When Yi-An Huang released a memo late Wednesday announcing Ahern Field in East Cambridge would keep its natural grass, community members didn’t just feel surprised by the decision – they felt shock that a city manager had changed their mind.
Yes, staff had just confirmed to city councillors that the move to artificial turf was locked in more than a year earlier. But longtime Cantabrigians also got conditioned to a kind of dictatorial authority during the three decades in which Robert W. Healy ran City Hall, and the six years of managership by Louis A. DePasquale that preceded Huang’s appointment were lowlighted by moments of unexplained, if not inexplicable, stubbornness, namely a refusal to enact a feasibility study of city-owned Internet. (Huang did the study.)
In the hours that followed Huang’s memo choosing grass over turf, residents reacted with varying levels of surprise. “It is wild,” said one politics watcher. “Who hacked the city manager’s computer?” another quipped.
Was such a turnaround unprecedented? “As far as I can tell,” one said. “That is a fair assessment,” said Andrew Farrar, a Cambridge Youth Soccer advocate, in an interview he gave for an article about the memo.
“It is rare,” said Rhonda Massie in the same article, recounting how she’d all but given up on civic processes over the years after feeling resistance to considering neighborhood points of view. She pointed to the still-empty 40 Thorndike multiuse building, the result of shutting the Sullivan Courthouse and a disposition process that began in the Healy era. “People here said no, we want, if not the building gone, we want the building lowered substantially. We were treated shamefully.”
Huang, in a Friday call, downplayed the idea that a city manager changing their mind should shock people.
“The decision felt consistent with how I’ve navigated difficult issues,” he said. “We have a perspective that’s informed by our departments and staff, who are responsible for making these kinds of decisions, but also I think we’ve always been committed to engaging with the community.”
“It’s consistent with that broader framework of trying to work things out with the council and the community, and ultimately on this issue it felt like we did need to listen to where everybody was landing,” Huang said.
There wasn’t a fight from staff over keeping grass at Ahern, Huang said. “We all felt we all were leaning in the same direction as we were processing Monday,” he said, referring to the night he and department heads presented their case for turf to councillors. “We still believe really deeply that there is a need for more athletic fields that can support youth sports. I’ve been very clear about seeing this as an honest tradeoff.”
Though much of the attention in the debate over turf has been on Cambridge Youth Sports, also known as Cambridge Youth Soccer, Huang noted that the city’s flag football community has also made it clear it needs more space to build up program. “Providing the space is what the city is responsible for, and it does have to precede growth,” Huang said. “You can’t bring in more parents, more families, more kids, without having sufficient space.”
He looked back to the decision to install turf at Russell Field in North Cambridge near Alewife – a success story in that when the field was grass in 2017, it was able to host around 200 hours of of play; as a synthetic turf field, last year it hosted nearly 800 hours of use. It’s why, when people see the need for more sports, they end up leaning toward turf, Huang said.
Russell was already an athletic field, unlike the mix of uses that Ahern sees. But there was even more to the debate.
“We underestimated how much has changed,” Huang said. “Ten years later there’s much deeper concerns about microplastics, about heat and climate change and about social isolation and technology and this feeling that we want ourselves and our children to touch things that are real. I can see that influencing people, where the idea of having a grass field and being able to touch something natural and play in a field of grass compared with more plastic – when I put that all together, I’m like, okay, I get where this is coming from.”
When Huang told councillors on Monday that the public process “could be a lot improved,” he demonstrably meant it.
“We have to be willing to listen. it would be unhealthy for a city to say we’re always right and once we’ve made a decision, we’ll never change our mind. The idea that we would be willing to change our mind, that should be part of our culture,” Huang said. “Obviously I would aspire to have that be a relatively rare situation. That means making sure that we’re both doing the community outreach and engagement, but also developing community support for decisions that might be difficult.”
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