Neighborhood group conversation started well, but so far doesn’t answer questions or conflicts
The City Council’s Sullivan Chamber, seen in City Hall during a June 2019 meeting, may not feel welcoming to all residents or the groups representing them. (Photo: Marc Levy)
“Well, this is certainly not Sullivan Chamber,” I thought as I sat down at the City Council’s Neighborhood & Long Term Planning, Public Facilities, Arts & Celebration Committee meeting Thursday.
For starters, the chair was comfortable, I had a cool glass of water at hand and I sat at the Zoom table, a co-equal among the rectangles, unseparated from my representatives by the gates and raised thrones of the unfriendly real-life home of the council.
Most of the city’s officially designated neighborhood groups had been invited to a hearing about neighborhood groups’ “successes and challenges and how the city can better support them,” and a few of the smaller undesignated groups, including my own, the Mount Auburn Neighborhood Association, were graciously added. Several citywide groups were also included. Even if a citywide group was not technically a neighborhood group, in the end I realized there were common challenges for each of us.
Here are some of the challenges that stood out for me:
Just who does a self-described group represent?
There is power in us getting together to act as a group, and that power has more impact when the group membership reflects the represented accurately. Most panelists among the 40 or so representatives of more than 15 neighborhood and citywide groups spoke about the constant challenge of making sure their group was welcoming, diverse, and open to all. Many mentioned the structural difficulty of finding time to devote to a volunteer job. Volunteerism favors those with time and disadvantages those without.
Suggestions for meeting this challenge included visiting neighbors at their homes, freeing up parents with child care and keeping the group fed, as well as active and persistent recruiting of the underrepresented and their voices.
How do you handle group discussions?
It came as a great surprise to me as I was growing up that not every one thought the same as I did. With each passing year, I learned that my best ideas are improved by listening to someone else’s ideas. While my childhood dinner table discussions of eight might get by with simple rules of speaking loudly, larger groups need to agree on how to communicate.
Robert’s Rules of Order, an old and very formal set of meeting rules that is used by the City Council, is a good starting point. While having all conversation go “through the chair” may not appeal to everyone, the basic principles are good ones: Agree on a facilitator and agree that everyone has a right to state their ideas, discuss them and participate in the decision.
What can the city do to help neighborhood groups?
Some themes stood out: Provide meeting space, provide expertise, listen, provide an ombudsperson, ask, fund and even allow use of the city’s electoral machinery (and proportional representation, no less) to help decide neighborhood issues.
Some panelists rejected the idea of city oversight over neighborhood groups. At the same time, some public commenters requested that the city police the groups that appear before them.
So how should the council resolve this apparent conflict? Beyond inviting topic-specific groups, it’s not the council’s job to decide who sits at its table. It’s the councillors’ job to listen; then they should judge participants on their ideas. The quality of council decisions depends on a big table.
The committee meeting was great, and I learned a lot. The Zoom format was well-run and effective. I did miss seeing some of the city’s best neighborhood groups at the table. There is still work to be done at making all feel welcome at neighborhood meetings and City Council meetings.
Tom Stohlman is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate and Cambridge architect and planner who identifies himself as a “failed candidate for Cambridge City Council (2009 and 2011).”
I stated the reasons I didn’t go in a letter that was the only thing in the meeting packet other than the agenda. Those remarks and what I’ve written here are my own, nobody else’s, and no matter how many times someone tries to pin them on any other person or organization, it’s still just me talking. I had another reason not to go as well; four out of five of the hearings at the Cambridge Historical Commission dealt with East Cambridge, and I knew that I’d get a respectful hearing there, rather than the political machinations and bullying I have come, sadly, to expect at City Council meetings. It appears that I made a good choice.
I would like to underscore the vital importance of one of the statements in this piece, “Beyond inviting topic-specific groups, it’s not the council’s job to decide who sits at its table. It’s the councillors’ job to listen; then they should judge participants on their ideas. ” In my experience, to the extent that city officials, elected, unelected, paid and volunteer, have any interest in listening to us at all, it’s because they have an open mind and want to consider what people have to say so that they can make good decisions. For anyone to claim that it should be otherwise, that only groups that pass their personal test of worthiness should have any right to speak or be heard, sounds far too much like the authoritarian society I doubt most of us want to live in. Once we start down that road, anyone could be the next out group. Some I might miss more than others, but I’d be right there fighting both for their right to speak and for them to bear the consequences of what they say.
Neighborhood groups form themselves; whether the City puts them on a list is not some official designation, nor does it (nor should it) create some sort of hierarchy of “official” and “unofficial” neighborhood groups. That list is based on old information in many instances and certainly does not appear to be actively maintained.
The City Council and the rest of city government need to keep their noses out of our business. They can facilitate our ability to let people know we exist and have somewhere to meet, and they are welcome to come to our meetings to help educate themselves about what the people they’re supposed to be representing think about what’s going on in Our Fair City. We benefit regularly from city employees who attend our meetings to answer our questions and to help explain city initiatives to us. Those are services our government should be providing to residents, and neighborhood groups are convenient venues to do this, although the City is quite capable of setting up and running such meetings on its own.
Unlike many people, I do not consider the word politician a pejorative. At their best, politicians find ways to bring people together to bridge their disagreements and do good things for the larger society. If we’re lucky, the good that I’ve heard from some attendees about this meeting is the first step on that road, but it’s going to require a whole lot of self-reflection by Councillors for that to come about.