Council Updates, Memorial Drive Shooting, Holocaust Commemoration, and More

Health and Environment Committee
The next two Health and Environment Committee meetings are scheduled for May 26 (Zero Waste Master Plan) and June 22 (Urban Forest Master Plan). As I have written in the past, a long-term project of mine on the council has been to update our long-term planning documents. These master planning documents are essential oversight in terms of goal setting and achievement, but also in operationalizing across City departments. Through these kinds of documents, we can better coordinate resources, structure programming, and implement important changes over time. The Zero Waste Master Plan (ZWMP) meeting will be focused on the first round of ordinance changes called for by the ZWMP 2.0 Update which I worked to pass last year. These changes include updating the Litter and Refuse Ordinance, requiring Zero Waste Management Plans from large building owners (residential and commercial), mandatory food waste diversion (residential and commercial), updates to the Bring Your Own Bag Ordinance, and a new “Skip The Stuff” Ordinance, among other changes. These are important ordinance changes which will codify a number of important initiatives within the ZWMP 2.0. The Urban Forest Master Plan (UFMP) meeting will be focused on the 5-year update to the UFMP, including recommendations from the analysis and evaluation and feedback from community meetings. I have held UFMP meetings in the H&Env committee every year leading up to this process. This meeting will include suggested changes to the Tree Protection Ordinance, consider canopy coverage requirements, open space requirements, and other flexible landscape zoning requirements that will help the UFMP and further urban forestry goals.

Social Housing Task Force
On May 18, 2026, the City Manager delivered CMA 2026 #141 and CMA 2026 #152 which were responsive to a Housing Committee hearing on December 16, 2025 that brought together social housing stakeholders to discuss the potential for social housing. The Mayor and City Manager have appointed a task force that has been charged with evaluating and presenting a social housing model in Cambridge. I am excited about the potential of social housing in Cambridge and look forward to continuing to work on it.

Producer Responsibility and Product Stewardship Bills
One of the ongoing strategies for the Cambridge Zero Waste Master Plan (ZWMP 2,0) is to advocate for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) at the state level with other municipalities. Last week I sponsored a policy order in support of several state bills which would enact a level of extended producer responsibility over several product categories like batteries, paint, mattresses, and printed materials and packaging. EPR policies incentivize product design and packaging with increased durability, ease of repairability and recyclability, and reduced toxicity, and creates jobs and economic development in direct proportion to the amount of material recycled while businesses that provide take-back opportunities for their customers or participate in programs that can create customer loyalty, and enhance the image of their brand. Local governments such as Cambridge have no input into the design or marketing of products, limited ability to influence consumer behavior, and do not have the resources to adequately address the rising volume, toxicity and complexity of discarded products, yet the City of Cambridge is fiscally responsible for excess waste, both directly, through the amount of trash we generate and haul, and indirectly through the environmental impacts of litter, dangerous fires due to lithium battery disposal, exposure to toxic products like PFAS, and contamination of microplastics that leech into our community.

Shotspotter
For many months now, we have been discussing “ShotSpotter” in both the Public Safety Committee and the City Council. On Monday, the Council voted to end the use of this specific technology, which constantly records audio from the city and relays potential gunshot sounds to the Cambridge Police Department. The intent of the technology is to alert emergency services to the sound of gunshots in the event that a 911 call is not received quickly enough. Over many months of conversations and research into the program, documentation on the technology has shown that there are serious issues with ShotSpotter in terms of the effectiveness of the technology, and especially the ways that data recovered is used and stored. Our Surveillance Technology Ordinance required the City Council to review all surveillance and data collection technology annually to determine if it is still in the best interest of the city to continue its use in terms of effectiveness and in terms of privacy risk to residents. 

As the City Manager and the Acting Police Commissioner acknowledged, we are a very safe city, but gun violence still exists in Cambridge, and we have more work to do to confront that. But in this case, I do not believe that ShotSpotter makes us safer or helps us solve crimes. The very large false positive rate documented by ShotSpotter makes the tool relatively ineffective at tracking actual emergencies, but the larger issue is in data storage and privacy agreements. The data for this technology, which is a continuous source of audio recordings from around the city, is vulnerable to being accessed by federal agencies, including ICE, and may be unknowingly shared with federal agencies through the Department of Homeland Security. That is a risk to residents that I cannot support and our Welcoming Communities Ordinance does not allow. The substantial concerns regarding: the reliability and effectiveness of the technology in producing actionable public safety outcomes, the operational costs associated with its deployment, and the adequacy of safeguards to mitigate risks to privacy, civil liberties, and civil rights led the majority of the council to vote to end the use of this technology.

Time does matter, and yet for the most recent act of gun violence in Cambridge on Memorial Drive, ShotSpotter made no difference and would not have saved anyone from getting shot. I am not against the use of camera equipment generally – I am supportive of public safety cameras controlled by CPD in public spaces and I have supported camera-led enforcement of parking and traffic violations – but when we deploy surveillance technology we have a duty to control the data that is collected and a responsibility to review the technology for effectiveness and data control. If there is a better tool that accomplishes the goal better than ShotSpotter did, I am more than willing to consider its use and work to ensure that the data is managed safely. The data we reviewed over several months indicate that ShotSpotter failed both of those tests and it was in the best interest of the city to end its use.