As the Davis Square Neighborhood Council nears a vote on whether it will be recognized formally by the city, even some board members say the organization has stuff to figure out first.
The 642-member council, which formed in 2024 and is active around the Somerville square in beautification, community-building and advocacy work, can’t negotiate benefits with developers without official standing. City councilors on a Legislative Matters Committee will consider next week what recommendation to make on that status to the full council, but a hearing Tuesday showed division among residents.
“Not at this time,” said Edward Woll, a co-chair on the neighborhood council’s nominating committee, at the Legislative Matters hearing. He cited a bylaw clash over whether eight or 20 people could be a voting quorum – a topic taking up much of the group’s most recent meetings. “Twenty is patently inadequate to represent the interests of the DNC voting community.”
“The experience for general members at these meetings is kind of brutal and repellent, as MIT engineers are battling with Harvard-trained lawyers for every last inch of Robert’s Rules of Orders,” said Frank Malsbenden, a general board member. The group is mired because of the high stakes of being able to negotiate with developers for community benefits agreements, which raises stakes and creates factions, becoming “a recipe for acrimony at the neighborhood level.”
A second factor drawing unease is the neighborhood council’s rule that people living within a half-mile of Davis Square’s neighborhood boundaries can be voting members, even if they live in Cambridge, Arlington or Medford. “Neither the Union Square Neighborhood Council nor Gilman Square Neighborhood Council extend voting rights on the basis of residence to anyone living outside of Somerville,” said Meredith Porter, a resident who submitted letters on each area of dispute, opposing recognition even though “great work has been done.”
City Council president Lance Davis, who represents the Davis area, asked the city solicitor Aug, 4 for legal advice on allowing membership from outside Somerville, but there’s been no reply, Porter said.
While the lowest boundary of Union Square is 0.2 miles from the city line of Cambridge, which is the nearest city, Gilman Square is no closer than 0.8 miles to its closest neighbor, Medford. Cambridge’s Mem Tea is inside Davis Square boundaries, and so is Seven Hills Presbyterian Church.
“Cambridge is just a few hundred feet away from the Davis Square T stops. Additionally, our T stops say Tufts University,” pointed out Peter Kim-Santos, the DSNC treasurer, who supported recognition of the group now. Bylaws result from compromises, he said, and “we are certainly engaging in different efforts to improve them wherever we can.”
General board members Louisa Bissett and Alex Dehnert also supported recognition now, with Dehnert saying the group “will continue to evolve and improve, but the major structural details of the bylaws seem stable.”
Negotiations and a Somernova vote
Membership is a touchy subject in part because of a vote on the redevelopment of the Somernova complex that was run by the Union Square Neighborhood Council on June 4, 2025, which showed 71 percent favoring the project. Who was allowed to cast a ballot was an issue that day and since. A speaker at Tuesday’s hearing, Lumina Gershfield, said she was “a little bit disillusioned” because she felt Somernova results were skewed by deemphasizing “the people who would be directly affected as abutters.”
Speaker Chris Dwan said it would be “a mistake” to delay recognition to perfect DSNC bylaws, particularly because of the Somernova vote. The experience, in which rules were adjusted “on the fly and I think it worked out okay,” taught neighborhood councils a lot about how to define membership, he said. (Dwan has written for The Independent.)
Among DSNC members, 567 are Somerville residents, or 88 percent of the total, since getting rid of a vague “local interest” category, said council vice president Chris Beland. Members are contributing to the city’s Davis Square neighborhood plan, seeking solutions to vacant storefronts and contemplating an improved Elm Street for parking and pedestrian – an “Elmway.” But Beland felt benefits negotiations would be the council’s primary responsibility.
Negotiations were an even more potent topic before Aug. 31, when the developer Copper Mill pulled out of a project proposed for David Square. Its plan for a 502-unit, 26-story tower was divisive, with many residents, including council members, upset about the height and saying it was out of scale with the neighborhood.
“The famous Copper Mill project has been canceled, but 882 Broadway, which is near Powder House, and 199 Elm, which is near Revival in Davis Square, those are still active, and new projects are starting all the time,” Beland said. “We’re here to ask the city to officially recognize us as the body to negotiate community benefits agreements, in addition to all of the other general advocacy work that we’re doing.”
An ordinance issue
Former state representative Denise Provost believed DSNC membership was too restrictive when it came to Somerville residents and too permissive to others. “Davis Square is an indivisible part of Somerville, not just a neighborhood. We are all stakeholders in Davis Square … In our 4-square-mile city, the future of any part of our city affects the future of the whole of Somerville,” Provost wrote to the City Council.
By allowing voting rights to residents who live in a “small, arbitrarily selected number of street addresses” around the square, the DSNC was engaging in “structural gerrymandering [that] discriminates against the majority of Somerville residents. It excludes us from vital decisions about Davis Square’s future,” Provost said, urging the City Council to take its time before granting recognition.
Like Malsbenden, she felt a bigger problem lay in the neighborhood council ordinance itself, but that “broader discussion can be left for another day.”
The next Legislative Matters Committee meeting is 6 p.m. Tuesday.
