Quinton Zondervan, a three-term Cambridge city councillor, said he has decided against running for reelection.
That means there will be a guaranteed three new faces on the council come January, the most since 2017 – the year Zondervan was elected. Before 2017, that hadn’t happened since 1989.
An official announcement that Zondervan wouldn’t campaign for reelection was released Sunday, with the councillor calling his time in office “the honor of my life.”
“It’s a personal decision,” Zondervan said Wednesday by phone. “It was never my plan to to do this long term. And I think three times is enough,” especially considering “half of that was Covid and pretty brutal – actually, more than two-thirds of it. It’s a tough enough job, but Covid definitely made the job a lot more stressful and a lot more intense.”
But Zondervan is also going out on a high note, he said, because he ran for office with a focus on climate change and leaves having passed his three-part Green New Deal: The first two phases, passed in March, require developers of large new non-residential buildings to calculate their project emissions, including from construction activities and building materials, and the City of Cambridge to provide free access to green-jobs training programs for low-income Cambridge residents. The third piece, a Building Energy Use Disclosure Emissions Reduction Ordinance, passed June 26.
Legislative achievements
In addition, he pointed to legislative achievements such as support for the unarmed, citizen emergency response team known as Heart; the Cannabis Equity Ordinance; the Tree Protection Ordinance; Affordable Housing Overlay zoning; the Cycling Safety Ordinance; and elimination of parking minimums. “Policy making is a team effort, and I’m deeply grateful to the activists, advocates, supporters and colleagues without whom none of these great things could have been accomplished,” Zondervan said.
A release quoted colleagues such councillor Marc McGovern, who said he appreciated finding common ground with Zondervan on issues such as housing and homelessness despite disagreeing elsewhere, and from councillor Burhan Azeem: “It was my first term, and Quinton really helped me learn the ropes on how to write policy and get it passed. I’m so glad we got to work together on everything from parking minimums to the Green New Deal. It was a historic term.” Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui said she appreciated Zondervan’s “contributions to policy work and his passion” and noted their work together over the last six years on a number of issues.
“He had a valuable perspective to our discussions,” Siddiqui said. “I wish him all the best in his next chapter.”
State Rep. Mike Connolly called Zondervan “a relentless stalwart for climate justice, racial equity, safe streets, open space and housing-first policies.”
Political season ahead
There are nine City Council seats, all at-large and on two-year terms, that will be decided at the polls Nov. 7. Vice mayor Alanna Mallon and councillor Dennis Carlone have also decided not to run again; fellow councillors Patty Nolan and E. Denise Simmons haven’t made their intentions clear.
At least 10 challengers have identified themselves as running for a council seat, and three among them are allies or aligned with Zondervan’s principles of climate concern, affordable-housing density, transit prioritization and a wish to see armed police performing fewer functions: former councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, who served on the council 2020-2021; educator Ayah Al-Zubi (who doesn’t refer to police in a press release sent to Cambridge Day); and longtime aide Dan Totten, who got special thanks in the Sunday press release as accounting “for more than half the work credited to my office.” Zondervan also mentioned challenger Vernon Walker, who is a program director at the organization Communities Responding to Extreme Weather
The combined interests suggests the possibility of the kind of candidate slate that is encouraged by Cambridge’s ranked-choice form of voting.
“I do take my responsibility to leave our government in good hands very seriously, and to that end I’m supporting a group of strong challengers running for City Council,” Zondervan said. “I look forward to helping them get elected and supporting them as they take office to ensure a great transition.”
Long term “never my plan”
Zondervan was born in Suriname, a small country in South America that is 90 percent Amazonian rainforest. His family fled its takeover by an authoritarian regime when Zondervan was a teen, and came to the United States. Zondervan got a master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “fell in love with Cambridge and never left,” he said in 2017. He and wife have two children who attended Cambridge public schools.
Now, though, his children are grown and his wife has taken a position at Princeton University, relocating to New Jersey in 2022. “That’s not that’s not the reason I’m not running. I might have made the decision anyway or stuck it out another term, but it was never my plan to be doing this for 10 years,” Zondervan said.
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Thank you for your service, Councilor Zondervan! From my reading here, I always appreciate the perspective you bring to the council and your dedication to keeping us honest and acting according to our professed values.
thank you for your service but perhaps council can breath a bit easier in deliberations and debate without feeling manipulated or being used to a heavy hand.
In many ways, the “historic term” left layers of overlapping policy orders affecting many residents who keep seeing the goal posts moving. While issues like housing, tree protection (which conflicts with the AHO upzoning), and unfunded mandates like BEUDO, where individual residents are responsible for retrofitting their older units, and other ideological goals feel accelerated and stifling in practice- they have merit in principle. The alternative is NOT not doing anything (a favorite argument). It is studying the data first– then figuring out how to implement orders. We have the state-mandated stretch code, BEUDO, Net Zero and green new deal and now the Fossil Fuel free demo project- where Cambridge is a guinea pig while trying to see how all these programs overlap. All sounds good in principle- but not one mention of how much any of this will cost the property rich (inherited , working class and generational units) and cash poor. Or small businesses. Or true data on bike lanes. (and no- no one wants to kill people). Or where we are to get the electricity. That goes for 10-15 story buildings in inappropriate places by formula- not neighborhood or design.
This council is one the verge of scorched earth letting the newbies pick up the pieces. Seems headlines and pictures in the paper and siloed opinions have been the guiding force. And the final push at being a guinea pig superseding the state mandate is by a person who is also co-chair of the Ordinance committee (August 1st) which I always considered a conflict of interest. No more zealots need apply. We should have taken a beat to have things done right. We are only a speck of sand in the climate change issue. Good for us for being first, but it doesn’t matter if other municipalities and states are behind us.
I wish you luck in whatever you take on. you know how the game is played and have a knack for it. when the dust settles, it is the residents who have to figure out how to comply, how to pay the non-complying penalties, how the council policies really have affected them and their quality of life, and how to keep residents slated for thousands of dollars in retrofitting from selling and leaving. the theme is one thing, the implementation and reality-based consequences are another. shoot now and ask questions later.
Sorry to hear this. Thank you for your years of service and all the accomplishments you made for the City of Cambridge. We owe you much. Wish you would have stayed on. Many wishes for a great future for you and your family.
Amen, Pete.
Mr. Zondervan, they say better late than never, and thusly it is only fitting that my first post shall be to thank you very much for taking the time one fine Sunday afternoon to come a visiting to a certain “entity” of this city, in assist to this author (with physical constraints) in obtaining a certain “keyed” access that was being improperly withheld. Some small acts of kindness reverberate as rivulets into oceans and that day you walked the talk. It made a world of difference to me (for 3 long years) Thank you for your service and I wish you and your family continued good journeys. Namaste