Most Cambridge drivers could be asked to pay $75 for their next resident parking permit, up from $25, under a policy order passed Monday after four weeks awaiting action by the City Council.
The order passed 7-2 with debate familiar from when it went on the table March 2: That it hurts seniors on a fixed income. (The votes against were by Tim Flaherty and E. Denise Simmons.)
No resident is forced to pay $75, though. The proposal allows for anyone to check a hardship box – no proof is needed – and pay $25 instead.
A blanket exemption for seniors would end, and as a result senior drivers will pay $25, up from nothing. But the cost for visitor parking permits are unchanged at $25, and permits for people with disabilities would still be free.
“You have seniors in this community, quite honestly, who could afford the $75 or more who get an exemption, but if you’re a 30-year-old single mother living in Newtowne Court, you have to pay. I’m not sure how that makes sense,” councillor Marc McGovern said, referring to an affordable public housing project run by the Cambridge Housing Authority. “I want the people who can’t afford it to get a break and get a subsidy whether they’re 65 years old or 30 years old. I don’t want anybody who is struggling to put food on the table to pay $75, regardless of their age.”
Opposition from Simmons continued to be based on the burden a fee represents to seniors. “There are people who have lived in the city for decades, who have stayed through every wave of development, displacement and rising cost, and now we are being asked to tell them that one small accommodation the city has made for you is being taken away,” Simmons said, arguing that $25 is not a nominal cost to an older resident on a fixed income – for whom it “might be a heating bill. It might be a week of groceries, it might be a co-pay that they’re already putting off.”
“We’re asking to remove the protection without even talking to seniors,” Simmons said.
The order had been tabled in part to give the council’s Transportation Committee, led by Flaherty and Burhan Azeem, a chance to meet to explore the fee’s impacts and basis. Backers say the price increase would help pay for the cost of issuing the permits, which now costs rather than makes money, but Flaherty was skeptical, calling for “a verification, a validation of the cost of the programs” and saying a committee meeting could come together “anytime,” probably in the next two weeks to 21 days.
Councillors voting in favor of the night’s simplified order were not having it. Cathie Zusy reminded Flaherty of a 2024 analysis by the city Department of Transportation that supported the $75 price structure and said “if we were to rerun the analysis with updated costs, it will have grown”; Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler suggested that if a committee hearing was going to be scheduled, that could have happened since March 2. Azeem noted that the order was co-sponsored by three committee members, and the issue would “end up in the same place.”
The language of the order calls for a report from city staff to go to the committee before June, and there’s most of a year before the next permit cycle. “You could have as many committees on this topic with different questions that you want,” mayor Sumbul Siddiqui said.
“We have been discussing this, literally, for about two and a half or three years,” councillor Patty Nolan said. “I really don’t see the point of continuing this discussion.”
Other actions Monday
The city moved toward updating its Welcoming Community Ordinance to limit where federal authorities can undertake immigration-branded attacks and make clear that city resources won’t be used in the work. An April 7 discussion in the Public Safety Committee will look at how local police would handle protesters clashing with federal agents, councillor Ayah Al-Zubi said.
The amount of federal litigation being watched by the city – or involving it directly – keeps growing, now including a Housing and Urban Development directive that could affect Cambridge’s fair housing and human rights laws. An online portal for federal grants may soon come with “conditions that we have objected to,” city solicitor Megan Bayer said, and councillor Nolan said she was aware that Donald Trump’s government was looking to block financial aid to students unless they signed onto “truly reprehensible conditions.”
Council approval came for updating regulations about how tobacco products are sold, a request from city staff so Cambridge laws can be “updated to conform to widely adopted municipal policies, new state laws and court decisions,” Nolan said. Councillors expressed support for bills now on Beacon Hill that would put restrictions on the use of rodenticides that move up the food chain to hawks, owls, eagles and other wildlife; and increase housing stability for older adults.
Federal cuts to Medicaid and food benefits “will have horrible impacts on our elders and will make it harder to fund home care, which makes no sense,” Zusy said, citing information from a legislative gathering with the organization Somerville-Cambridge Elder Services. “It’s less than $8,000 a year to provide a senior with home care services. If you need to put them in a nursing facility because they can’t get home care, it costs almost $93,000. It’s penny wise and pound foolish.”
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