Is it a Cambridge house, or a Somerville house? Election commission will have to decide soon
A city-line dispute that could upend the lives of dozens of residents emerged Wednesday at a Cambridge Election Commission hearing.
But are they residents of Cambridge? Or Somerville?
The case centers around Sam Seidel, an urban-planning consultant and former city councillor who lives on Harris Street, Cambridge, in a two-family home that was built on Eustis Street, Somerville. The home didn’t move: The address was changed in 2003 by request of the real estate agent that developed the home into condominiums.
The house is a block south of Beacon Street, near Petsi Pies and a Star Market grocery store. Street plans show the city line cutting neatly across the home’s front, placing its unenclosed porch in Cambridge and the front-facing bedrooms just over the line in Somerville.
“I have Cambridge services for everything – fire, police, trash pickup,” Seidel told election commissioners. Though having automatic bill pay set up obscures the issue, he thought he might pay water and sewer bills to Cambridge too.
But his tax bills go to Somerville.
“I am told, and I have not dug into this, that it is an arrangement between finance departments … that one place collects the taxes and distributes it across cities,” Seidel said. “But Somerville is the entity that collects my taxes.”
Heather Hoffman, a real estate title examiner and lawyer arguing against Seidel as a representative for the absent activist Charles Teague, said that in her 30-plus years of work she had never seen such an arrangement as Seidel described. “In every single case, there have been separate tax bills,” she said.
To her and Teague, whose activism has most recently been around trees, that makes the case: Seidel is a Somerville resident who should not vote in Cambridge, though he is on Cambridge election rolls. Seidel thinks of himself as a Cantabrigian.
Election commissioners, eyeing maps that show the city line cutting across homes all the way down the block, opted not to decide Wednesday, but to recess and do more research before reconvening March 1. “This is going to affect quite a bit – it’s going to affect several lives, it’s going to affect children, it’s going to affect taxpayers and voters,” Election Commission executive director Tanya Ford-Crump said. “Once you open this can, it’s going to all come out. We need backing. We need more information than what we are being provided with.”
With so many residents of the street – including Seidel’s neighbor in a two-family condominium – commissioners wondered by Teague had singled out Seidel.
While serving as lawyer for Teague while he was out of town – he is expected to be at the March 1 hearing – Hoffman said she didn’t know.
Why this case
Reached by phone after the meeting, Seidel theorized that Teague was upset that he’d written a letter to the Planning Board in support of a two-block upzoning in North Cambridge known as the Barrett petition. He recounted coming home the night of Dec. 21, the day after a board hearing, to find a man “standing on my steps, looking in my windows, looking in my mailbox and photographing my house.” When he asked why, the man said he’d smelled gas coming from an exhaust valve at the house – “It does give off a slight gas smell,” Seidel said – and walked away. Realizing who it was, Seidel ran after him, calling out “Charlie Teague” three times, Seidel said, the last time face to face. At the time, Teague said he was in the area looking at a potential development property and smelled gas.
Seidel doesn’t buy it. The behavior was “creepy,” Seidel said.
There was no hesitation from Teague about motive when reached by phone Wednesday: He said Seidel was committing voter fraud – and that it wasn’t a letter to the Planning Board that drew his attention, but his signing of the zoning petition that helped allow it to be heard by the Planning Board.
“I read the zoning petition and there was his big fat name. And I said, I didn’t think he lived in Cambridge. And you know, I was right, he doesn’t,” Teague said. Referring to Seidel voting in Cambridge, Teague said, “This is just a fraud. This is just a lie.”
Seidel, when called back, recalled that he had signed the petition. “He’s right – I am a signer to a zoning petition. I put my name down,” Seidel said. “I’m pretty sure that is correct. And at some subsequent point, I wrote a letter in support.”
Back to 1839
The Election Commission’s discussion Wednesday hinted at the complexity of the decision members will face about how to judge if Seidel votes properly in Cambridge or Somerville. Case law around city-line disputes looks to “the primary purpose” of a property and might hinge on where someone sleeps, which might be different from where a bedroom is. Lesley Waxman, assistant director of Cambridge’s Election Commission, noted that relevant case law goes back to 1839 – raising laughs from commissioners – but “they don’t give you a hard and fast rule. It’s a question of fact that you have to determine on a case-by-case basis.”
