Born in Wellesley, incumbent city councillor Craig Kelley went to the University of Rochester on an NROTC scholarship. He made dean’s list, got a bachelor’s degree in history and won the NROTC leadership award. After college, Craig served in the Marine Corps for four and a half years, seeing such faraway places as the Southern California desert, the Philippines and Malaysia. It was during these travels that he became interested in environmental issues, realizing that reducing poverty would decrease the likelihood of military conflict in developing nations. Less than four weeks after resigning his Marine Corps commission, Craig was knocking on doors for Greenpeace.

From Greenpeace, he moved on to Boston College Law School, where he served as chairman of the Environmental Law Society. He graduated cum laude in 1993 and earned the Susan B. Desmaris award for Public Service Achievement and Leadership for his work on environmental issues at school.

After law school, he became an environmental consultant and married his wife, Hope. They live with their two sons in North Cambridge, where Kelley was a leader of the North Cambridge Stabilization Committee and helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to preserve the Alewife floodplain, promote environmental issues and develop affordable housing throughout Cambridge. He was first elected to the City Council in 2005.

Compiled from the candidate’s words in publicly available sources

Kelley’s top three priorities:

From the Cambridge Residents Alliance

Help establish a more constructive dialogue around educating our kids in and out of school, so Cambridge residents from all backgrounds are as prepared to succeed in life as they can be.

Increase street safety and improve urban mobility through more public access to police enforcement data and more aggressive use of that data by the police – along with information about crashes and general complaints and traffic counts and so forth – to tailor the city’s transportation education and enforcement efforts.

Help the city develop a housing policy based on current demographics, a long-term goal and accurate data about who is living where so we can all have a clearer idea of what our current housing opportunities are and what the city as a whole might look like in the future.

On local business:

Condensed and edited from responses given to Cambridge Local First

We can support business with zoning that encourages street-level interactions. This would include having underground parking not connected directly to the associated building, sidewalks that do not have obstructions, bike parking that makes cyclists feel welcome and so forth. Overall, the aim would be to make development human-scale and to encourage people not to rely too much on their cars.

I would push for outdoor, on-street patio seating and more extensive (complete streets) options for cyclists and pedestrians.

Kelley on the issues

From Cambridge Community Television

Open space:

Kendall Square:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsmcKL3LwLE