These are just some of the municipal meetings and civic events for the coming week. More are on the City Calendar and in the city’s Open Meetings Portal.
Snow; Cambridge Street zoning
City Council, 5:30 p.m. Monday. Snow clearing methods aren’t working consistently for regular precipitation, let alone during a 30-inch blizzard such as Cambridge saw last weekend, some councillors say in proposing a Cambridge Snow Corps that would enlist help during a crisis. Boston, Baltimore, Chicago and New York have programs that could be models, says councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, lead author.
Cambridge Street zoning was passed by the council Jan. 26, but members of the East Cambridge community want more to be done around issues such as widening setbacks to allow for tree plantings, ordering architectural stepbacks at the fourth story of a building, creating pocket parks and encouraging active ground-floor space, lead author councillor Cathie Zusy says. She wants discussion of these topics and more at an Ordinance Committee meeting. Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, meanwhile, wants a roundtable on the best future uses of city-owned properties, and councillor E. Denise Simmons calls for staff to better illustrate the effect of funding for big city projects. At a time departments are being asked to cut back for council consideration in a budget, “good fiscal governance requires that the council have access to a clear and consolidated understanding of existing capital authorizations, bond obligations, expenditures and estimated costs to completion before layering new commitments on top of prior-year decisions,” Simmons says. She also calls for giving the public better and more consistent access online to presentations, memos and other materials being discussed in public meetings or for the public good. “Many city departments and boards regularly publish detailed agendas and accompanying materials,” Simmons says. “The level of detail and timing of publication can vary.” That’s putting it mildly.
Support for a state bill protecting libraries and librarians against hateful attacks or attempts at censorship is proposed by councillor Marc McGovern, and is something probably everyone can get behind; and councillor Ayah Al-Zubi, with co-sponsorship from Nolan, proposes the city make an overdue departure from the social media platform once known as Twitter. Owner Elon Musk “is a white nationalist” who assaults democracy and governing norms, and his platform’s bespoke AI “generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images, including 23,000 of children, in just one 11-day period.” There are at least 15 city accounts on the platform, a “municipal presence [that] has functioned to legitimize and drive traffic to X despite its transformation under current ownership,” Al-Zubi says.
Talk about adding a real estate transfer fee to the biggest commercial and residential property transactions goes back to at least 2016, and at this meeting councillors will consider possible language for a version proposed Feb. 9 (which would still have to go the Legislature for permission). Now liability for the payment is on the purchaser rather than the seller, as suggested by councillor Tim Flaherty, and the city would impose fees “up to 2 percent” of prices exceeding $1 million instead of “equal to 2 percent” – a return to language that was asked back in 2020.
The council meets at City Hall, 795 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square. Televised and watchable online and by Zoom videoconferencing.
Central Square plan open house
Central Square Demonstration Plan, 5 to 7 p.m. Tuesday. The Cambridge Redevelopment Authority seeks ideas for a “demonstration plan” toolkit to support Central Square cultural preservation and expansion, mixed-income housing and commercial vitality. The meeting, rescheduled from its original date by bad weather, is in-person at the Street Theory Collective, 541 Massachusetts Ave.
Saving deleted federal data
Open Data Review Board, 5:30 to 8 p.m. Tuesday. The board hosts a presentation by Molly Hardy of Harvard Law School’s Public Data Project, which launched last year to preserve and ensure long-term access to federal datasets at a time the president and government are taking down materials they dislike. The board meets in the second-floor Ackermann Room at City Hall, 795 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square. Watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.
Snow days; third-grade reading
School Committee, 6 p.m. Tuesday. Two members call for third-graders who aren’t proficient in reading to no longer be moved to the fourth grade unless there’s a good cause exemption written up by a principal and approved by the superintendent. “A substantial proportion of Cambridge Public School students cannot read at grade level,” says Elizabeth Hudson and Richard Harding, calling for action from the superintendent by the end of the year and enactment by the 2027-2028 academic year. After a series of troubling accusations against district leaders, Hudson, Harding and first-termer Arjun Jaikumar call for a “regular, independent 360-degree feedback process for all school principals, incorporating input from families, students and staff.” There’s also a call to review the standard for closing schools for snow days, which has happened four times this academic year. Because those days are made up at the end of the term, schools are now expected to close for summer break on June 29. The committee meets in the Dr. Henrietta S. Attles Meeting Room at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, 459 Broadway, Mid-Cambridge. Televised and watchable online and by Zoom videoconferencing.
Design of 2072 Mass. Ave.
Planning Board, 6:30 p.m. Tuesday. Members give advisory design notes to a 12-story, 73-home apartment building at 2072 Massachusetts Ave., near Porter Square in North Cambridge, replacing the Darul Kabab restaurant next to senior homes. The 90,472-square-foot project is going up using Affordable Housing Overlay zoning that allows 12 stories along major Cambridge corridors as of right if all homes within are deeded as affordable. Developers are Capstone Communities, Hope Real Estate Enterprises and MPZ Development. Watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.
Bridges across the Charles
Transit Advisory Committee, 6 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday. A short presentation on Charles River crossings and a long one on the region’s long-range planning processes, as well as a chance for members to ask questions of city staff about any city or state project. At City Hall Annex, 344 Broadway, Mid-Cambridge and watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.
MIT opens up a 1966 building
Historical Commission, 6 to 10:30 p.m. Thursday. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology asks to demolish most of its building at 60 Vassar St. (known as the Stanley Gordon Brown Building, or MIT Building 39, which has housed the schools’ Microsystems Technology Laboratories). “Columns and slabs” would be kept on the six-story structure built in 1966, a fairly anonymous grid design of concrete and window amid other fairly anonymous-looking buildings, and it would be reskinned with a facade of top-to-bottom glass allowing a peek at the work inside and an opaque seventh-floor cap. Watchable by Zoom videoconferencing.
Unite housing and homelessness
City Council, 5:30 p.m. March 9. The regular meeting pauses an hour in for a hearing on reorganizing and consolidating housing and homelessness services to one department from three. Within the regular meeting, it’s annual report time on the city’s use of surveillance technology – arriving after months of concern about the installation of devices owned by the company Flock to track license plates. The city stopped working with Flock before the most recent, scariest scandals (including one that convinced Amazon’s Ring doorbell company to back out of a partnership with Ice), but there is still council support for other forms of license-plate tech for automated traffic enforcement. The council meets at City Hall, 795 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square. Televised and watchable online and by Zoom videoconferencing.
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