Orders that could change life significantly for Cambridge’s lower-income residents were approved Monday by city councillors, including a call to put some of the $65 million in federal Covid aid the city is getting into a guaranteed-income program and one that would give all high school students free CharlieCards for bus and subway rides.

Public meetings this week look at approvals and timelines for the next set of bike lanes and a study of their business impacts, a 400-foot tower for Kendall Square that would be the city’s tallest, a pause on office and lab development around Alewife, a possible guaranteed income program for the city’s poorest and much more.

The City Manager’s Office has blown past another deadline for setting a telework policy for municipal employees, this time to deliver a report and recommendations to the City Council at its March 21 meeting. The latest missed deadline was signaled weeks earlier by the city manager’s indignation about being questioned.

Giving up the power to reject curb-cut applications may have seemed like a slam-dunk a month ago, when backers of the idea couldn’t come up with a single example of the council using it in the past 100 cases. This month brought that case.

A mostly barefaced City Council ushered in the next stage of a Covid response Monday, the first day in almost two years that Cambridge does not require masks in any setting.

Cambridge Public Schools will make masks optional for students and staff starting Monday. Officials called it a difficult decision and warned the school community to be sensitive to people’s decisions to stay masked against the spread of coronavirus or not.

A town hall about the management and future of the Armory arts building in Somerville is being championed by a city councilor who says elected officials have been “left in the dark.”

City government was in an unusual position Monday as the city manager asked for support to break the law and city councillors responded in the affirmative – because a May 1 deadline for bicycle lanes can’t be achieved with new levels of community engagement and parking mitigation demanded by the councillors.

There were two hours of School Committee discussion Tuesday in which even members wondered about the process for a mask decision, and the mayor said she would be “happy” to call a special meeting on the topic. The deliberations led only to sending the idea back to the working group – which also doesn’t decide.

Public meetings this week look at problems with rats and a change in preschool hours, missing a May 1 deadline on bike lane construction, turning a vacant lot in The Port into affordable homes, special education policies, an energy-use disclosure law, Alewife-area lab moratorium, city manager search, law against wage theft and much more.