a short list of candidates for whom not to vote, here are some that stand out as voices that seem the most valuable in guiding Cambridge forward in the next two — or more — years. These are names that should excite voters for the roles they play or could play; tasks they perform or could perform; and potential for great ideas and leadership.

(Those not mentioned, of course, are mostly the candidates who fall into the space between the lists, including several incumbents whose work may have been good or even outstanding, especially for a certain constituency, but who also present enough troubling aspects to diminish the confidence or excitement a voter can feel ranking them high on the ballot.)

Council incumbents

Leland Cheung gathers signatures during his reelection campaign for City Council. If voted back in Tuesday, he will be serving his second term.

Leland Cheung has been on the council for only one term but has achieved a tremendous record balancing innovation and constituent service. It is a cliché to look at the youngest member of a body and identify that person as being the best able to guide a city into the future, but Cheung makes it difficult to avoid. Throughout his first term he has sought technological solutions that serve the people, starting nearly immediately upon election with urging the city manager to bid for Google’s ultrafast Internet proposal and following it up with bringing crime statistics to citizens via the police BridgeStat system, Wi-Fi to people in city parks and the details of city manager contracts to at least the beginnings of transparency (as was supposed to happen the last time the contract was voted). With his entrepreneurial and international background and studies at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has an innate sense of the needs of Kendall Square and its denizens and pressure points in town-gown relationships, and a strong sense of where to guide Cambridge’s square mile of innovation — his Entrepreneurs Walk of Fame being a masterstroke that needs to be maintained and capitalized on. He also stood up to the cynics and fought to meet with Boston officials to form a regional approach to luring businesses, another necessary step into an increasingly globalized future. Cheung is low-maintenance and high-productivity, and he listens.

It was mildly depressing to watch Cheung join the council with such enthusiasm and urgency and watch it be submerged into the mire of bureaucracy, caution and lack of creativity that bogs down so many of his fellow councillors, turning every council initiative into such a slow, dispiriting slog. This submersion (and subversion) started even before a mayor was elected, as Cheung presented three potential solutions to an eight-week stalemate that was keeping work from getting done and really starting to be embarrassing. But his older and allegedly wiser peers maintained the mantra that “this is our system; the system works,” raising objections that merely proved they hadn’t been listening. Even worse was when councillors David Maher (by then the mayor), Sam Seidel and Tim Toomey blocked Cheung’s effort to extract promises from Kendall Square developer Boston Properties for getting housing, low-cost office and lab space for entrepreneurs and public amenities such as a grocery store and public art for Kendall Square — exactly what the city’s highly paid consultant will eventually say is needed there.

“We never operate on this calendar,” Seidel told Cheung, explaining how the council prefers to move at mind-numbing slowness on even the simplest matter. “The shortest turnaround time typically is Monday to Monday. Zoning matters typically take weeks.” (Weeks? We wish.)

For the sake of Cambridge’s future and the people who need help and hope now, Cheung must be reelected with the revivifying message: “Don’t listen to the comatose councillors. Keep fighting. Take action.”

Craig Kelley was first elected to City Council in 2005 and has since developed a reputation as stubborn and irritatingly contrarian. It turns out he is also often right. (Photo: Liv Rachelle Gold)

Craig Kelley frustrates his fellow councillors. Rare is the person who doesn’t acknowledge Kelley as a stubborn, contrarian, potentially showboating, gigantic pain in the ass. But what must be really frustrating for them is how often Kelley is right.

Whatever the secret votes were to support the city manager’s disastrous appeals of the Malvina Monteiro lawsuit or block release of other details to the public, Kelley made public efforts to take control of Law Department spending, including the most recent parts of the $3 million spent litigating the case, and secure the city’s rights to sue its own lawyers for what is essentially legal malpractice; argued against closed-door meetings and for the public’s right to speak on the matter; and asked for the release of information in the cases that didn’t affect future litigation, or at least for the city manager to say when it would be released. Did he actually act behind closed doors to prevent the release of information, as councillors Ken Reeves and Marjorie Decker say? Sure, that’s possible. Eventually we’ll know if and why Kelley acted in this somewhat implausible way.

