Cambridge city election?

[ron_newman]

Cambridge is having a city council and school committee election next month, as they do in every odd-numbered year. Nobody has discussed it here yet, even though a fair number of DSLJ readers (including two of the four moderators) live on the Cambridge side of the line.

Would anyone like to start a discussion of that election, or at least link to another forum where that discussion is happening? (I live in Somerville so I know almost nothing about it.)

Links I've found so far: Reddit thread; Another Reddit thread; Robert Winters's Cambridge Civic Journal (quite informative, but is not a discussion site)

Comments

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Apparently discussion is happening on reddit. :)

I was just at a house party for the Slate For Cambridge people. Talking to John Sanzone was pretty cool, I liked him and his ideas about higher density and less parking and zoning being nuts. Haven't looked at his blog yet, but the redditors liking him seems consistent.

The others were vaguer, but Mariko said the Council had voted to raise linkage fees from $3 to $12 a square foot, when research says $24 would be good. This is money that goes to support affordable housing. She used this as evidence that they're in the campaign finance pocket of developers; I took away that they'd voted to raise linkage fees 4x instead of 8x.

My 2013 notes have pluses for Carlone, Cheung, Toomey, and Kelley. I haven't really followed votes or activity since then though, which is pretty negligent, I guess. I see some redditors don't like Toomey, though mostly on personality? Nadeem I have marked as "vague".

I'm surprised Kelley is part of this "Unity" counter-slate.

[emcicle.livejournal.com]

Can you explain what this slate for cambridge means? i got a letter from craig kelley saying he was part of it, but it didn't really explain what it was or what it meant?

(i'll also go review some links from ron newman)

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I don't have his e-mail any more; I remember getting a sense that he stood with the slate. But apparently, no: this is the slate of insurgents -- alleged rents and bike owners -- led by Mazen and allied with Carlone http://www.slateforcambridge.com/

Kelley has joined with six other incumbents as an opposing slate, the Unity Slate. So seven of nine incumbents are asking that you vote for them as a bloc.

[emcicle.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, i see how I got confused. I remember he was joining some slate (just didn't get which one). that being said, there's no way i'm voting for a bloc of seven incumbents. no way.

[ron_newman]

"alleged rents" ?

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Urp. "alleged renters"

[lizforalderman.livejournal.com]

Ha, do you think they're secret homeowners? :)

[gruene.livejournal.com]

That's a interesting strategy for Cambridge, given their electoral system, which doesn't incentivize block voting the way Somerville's plurality system does. I guess the hope is that if you all get your supporters to give your block their second - fifth votes, that helps all of you get in office. But your slate can't "sweep" an election, since it fundamentally falls back to proportional representation. ie. If the whole city followed the slate voting tactic and the Unity State got 2/3rds of the votes and the Slate for Cambridge for 1/3rd of the votes, they would get 6 and 3 seats respectively. Verses in Somerville, (and most cities), which ever slate got more votes would win all the seats.

Of course, of the 23 candidates running, only 11 are in either slate, and there's nothing requiring the voters to rank the slate together. I suspect many will not.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Most cities I know of use wards, so it's not really a matter of who gets the most votes, but who wins the most wards, which can differ based on voter distribution. If they were uniform, yeah, the 2/3 slate would get all the seats, which is ostensibly why we have PR instead.

Of course, this does raise the question of how they get ranked. Cynical comments were that the SfC is just a way for Nadeem to get himself re-elected, hoping he'll get boosted by voters for the other newcomers. But if the 7 candidates got only 2/3 of the votes, someone's getting bumped...

[gruene.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of the at-large seats. Ward races are obviously a different beast. Somerville and Boston both use a mix of ward and at-large seats. Medford, on the other hand, only has at-large seats.

[gruene.livejournal.com]

Also Crutchfield is running for School Committee, so the "Slate for Cambridge" is actually only fielding four candidates, which is probably about the maximum number of seats they could hope to win anyway.

[ron_newman]

I'd hate to see anyone make a voting decision based on those two Reddit threads. They were all I could easily find, and I'm hoping someone will post links to more substantive discussion elsewhere.

[emcicle.livejournal.com]

i wouldn't base it just on that, but i find something really... off-putting (I guess) about 7 of nine (hee hee, star trek reference) people basically running together and saying "hey, we're awesome, we work awesome together, don't break us up, don't judge us each by our own merit, keep us all together". The implied part to that is "these other two people aren't awesome and really need to go". I like to make my decision based on each individual, not as a whole group. (I apologize if that doesn't make sense, i'm having a hard time trying to verbalize what I mean).

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Seriously. I've also managed to miss where they say anything about all the important work they've done and why they are worth even a quarter of what employing them costs the City.

[somerfriend.livejournal.com]

John Sanzone has been an advocated for the Grand Junction path for a long time, if I lived in Cambridge I would vote for him. https://www.facebook.com/GrandJunctionPath

[she-of-emeralds.livejournal.com]

Thanks for bringing this up, ron_newman! I'm one of those on the Cambridge side of the line and am shamefully ignorant of what goes on in local politics. I am attempting to remedy this ignorance. I'll start reading the links you've provided.

+1 for Slate for Cambridge

[lizforalderman.livejournal.com]

No longer a Cambridge resident, but over the course my own campaign I've interacted with all of the newcomer members of Slate for Cambridge, and I liked them all a lot, particularly Mariko Davidson and John Sanzone. The fact that the Cambridge council only has one(!) woman is going to incline me towards recommending Mariko for your #1 spot.

Elizabeth