That could lead to complications not just for residents of Harris Street, but two to three miles of border with Somerville as well as where Cambridge meets Arlington, Belmont and Watertown. Though it was the impression Wednesday that city-line residents with school-age kids could choose which school district they preferred, that too needed research.
“It’s hard for me to understand what public good is being derived from this,” Seidel told commissioners of the case. And later recounting more of his testimony: “You can’t single out one person for a quote-unquote violation … there are a whole lot of properties that that are impacted by this border-property status. You can’t just pluck one out of the hat.”
This post was updated Feb. 23, 2023, to add background on Charles Teague.
Am I actually looking at a lawyer acting in an official capacity wearing a tie dye T-shirt? Lmao
^^^^^^^
An actual Cambridge resident wouldn’t bat an eyelash at this….
What a clown car fiasco driven by a personal vendetta by people acting in an official capacity. What public good is this serving?
Cambridge and Somerville should just merge. Would certainly solve the problem.
Typically you reside where you sleep. If the bedrooms are in a particular city, that is where you reside.
NIMBY losers trying their hardest to prevent any and all development.
It would be helpful to include a bit of information about who this Teague guy is. A quick internet search seems to imply that he’s some sort of crank that likes to tilt at municipal windmills, rather than someone acting in a official Cambridge capacity. No idea why he would be hiring his own lawyer though.
I’m gratified that Mr. Teague and his learned counsel have taken such a strong interest in election integrity. I’m sure that they have a solid track record of bringing other situations to the city’s attention, so that no one could misinterpret their current actions as harassment of a political opponent.
Who is Charles Teague? I feel like maybe there is a paragraph missing or did I misread this
Teague may be a troublemaker, but that does not change the obvious conclusion that–unless he’s sleeping on his porch–Seidel is not a Cambridge resident and should not be voting or petitioning as such
US conservatives have a long history of using legal proceedings to preserve the status quo by limiting the rights of those who disagree with them.
In the 1950s, groups calling themselves Citizens Councils pushed back against laws and court decisions aimed at restoring rights that had been taken away when Reconstruction ended, around 1877. Journalist/historian David Halberstam described the Citizens Councils as “respectable citizens of the community” who “struggle to achieve a constitutionally illegal purpose by ‘all legal means’.”
In the past decade, North Carolina Republicans have gone to court defending restrictive voting measures, even after a Federal appeals court ruled that earlier efforts were drafted “with almost surgical precision” to discourage voting by Black residents, who tend to support Democrats.
No matter whether the local efforts of Teague and Hoffman were motivated by Seidel’s signature on a zoning petition or by concerns about a possible gas leak near Seidel’s home, I hope that Cambridge officials can promptly resolve the 1839 precedents (set before the Constitutional promise of equal protection and due process) and clarify rules that protect the voting rights of all individuals and groups.
Cambridgeresident, no, you are not looking at a tie-dyed T shirt. You are looking at a handmade short-sleeved batik top. My recollection is that it is made of raw silk, but I’ve had it long enough that I don’t remember for sure. Not that it should matter, but I have enough respect for the Election Commission and the seriousness of the hearing that I put on lawyer clothes. Amazingly enough, the people who were actually participating in the hearing were more interested in the matter at hand than in critiquing my wardrobe.
As to the question of whether Mr. Seidel is entitled to register to vote in Cambridge, we are all taking that quite seriously. I would have thought that that would matter to people who believe in the rule of law, but there are always people who are so used to the privilege of never being questioned that they think that being obliged to follow the rules everyone else has to follow must be oppression. Rest assured that Mr. Seidel will be able to vote legally somewhere, but it might be Somerville rather than Cambridge.
I do agree that right-wingers these days tend to rely on grievance first and just never get around to the facts. Had any of you attended the hearing, you would have heard me talking about the facts and the law, with zero whining. That’s how I intend to proceed on March 1 as well.