Because Kelley usually has reasons for acting as he does, maddening as it may be. Like when he stood alone and voted “no” on a city manager contract that had been conducted by two councillors — Maher and Brian Murphy, now on to other things — but wasn’t posted for review by the public as councillors agreed it would be.

He was also ahead of the curve on insisting repeatedly on more enforcement of traffic laws, including for bicycles, a cause that gained force and resulted, two weeks ago, in the city manager promising a fresh look at the issue and more enforcement. It wound up looking like a win for Kelley. When Henrietta Davis proposed a law against brakeless bicycles, which Kelley reminded her already exists at the state level, she wound up just looking like someone who’d seen something on television and wanted to tell people about it.

In December, Kelley suggested looking at the repercussions of retirements among high-level staff such as the city clerk, city manager and his deputy, and most of the council gang-jumped him — Reeves and Seidel being exceptions — with a somewhat hysterical charge of age discrimination. Even Cheung, who should have known better from the times his own policy orders have been misread and the intent ignored, climbed aboard to beat on Kelley. Now a campaign season has revealed that the government would be in disarray with the departure of the city manager and city clerk and, while neither is desired, neither seems unlikely, either. There is no coordination and only the vaguest consensus among council candidates about the process for replacing the people who’ve been running the city for decades. Instead of freaking out, councillors could have looked ahead a few months and seen the increasingly likely need for a process to be studied, agreed upon and put in place; instead they chose to ignore it for 11 months.

Soon we may have a lame-duck council; a January inaugural; a possible repeat of the eight-week delay (or longer) in appointing a mayor to decide committee assignments; and, in March, a rude surprise from our 30-year manager. Then the council can get to work with its usual alacrity.

Maybe the next council will be less about the occasional self-serving drama and more about listening, even to the outliers, to see if there’s value in their suggestions. Obviously that could be important if Kelley is reelected. And both those things would be good ideas.

Ken Reeves is the longest-serving member of the council and an advocate for Cambridge’s various pleasures, including restaurants, clubs and the arts. (Photo: Liv Rachelle Gold)

As Cheung’s candidacy is about the technological future of Cambridge, Ken Reeves’ is about its future as a center for the pleasures of life, because what makes life worth living is what makes Cambridge worth visiting. More than any other incumbent — or challenger, for that matter — Reeves represents the sensual and artistic aspects of the city needed to be in place if Cambridge is going to keep growing as a creative mecca. It is his vision for Kendall and Central squares especially that is bringing the city closer to a new, attention-getting festival, more music (if he can break an archaic city law about having nightclub doors only on Massachusetts Avenue or Green Street), better dining, the 24-hour pleasures worthy of a world-class city and even a little forgiveness for the noise of occasional revelry. While plenty of councillors might think to convene a task force looking at the amenities and concerns of Central Square, only Reeves would feel the need to convene on “the Delights and Concerns” of Central Square.

There is also the sheer pleasure of hearing him speak and seeing him saunter around the city, always dapper, but these are hardly defensible reasons to elect a politician. Meanwhile, his legislative efforts can be disorganized, and it is sometimes shocking to hear the things he seems not to know, considering his role as the council’s longest-serving member. (Did Reeves, a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School with a private practice in Cambridge, really need the city clerk to read him the justifications for a closed-door meeting?) But that just leads to another pleasure of having Reeves in office: His wildcard nature means never quite knowing whether he is asking a question for himself or for his constituents, or what he’s going to do next, which suggests that even his placement in the pro-city manager camp is suspect when push comes to shove. His request for funding to “undertake academic or legal counsel to review the Plan E Charter” back in October 2009 was certainly intriguing, suggesting that he feels the council is capable of doing more — an applaudable idea in a city where the manager seems to be setting far more policy than its policy-setting arm.

