Council Updates, Equity and Inclusion Department Restructuring, and More

Health and Environment Committee Updates

Joint Housing / H&Env on Solar Energy Systems: Thursday, December 11, 3:00pm-5:00pm

• (meeting materials, when available)
• After some pushback from the rest of the Council on my proposal to protect existing solar energy systems, this proposal was sent back to committee for more deliberation. This meeting, a joint meeting of the Housing Committee and the Health and Environment Committee will continue to try to come to a compromise in order to protect residential solar panels.

Finance Committee Updates

Joint Housing / Finance on Incentive Zoning: Wednesday: December 3, 3:00pm-5:00pm

• (meeting materials, meeting video)
• The Housing Committee and the Finance Committee held a joint public hearing to discuss the feasibility and potential impacts of implementing residential development incentives – such as tax incentives, public equity financing, and reduced fees and requirements – on housing production and city finances. This meeting was productive and I encourage anyone interested in housing production and affordable housing to watch the recording and review the meeting materials. This meeting was the beginning of a much larger discussion on zoning and land use, direct investment in housing, tax incentives and permitting, and different models of housing including social housing. Housing development is a complicated network and is largely impacted by macroeconomic factors and is cyclical, but there are still many steps we can take on the local level to continue to incentivize more housing development and especially affordable housing.

Equity and Inclusion Department Restructuring
On Thursday, the Government Operations Committee held a meeting to discuss the organizational changes to the Equity & Inclusion Department, including laying off seven staff. After the news was announced, I filed a policy order seeking a clear explanation from the City Manager. The response indicated that this decision was part of an operational and organizational change meant to streamline redundancies and ensure fair distribution of resources across departments. This decision, along with the way the firings were conducted was nothing short of a complete shock to the Council and the community. I am not opposed to strategic thinking in management and I am open to having hard discussions about staff reductions – I have been clear about that; however, these firings were decided without input from the community, the council, City staff, or the commissions. They were done abruptly, insensitively, and without regard for the longtime commitment these employees have made to the entire city. This council has expressed a clear desire to work collaboratively with the City Manager to work through difficult budget decisions, which we talked about at a roundtable just a few weeks ago. So to be alerted via a phone call and an all-staff email about these staffing decisions feels like a deliberate lack of collaboration in governing. After the discussion in committee (which you can watch here), I am still not sure why this decision was made in the way it was.

I don’t doubt that these are hard decisions to make, and I respect that administrative decisions like this are under the authority of the City Manager, but we have talked in the Sullivan Chamber very frequently about increasing collaboration – especially around difficult decisions. And if this staffing decision was in response to a budget determination, that determination was not made collaboratively. And if this staffing decision is because of a commitment to streamlining Boards and Commissions, that was not done collaboratively. The City Manager and his team explained that this decision was nearly two-years in the making, which is surprising and a concern, because throughout those two years, the Council was never consulted, and throughout those two years, a more appropriate process for staff restructuring overall, not only in this area, was not produced. This decision was unkind to long-serving employees, and unsettling to other employees since it was uncollaborative and nontransparent. The City of Cambridge can do better by its employees and its residents than a corporate restructuring. We deserve more and we promise more. We could have had a clearer and public process for streamlining boards and commissions, and we could have had other announcements about budget concerns that could have been discussed leading up to the FY27 budget, and these conversations could have happened in executive session if necessary, but this timing and this decision were a very disappointing way of blindsiding City staff and the Council.

Flock Safety Public Safety Committee Meeting
On Tuesday, December 9 from 12:00pm – 2:00pm the Public Safety Committee will be discussing the implications of deploying automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) and utilizing a company called Flock Safety in implementing the ALPRs and data management. For background, back in February, the Cambridge Police Department (CPD) requested authorization to utilize several new surveillance-related technologies including drones, tech to unlock phones, and ALPRs. The City Council approved the technologies, although I voted against that authorization along with Councillors Sobrinho-Wheeler and Siddiqui because I was concerned about the possibility of improper use of private data by federal officials in conducting immigration enforcement. I don’t have a problem with the use of these specific technologies, and I do have issues with some of the ways these technologies, and more specifically the data they collect, can be used to aid the federal government in carrying out cruel and illegal immigration enforcement. CPD has prior authorization for a number of surveillance technologies, all approved by the City Council over the years, including some cameras in the public way, which I have supported. What makes this technology different is, in part, the vendor chosen for this work, Flock Safety, which has been implicated in sharing private data collected with Texas officials as they conducted an investigation related to a woman having an abortion, an act that, if it happened in Massachusetts, would be a direct violation with state law. Since then, federal immigration enforcement has only increased, including in Cambridge and neighboring cities, and the ACLU issued a statement warning cities of this breach of public safety. Following that, I sponsored a policy order asking the City to pause use of this technology until we had an opportunity to investigate the issues and determine whether the data collected in Cambridge was safe from federal overreach. The intent for this meeting is to determine whether the ALPRs being deployed are being managed in a way that protects residents and allows CPD to do their job without concerns about illegal data sharing. Again, I don’t have a problem with CPD using these technologies in the course of their sworn duty in Cambridge, but we need to ensure that the data collected is being handled in accordance with our own Surveillance and Welcoming City ordinances as well as Massachusetts state law. I look forward to the discussion on Tuesday and continuing to partner with the ACLU and the Cambridge Police Department to ensure the public safety of everyone who calls Cambridge home.