Cambridge Day sat down last week with Cambridge City Manager Yi-An Huang for a wide-ranging conversation about his work as chief executive of a municipal bureaucracy that employs over 2,000 people. Now in his fourth year on the job, he’s the first ‘outsider’ to run the city in decades. Cambridge’s “weak mayor” system means Huang is also the most powerful policy figure in the city, and he is its representative on the Metropolitan Mayors Coalition, which engages in issues that affect 17 cities and towns in Greater Boston, including Boston itself.
The city’s budget, City Hall’s relationship with the City Council, and the difference between working in government and working in health care, where he was before, were all on the agenda. So was housing, with Huang wryly noting the view from his desk, the uninhabitable building at 3 Bigelow, a property the city owns and could be part of new efforts to address the city’s housing needs.
Huang was relaxed, direct and thoughtful, even when discussing the likelihood that the city starts to run into the same budget headwinds other cities in Massachusetts are already struggling with. Less ambitious spending and lower property tax revenues seem likely, which mean tough decisions are on the horizon.
A new fiscal picture
When Huang was first appointed city manager in 2022, Cambridge was in a period of unprecedented growth. Low interest rates encouraged investment, especially in the biotech sector, both in physical redevelopment for new labs and office space as well as in the form of seed capital for startups, many of which chose to make their home in Kendall Square. Plus, the city was awash with federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), a COVID-era program under the Biden Administration that provided tens of millions of dollars’ worth of financing to dozens of municipal projects.
Now, Huang must navigate a much more complicated financial picture than the one he inherited. Federal funding that was once used for new investments and to “plug holes” in the budget has dried up, as has grant money to the biotech industry and its major universities for research and development. That, plus higher interest rates, has resulted in an overall decline both in investment and jobs for the area’s most important industries. Biotech’s ongoing slump in particular has affected commercial property revenues the city relies upon and has used to keep residential property tax rates well below average in Greater Boston.
Even so, Cambridge remains in an “incredibly fortunate position” according to Huang. For Fiscal Year 2027, which begins July 1, the city has managed to avoid some of the tough realities faced by other Massachusetts municipalities.
“We’re not seeing layoffs. We’re not seeing program and service cuts. We’re not going to people and asking for a tax override,” he noted.
The city kept residential property taxes relatively level in the current budget by increasing taxes on commercial properties. Huang said next year may be a different story. “We’re two years behind Boston in terms of being in a place where we are going to be at the commercial tax levy limit, and where, if we see commercial values continue to decline, you’re going to see residential property taxes go up more than what people are used to,” Huang said. “Boston is now in their second budget where they’re seeing that play out. Our FY27 budget, we’re still able to balance those tax rates and keep residential taxes lower. Our expectation is in FY28 we’re going to be at that limit.”
The city has already had to make some unpopular decisions as ARPA funding ended for programs like short-term cash assistance for disadvantaged families and the Transition Wellness Center, which shuttered last year, because the city did not take over funding them. “We either need[ed] to see some of those investments go away, or we have to find space in our budget for them, and that creates hard choices,” Huang said. He noted that “This is not the time to embark on a really expensive new program if we aren’t sure that we can sustain it … that’s where we just need to be a little bit careful.”
“A mistake that we don’t have an excuse for”
Most of the city’s financial headwinds can be chalked up to macroeconomic realities that apply across cities in the Commonwealth. But city officials didn’t make things easier for themselves in one case earlier this year, when a simple human resources error ended up costing Cambridge taxpayers in a six-figure settlement.
Earlier this month, the Harvard Crimson reported that after the city laid off seven employees in a restructuring of its diversity-related commissions, it was late in giving them their final payment. This triggered a Wage Act violation, which entitled the former employees to three times the original amount of compensation, or about $180,000.
Huang said the error was due to a simple miscalculation by the city’s human resources department. “This really was a mistake that we don’t have an excuse for,” Huang acknowledged. He added that the city didn’t try to fight the allegations that pay had been delayed and paid them as quickly as they could. “We were not in a position where we wanted to be fighting people and saying, ‘we didn’t make a mistake,’ or to draw this out,” Huang said.
Huang said improving and investing in human resources will prevent future mistakes.
Better HR “is something I talked about pretty extensively when I first came in,” Huang said. “We’re an organization with 2,000 employees, and the HR team had essentially not grown almost at all and had significant vacancies. And so, we’ve been working to build better systems and processes.”
On March 25, city officials presented to council a plan to replace the city’s HR management software, which is currently 25 years old. According to the memo, the project will cost $15-20 million and take five years to complete. At the meeting, some councillors expressed surprise at the project’s cost and length.
Huang said there were efforts to try to replace the system more quickly and with less expense, but the number of union contracts the city manages adds a degree of complexity that is unusual for private employers, “and it creates a more complex and difficult implementation.”
Reoriented relationship with council
This January marked Huang’s second inauguration for a city council. One thing that has changed since his first year on the job were the roughly 90 policy order requests for reports that the city manager’s office had not delivered. The PO process is a quirk of the shared power between the city manager, who runs the day-to-day operations of the city, and the council, which relies on the manager’s office to keep it updated on the status of projects, necessary data for legislation, and sometimes, even the nature of its own power over a particular issue.
“I recommended the Council to take the step to just clear the decks and say, ‘Let’s start over and get rid of the backlog,’” said Huang. He asked councillors to resubmit only the orders that were most important to them. “On the city side, we will answer everything that comes through, and we’ll give you at least some sense of status,” Huang promised. He said that over the last two years, the city has been able to keep up with requests and avoid another backlog.
Improved collaboration with council has also led to a narrower scope in terms of budgeting. This fiscal year, he said council has been focused on its three top priorities:
- a social housing pilot,
- supportive housing for the homeless,
- and expanding access to childcare for low-income families.
He said these three priorities were the result of a massive scoping exercise. “We’ve been going through this process with the council to actually pick up the 20 to 25 things that have … required some level of staff resourcing to scope and explore, and then ultimately budget to prioritize,” he said.
Huang emphasized that not all problems in Cambridge need to be resolved with a line item.
“The budget used to be seen as … a sign of our values … if you put more dollars into something, that means you care more about it,” Huang said. “We need to be having conversations about the problems that we’re trying to address first, and then we move into the actual solutions to those problems … Because it may be the case that you don’t need any money, and that the most effective thing you can do is actually changing regulations.
“Or maybe it’s the case that that what you want to do is going to cost so much money that actually we shouldn’t even be talking about it, because there’s no way we can fund it right now.”
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