He also serves a vital role on the council, namely as a conciliator between factions who can return a pointlessly heated exchange to reasonable room temperature and seek out the logic behind even the most assailed suggestion. Which is not to say he cannot unleash some righteous fury of his own at times; again, in addition to his strengths as a legislator, it can also be fun just to hear him orate. Cambridge would be a poorer, less fun place without Reeves helping lead it.

Council challengers

Marquardt and vanBeuzekom

Voters could be forgiven for thinking Charles Marquardt and Minka vanBeuzekom are already on the council. With Marquardt’s experience in small business and finance and his canny analysis of the city’s long-term budget needs, and vanBeuzekom’s history of community advocacy and focus on workable environmental solutions — especially when added to their consistently measured and practical public speaking — is is doubtful Cambridge has ever had two candidates so ready to take office.

Stohlman

Close behind them is Tom Stohlman, whose campaign is marked not just by good sense but by a sense of civility and calm that befits an architect and self-described nerd. His rationality and common-person approach would be as welcome on the council as his knowledge of zoning and record of land-use work with cities including Hingham, Reading and Andover. And Boston. And Cambridge. Every neighborhood uncomfortable with the direction development is heading would likely feel more comfortable with Stohlman on the council.

Mello

Gary Mello is getting involved in politics for the first time, but he’s entering with a bang. His wish for a two-year ban on development is unlikely to go anywhere; his suggestion that the city make Cambridge Health Alliance its provider for municipal employees’ health care is an exciting and worthy one, sure to save taxpayers money while boosting the alliance and raising its quality of services for everyone. In general, the taciturn Mello wants Cambridge off the cycle of raising revenue that inflates the power of developers at the expense of residents. That sounds like a good idea.

Richard Harding, Marc McGovern and Patty Nolan are seeking reelection to the School Committee. (Photos: Liv Rachelle Gold)

School Committee incumbents

Parents, educators, students and the community are in good hands with Richard Harding, Marc McGovern and Patty Nolan. These are public servants who have proven they are willing not only to put in the long hours of mastering mind-numbing policy minutiae, but to take bold and sometimes unpopular votes because it’s the best thing for students and the city. When it came time to decide on the district restructuring called the Innovation Agenda, Harding looked past his many reservations, voted in favor for the greater good and vowed to make the plan work no matter what, not flamboyantly voting against the plan on a single issue; McGovern looked at outcomes and courageously made a call he knew would cost him supporters and even friends; and Nolan applied her usual, laser-focus objectivity that pretty much ensures a vote is correct. These are not pandering politicians, but serious-minded officials who are passionate about their charge and dedicated to seeing the Innovation Agenda is done right, and they need to be returned to their seats.

School Committee  challengers

Osborne

Mervan Osborne is an exciting prospect for the School Committee: polished, accomplished and inspiring and possessed of several attributes that align perfectly with Cambridge’s nature and needs, including a bent toward the arts and an admirable technological savvy. Talk with Osborne and his team and you can literally feel the eagerness to engage with district issues on a substantive level. But most important is his experience at Boston’s Beacon Academy; voters unhappy with Cambridge’s achievement gap need the benefit of what he’s learned there.

Holland

John Holland is a solid, nonideological second choice for the committee — or first choice for anyone whose primary concern is keeping the district spending wisely and focused on best practices. While there are sound reasons Cambridge spends $25,737 per pupil, Holland seems serious about bringing his professional experience to bear in guaranteeing taxpayers know those reasons and see the results.

City councillor David Maher is sworn in Jan. 4, 2010. School Committee members Nancy Tauber, Fred Fantini and Alice Turkel listen during a meeting last year. (Photos: top, John Marcus III; middle and bottom, Liv Rachelle Gold)

What should be a crucial moment Tuesday, when people vote for city councillors and School Committee members, arrived all the way back on Aug. 1 and passed almost entirely unnoticed.

Let’s roll back the tape.

During a discussion of whether to look at how the council applies Robert’s Rules of Order in the running of its meetings, Mayor David Maher entertains motions and amendments on the way to a vote. Councillor Sam Seidel asks for a final reading before voting and gets it; councillor Leland Cheung asks to make a further amendment but is cut off by the mayor, who initially suggests he go ahead but then says the city clerk has just told him that, at that point, the vote must be taken as it is.

