Saturday, April 27, 2024

These are just some of the municipal meetings and civic events for the coming week. More are on the City Calendar and in the city’s Open Meetings Portal.

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Fred Fantini, second from left, at a Jan. 3, 2022, inauguration into his final term on Cambridge’s School Committee. (Photo: Marc Levy)

Evaluating the city manager

City Manager Evaluation Subcommittee, 2 to 4 p.m. Monday. The City Council finishes an assessment of the work of Yi-An Huang, city manager for the past year and a half and the first person in the role in decades who was not a City Hall insider. Toward the end of Louis A. DePasquale’s tenure as manager, councillors discovered they were in the position of extending the contract on an official they’d simply neglected to evaluate. Now the annual appraisals are being pursued intently. The committee meets at City Hall, 795 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square. Televised and watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.

Police reforms and city Internet

City Council, 5:30 p.m. Monday. Councillors may finally consider an order that’s been on the agenda for the past two weeks – first withdrawn temporarily and then charter righted by its author, departing councillor Quinton Zondervan. It has suggestions for police around averting “violence and death” – such as having fewer firearms and avoiding foot pursuits, as recommended by a university think tank – because the city’s police department hasn’t acted on big changes since the Jan. 4 killing of Arif Sayed Faisal in Cambridgeport. (A committee hearing around an inquest examining Faisal’s death was aborted Wednesday because it failed to draw a quorum of councillors.) This meeting will also see a presentation about the 300 body cameras that could be worn by officers for a cost of $1.6 million to $2.3 million over five years.

An update on municipal broadband and digital equity reiterates the inflation-adjusted costs of $149 million to $194 million after a two-year process of deciding how to proceed – an expense councillors will have to consider in the context of staff warnings of a need for budgeting austerity in the coming years. There’s also word that the Lesley University tennis courts at 30 Wendell St. in the Baldwin neighborhood have been sold to Homeowner’s Rehab Inc. with $5.7 million from the Cambridge Affordable Housing Trust and will become affordable housing.

The council meets at City Hall, 795 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square. Televised and watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.


Charter review nears its end

Charter Review Committee, 5:30 p.m. Tuesday. This group charged with suggesting updates to the city’s 80-year-old governing document is winding up and reviewing 10 “decision points” including the form of government, length of City Council terms and whether members stay at-large. Watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.

Renaming school; Fantini honors

School Committee, 6 p.m. Tuesday. The renaming of the Vassal Lane Upper School to avoid honoring a 1700s family of enslavers is proposed to instead honor one of the enslaved in their home – Darby Vassall. Longest-serving member Fred Fantini is honored as he retires after 40 years with an order saying the committee “will sorely miss his good humor, level-headed sensibility, strategic thinking and the countless positive relationships he forged.” The committee meets in the Dr. Henrietta S. Attles Meeting Room at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, 459 Broadway, Mid-Cambridge. Televised and watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.


Looking back and ahead on voting

Election Commission, 5:30 p.m. Wednesday. Commissioners and staff continue a postmortem on the Nov. 7 elections for City Council and School Committee, which included an excruciatingly close race between two challengers for a committee seat, and look ahead to the March 5 presidential primary and budgeting.