The dream of city-owned Internet crashed Monday under the overload of Cambridge’s new financial and political constraints, meaning a delay for an indeterminate number of years before the idea can be considered again.
“Given the heightened uncertainty at the federal level, investing in a stabilization fund instead of scoping new ideas may be prudent to preserve the city’s flexibility to respond to potential federal funding gaps in the future,” city manager Yi-An Huang said in a written response to an order from February for an implementation plan. Talks about a $5 million Federal Funding Stabilization Fund are underway.
Expected financial retribution from the White House over Cambridge’s sanctuary city status and at Harvard University are combining with changes to the economy since the Covid pandemic to weaken Cambridge’s financial base. When new city funding priorities were discussed at an April 16 meeting, municipal broadband was seen as unrealistic in the current environment.
“If it was up to me we wouldn’t even be going through this exercise of prioritization,” councillor Paul Toner said. With “our current president taking over and making the decisions that he’s making, I didn’t think that we had the wherewithal to take on many of these projects to begin with – maybe some of the smaller-dollar ones, but definitely not larger-dollar ones like municipal broadband.”
Vice mayor Marc McGovern had an even starker take. “I’m willing to let go of the broadband,” he said. “I’m really just concerned about keeping people alive, keeping people’s heat on, keeping people’s roof over their head, food on their table.”
Municipal broadband, which cities install to treat Internet access more like a utility than a business, has been on some residents’ and officials’ wish list for Cambridge for around a decade. The city created a task force to look at the idea, and it wrapped up its work in September 2016 with a suggestion for a cost feasibility study. Huang’s predecessor as city manager, Louis D. Pasquale, delayed a study, leading to clashes with the City Council.
When Huang arrived, the tone was different, and in 2022 he called city-owned Internet “a very exciting opportunity.” Study findings in March 2023 described a cost of $150 million to around $194 million spread over several years, with a full network in place in seven years.
On Monday, with discussion of new fiscal realities already coloring other items on the night’s agenda, no councillor even tagged Huang’s municipal broadband memo as worthy of discussion.
DIgital equity promoted
In its place, councillor Cathie Zusy called for a review of the city’s digital equity work to ensure that everyone in the city had quality Internet of some sort.
“It doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to implement municipal broadband for several years, and we want to make sure that everyone has access,” Zusy said, citing need for improvement even at public housing buildings that are part of a three-year trial for extremely high-speed service with the company Starry.
As a sign of need, mobile Internet hot spots are the top item checked out from the Cambridge Public Library’s tech bar, director of libraries Maria McCauley said in a Wednesday phone interview. “In Cambridge and across the United States, a lot of people don’t have broadband access,” McCauley said.
The order by Zusy hopes that by October the city can update a 2021 evaluation of existing Internet access programs and see how to improve them. Some of the problems are about education and training as much as about access, councillors said.
None of the issues are new.
“We started talking about the digital divide probably 15 or 20 years ago,” councillor Patty Nolan said, calling to build on the previous assessment instead of reproducing the work. “Even though it was a few years ago, which in some ways in technology seems like a lifetime ago, in fact so many of those recommendations are still relevant. [Let’s] really make sure that we can move forward quickly.”
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Marc McGovern had an even starker take. “I’m willing to let go of the broadband,” … “I’m really just concerned about keeping people alive, keeping people’s heat on…
Doesn’t ring true to me Mr. McGovern. You’ve been on the Council for many years. The City has an enormous amount of waste, but no ombudsman. We have a participatory citizens budget. Look at some of the recipients e.g. a pollinator garden. Why do we fund these things if we are trying to keep people alive.
Then we have
https://www.cambridgema.gov/news/detail?path=/sitecore/content/home/arts/news/2025/03/localculturalcouncilgrants
Look at some of the projects! Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery. Look at the financials. The cemetery is incredibly wealthy.
Yes, it’s only a little here and a little there. But, we have a city in financial distress, and you and your colleagues have not fully recognized this. Please. stop the unneeded spending.
And most of all, get an ombudsman. He/she pays for themselves 10 times over.
City Council seems to be bold and aggressive pushing agendas that benefit people do not live here now. Robust affordable internet would benefit all current residents so it gets pushed aside for other initiatives. Pushing an eight and a half percent residential tax increase only makes Cambridge less affordable. Which Counselor is making a statement about this tax increase’s impact on affordability. Few discussions about cutting unproductive programming tocomtonue feel good agendas like free money for some selected few.
@ Fourmacks,
Unfortunately, the Council doesn’t seem to understand that the tax increases during the last
several years, including the very substantial one this year, has pushed, and will continue to push out economically middle class families.
For the last ten years, the Counselors have thought that the biotechs were going to continue to grow ad infinitum. The city spent and spent on non essential projects. Some of us wrote to the Counselors, but they were too dumb, fat and happy to rein in expenditures.
I can’t recall if any of them had actually run a business or had built a business. They had little experience in the real world of planning five or ten years ahead.
Now, the city is in a fiscal bind. It can blame it on the new administration in its proposed outlandish cuts (and that is somewhat valid), but the main problem is that this city is spendthrift, and the “end ramifications” are the end of the middle class in Cambridge.
What BS! We have gone from a moron city manager who thought he knew better to we’re now poor? Who’s getting the money from the real estate developers to get around the rules to build huge buildings that benefit only the developers?