But then, even knowing this, the mayor — pay close attention — turns to Cheung and asks him genially, “What were you trying to do, councillor?”

Now, it doesn’t matter what Cheung was trying to do, especially since he doesn’t even answer (instead, he just decides to vote no). The vote is taken. The motion fails.

The council goes on to the next order of business.

So what, right?

It’s true that “So what?” would be a totally appropriate response if virtually anyone else had been running this meeting, and if the person who was running this meeting — Maher — hadn’t also been the person running the special School Committee meeting on June 14. At that meeting, which had been called by three committee members to the irritation of the four other members (including the mayor), the procedures were radically different. Maher rammed through three votes, stopping debate and even expressing exasperation when member Patty Nolan simply wanted a motion reread before she voted on it, a request that is made frequently in other meetings Maher leads (including by Seidel on Aug. 1) without him chuckling ruefully and saying, “Honestly, procedurally, you’re not supposed to do this, but we’re going to let it — go ahead,” so Alice Turkel could read it over.

The committee meeting was over in a handful of minutes to the absolute shock of three committee members and parents in the audience. In that time, without a real discussion allowed, the committee managed to shut down a task force that was explicitly called for in the district’s restructuring plan, the Innovation Agenda, and ignore the reason the meeting was called, a policy voted in by the committee years earlier that was literally dealt with by a private phone call to Central Administration. One set a precedent that could have led to the disassembly of the controversial, hard-fought agenda piece by piece; the other set a precedent for changing district policy entirely without notice to the public, including parents and teachers, on the whim of a single committee member.

“Ludicrous,” said one of the two parents who spoke during public comment, reacting to Maher’s running of the meeting, while the other moaned in astonishment, “Oh my god.” Someone else can be heard in a recording of the meeting saying, “Someone’s got a wacky agenda.”

Yet Maher, asked the next week why he acted as he had, said he hadn’t done anything but follow Robert’s Rules of Order, which is — he said — all he can do or ever does.

“I’m not making the rules up, the rules are what they are. If someone says that they make a motion and they call the question, debate is over,” Maher said. “You go back and look at the tape. That’s exactly what happened. People may have wanted to talk about things, but procedurally, that’s exactly the way it was.”

“I know what the rules are. The rules are that when somebody brings in a motion and calls the question, you cut debate off,” he continued. “Procedurally, what happened followed procedure to the letter.”

Asked if he wanted to let people speak more during the meeting but felt prevented from doing so by Robert’s Rules of Order, he said again: “It’s not up to me. You’re following the rules. It’s not up to me.”

Yet you can watch that tape from the Aug. 1 council meeting — a month and a half later — and see Maher clearly tweaking and bending the rules as he wishes, casually ignoring attempts by the city clerk to rein him in and allowing with good cheer and no reference to procedural interruptions a request to hear a motion read through again. In fact, you can see Maher behave this pleasant and permissive way at almost any meeting.

Committee members Fred Fantini, Nancy Tauber and Turkel were also asked about their actions the night of June 14, and each gave ridiculous reasons for acting as they did, including that they were upset because the meeting took them by surprise (it was called as allowed by committee rules, and it was posted six days earlier) and that the topic could be discussed just as easily the next Tuesday (the final meeting of the school year, which lasted more than five hours and could go so long only because the committee voted multiple times to extend it). None have apologized for their actions or addressed publicly what they did, including the utterly illegitimate and ignorant vote to shut down the task force.

Maher, Fantini, Tauber and Turkel acted that night in a way they surely felt was an appropriate and clever response to being called to a meeting they simply didn’t want to attend, but was in fact petty, spiteful and undemocratic. The explanations they gave for their actions were evasive, glib and unbelievable.

And disgusting.

Although Tauber is the one person acting that night that may legitimately have had no knowledge of what was about to happen, when her stand-in at an Oct. 13 candidates forum said she “listens to all points of view and puts aside politics to stay focused on quality education,” it was impossible not to think of her complicity in a display of brute politics that prevented three fellow committee members from speaking.

While all have done good work, are tremendously likable and clearly care fervently about their chosen areas of public policy, it’s impossible to endorse the reelection of politicians who engage in such profoundly and unapologetically undemocratic maneuvers. What else are they comfortable deciding out of the public eye? What else would they do to control the agenda of a publicly elected body? Is this the kind of bullying behavior and lack of responsibility and accountability they would pass on to the youth they take office to educate?

Maher has gone on to engage in further questionable behavior, keeping secret the minutes of closed-door City Council meetings having to do with lawsuits filed against the city. In this he has the cover of the Law Department and apparently four other members of the council, but the justifications he gives for the secrecy would be far more plausible without the contradictions of these summer committee meetings providing such unsavory context.

These people are untrustworthy and should not get your vote. As they might tell students or their own children after misbehavior, these public servants deserve a timeout — a two-year timeout, let’s say — to think about what they have done.

The Fawcett Oil site could become 91 apartments, but neighbors are fighting the development. Brookford Street doglegs to connect the company’s plant with Massachusetts Avenue. (Photo: Google)

Whatever you think of the City Council’s approach to the big apartment complexes that keep popping up over the city, threatening to overrun neighborhoods with renters and cars, you have to admit it’s weird.

“Weird” may not sound like a nice thing, but it’s a compliment compared with the alternatives: “mystifying” or “hypocritical.”

The most recent example is the Fawcett Oil project along the linear park in North Cambridge, where the Fawcett family wants to turn an industrial site into 91 apartments smack dab in the center of a few twisted, tiny streets leading into the worst traffic patterns in the city at nearly any hour you care to try them. Given the size and difficulty of the roads and the nature of the neighborhood around them, residents want no more than 77 apartments there and care so much about it that they even crafted their own zoning for the city, PowerPoint presentation and all, to show the unintended consequences of the rules now in place along that beloved trail park.

But the council, with the exception of Craig Kelley, resisted setting the zoning up for a quick vote (quick meaning before Election Day, which is Tuesday) because the Planning Board hadn’t weighed in on it and because if the petition went through neighbors would lose the power to get improvements beyond just shrinking the project.

“To pass this downzoning tonight takes off the table so many other things this neighborhood needs,” councillor Marjorie Decker said. “There are so many other nonzoning issues that need to come out to get the best possible outcome for the neighbors.”

“If the petition goes away, the reasons to talk diminish,” Sam Seidel told the residents.

“Zoning is a crude tool,” Mayor David Maher said. “The City Council can change zoning and still end up with ugly projects.”

There was even talk of what the neighborhood could get in return for holding off, such as lovely fountains at the end of blocks now dead-ended by chain-link fence. (Ideally, the city would prove it can maintain the fountains it already has, such as the sculpture at the gateway to Kendall Square, before contemplating new ones.)

None of this is weird, though, unless you think back a year to the law the council wanted — with, again, Kelley being a prominent exception: the sign ordinance that would have set rules about size, placement and lighting for companies who wanted signs atop their office buildings.

Consistency

The reason councillors, some businesses and their attorneys liked the sign law is that it brought consistency to a process being done regularly “on a wink and a nod,” according to one of the most prominent winkers and nodders in town, lawyer James Rafferty. His public comments during debate was all the more striking because it came from someone confessing to gaming the current system of eliciting a special permit or variance by claiming some bogus “hardship.” But the legislators had the same appreciation for the virtue of consistency, with councillor Leland Cheung saying the changes meant an end to “treating companies across the street from each other differently.”

Now, a year and a day after councillors were forced to retract their 6-3 law in the face of a citizen petition — signatures obtained through sleazy means, but legitimate citizen signatures all the same — the majority stick to the argument that through the slow torture of mediation between neighbors and developer they can extract special considerations and promises, project by project, that will be better than that crude zoning so beloved by the same, simple, silly people who’ll have to live with construction and then doubled density for the rest of their residence. You know: the people who wrote, presented and pleaded for it, and the same sort who made pleadings when blueprints for the Alexandria project, Norris Street units or others rolled out across officials’ desks. The same sort who have to live with developers’ broken, unenforced promises.

(Or as councillor Henrietta Davis exclaimed during the debate over the sign law: “How long does it take for us to enforce a zoning violation!”)

Councillor Ken Reeves never misses an opportunity to complain about the empty-feeling University Park, finished in 2005 and extracted from developer Forest City as part of a deal for a Massachusetts Institute of Technology project, and he just launched eminent domain proceedings for a parcel deeded by The Bulfinch Cos. in 1998 to a neighborhood group as part of a deal for development in Area IV.

But he’s also the councillor who proposed fountains for the North Cambridge residents who wrote the Bishop petition, who want no such thing.

What they want is a maximum of 77 units replacing Fawcett Oil, which means they want their zoning passed. And if they gave it some thought, they might also want an answer to the question: Why is consistency so good for dealing with companies that want to put up signs and so bad for developers who want to put up buildings?

City councillor Marjorie Decker has introduced 113 of the 128 policy orders and resolutions this term that address national and world issues. (Photo: Liv Rachelle Gold)

With local elections Nov. 8, everything could change and probably very little will. Cambridge could see three new faces out of nine on the City Council and still find a majority keeping things much as they are, while even the brightest eager-beaver faces on the board will likely soon adapt to a glacial pace of minute changes, all filtered appropriately through the thick bureaucratic ooze of Robert’s Rules of Order.

I’m going to propose some changes for the next council anyway. In no particular order:

Create a committee to address national and world issues.

There are already 17 council committees, ranging from the crucial Ordinance Committee to the somewhat under-the-radar Veterans Committee, so the idea of creating an 18th certainly raises logistical questions. And since issues dealt with by committees start and end with the full council anyway, this may not be the ideal way to address the problem: policy orders and resolutions that address national and world issues over which Cambridge has little or no control.

The introduction of such orders — 128 this term, according to the invaluable Cambridge Civic Journal — makes the city vulnerable to ridicule and accusations that it wastes time and energy on issues best dealt with at the national level. One from 2009 opposing nuclear weapons is a good example of that, while others, such as this summer’s Wal-Mart order at least had a Cambridge-specific connection in a resident serving on the corporation’s board of directors.

But as a recent speaker pointed out during public comment, there is value in cities and towns expressing opinions on matters that can be cited in national debate, such as on issues of immigration or the Patriot Act. A resolution against buying World Bank bonds focused on investments made by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one from 2007 asked the state not to give taxpayer money to an anti-democratic regime in Burma.

The latest of these issues arrives tonight, when councillors will discuss joining an amicus brief for the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders in lawsuits against the the federal Defense of Marriage Act. It would make sense for Cambridge, one of the most gay-friendly communities in the world and a leader in gay rights, to make a statement against the act, which “defends marriage” by stopping gays and lesbians from marrying — sort of like “defending skiing” by eradicating snowboards or any number of other silly analogies.

There’s appeal in the idea of creating a separate body that could express the will of a local majority in a way that keeps the main council focused on city issues in which they can play a major role. Those who care about specific national and world issues and Cambridge’s role in addressing them can direct their energy (and comment) to a venue other than council meetings, and those who don’t care would be less affected. The ideal leader for a national and world affairs committee, if she remains on the council, would be Marjorie Decker, whom the Civic Journal identifies as promoting 113 of these orders and resolutions so far this year, or 88 percent of them.

Again, a committee isn’t the ideal solution, in that the process still involves the full council, but it would be good to find a way to keep the full council’s debate and public comment focused on local issues — without losing the power to make a statement on cultural issues.

Have councillors vote at the same time.

For roll call votes, the city clerk calls each councillor’s name in order. I would prefer to see a system in which each councillor votes at the same time, ignorant of which way others are going, and the results are secret until revealed as a final tally.

I know this sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Are councillors swayed by hearing the votes that precede them? I have no idea. If so, wouldn’t this lead to collusion or at least more caucusing and politicking before a vote takes place? Yeah, maybe. Can’t councillors just change their votes after the fact anyway? Yes, they can, although too much of that would make a councillor look a little silly, eventually. Technically, moving to this system would even require a rewriting of the rules of the council (as I read them), making it seem like a lot of work for negligible results.

And no doubt councillors would dislike having to be at their desks for votes, since they can now rove the area and call out their votes from wherever they happen to be. But if there are councillors who vote based on how they hear others vote, this would be the fairer system for constituents — who vote on their own every Election Day and deserve councillors who think independently and pay enough attention to the issues to make up their own minds on them.

Stop making deals with developers on affordable housing.

Developers game the system on the rules for affordable housing, and our government officials let them. In Cambridge, 15 percent of a development for apartments or condominiums is supposed to be affordable, but it’s all too common to see numbers slip below (and then to see affordable units go bafflingly empty anyway, as though there’s a shortage of people looking for places to live below the city’s astronomical market rate).

Why screw around? Decide how much affordable housing is wanted and make it mandatory — eliminate the power of the parties to go lower. Tell developers: These are the rules for building in Cambridge. If you don’t want to follow these rules, don’t build here.

Many will be familiar with this approach from a little company called Apple, which charges users a premium and then, far from allowing them to do whatever they want with the product that just cost a mint, actually restricts them from doing much at all. Use an Apple product and you get your media through iTunes, your software through the App store and your phone service through authorized carriers. Apple gets sued over this, too, from private citizens and other companies that want in on the action. The lawsuits go nowhere.

I can already hear the wails of Community Development staff and property owners and developers claiming they need flexibility to ensure the best projects and to simply break even on a property. But industry whines constantly about the hobbling of their profits by regulation — on everything from protections for coal miners to seat belts, auto emissions, the Americans with Disabilities Act and elimination of certain food additives — and are just as constantly proven wrong. Developers being able to charge slightly less could mean a proportionate hit on land values, but Cambridge could use some of its $100.2 million in free cash to satisfy property owners taking a hit on a revised-value sale, which is kinder than what some might suffer when a local currency is revalued after hyperinflation.

When this was pitched to Brian Murphy, assistant city manager for community development, he worried about court challenges from owners and developers who saw this as a land taking. “From a quick review, everything I saw suggested that there needed to be some compensation to a developer for a mandatory inclusionary program to pass muster,” he said.

True. But the resource he suggested might provide some answers fell resoundingly on the side of backing mandatory percentages. Court cases in California have backed a range of so-called inclusionary zoning laws to an astonishing degree, according to the National Housing Conference’s Affordable Housing Policy Review.

“Even local regulations that have diminished property values by as much as 87.5 percent have been upheld by the courts,” the review said in a piece about “Avoiding Constitutional Challenges to Inclusionary Zoning.”

While they’re all pretty bad, this one stood out for me, especially given the context of an earlier chapter in which Buchanan says simply that “Mexico is moving north”:

Americans who seek stricter immigration control have been charged with many social sins: racism, xenophobia, nativism. Yet none has sought to expel any fellow American based on color or creed. We have only sought to preserve the country we grew up in. Do not people everywhere do that, without being reviled? What motivates people who insist that America’s doors be held open wide until the European majority has disappeared?

What is their grudge against the old America that eats at their heart?

A lot of people will probably spot immediately what’s so weird about this — that Buchanan is defending dominance of America by people he outright identifies as “European,” while he seems to have a problem with people from America (that is, adapting Buchanan’s nomenclature, Americans) being on the land Europeans arrived at and claimed much later.

If there is a grudge at work, and I reject the idea there is anything more than simple demographics and inevitability seen here, it would be because Europeans came to where there were already people and beat them back, enslaved them or wiped them out via plague blankets, outright warfare, Trails of Tears and whatnot. There’s no grudge against Old America; if anything, he might be sensing a grudge against those who declared Old America to be the “New World.”

But by all means, Pat, please fight on with the winning slogan “America for Europeans”!