Cambridge Politics:

One of Cambridge's nine city councillors, pausing for a moment outside the City Hall elevator, ruminated on Cambridge politics: "You know, its pretty easy to get five votes together to fire a man, but it's hard to find five votes to hire another man." That just about summed up the past five month's action in City Hall.

The man who was fired was City Manager Joseph A. DeGuglilmo '29 dismissed last January by five members of the City Council, led by Edward A. Crane. DeGuglielmo left the manager's office last January in the same way he entered it two years before--in a bitter battle in the Council. In 1966, DeGuglielmo, a former mayor of the City, rounded up five votes on the council to dismiss John J. Curry '19, who, with the close counsel of Crane, had served as manager for 13 years. During the next two years, the council minority led by Crane sniped away at DeGuglielmo's supporters. In last November's election, their efforts were rewarded, two of the City Manager's five votes on the council failed to gain re-election. After that, it was only a matter of time until the axe fell. It fell only ten days after the new council took office. By the end of the month, Public Works Commissioner Ralph J. Dunphy moved into the manager's first floor office in City Hall, to serve until the council found a new permanent manager.

It's even money that Dunphy will stay in that office for a while longer, since the Council appears deadlocked over the manager issue.

Before he would vote for the dismissal of DeGuglielmo, Councillor Thomas H. D. Mahoney, an M.I.T. professor endorsed by the "good government" Cambridge Civic Association, extracted an "agreed memorandum" from the other four anti-DeGuglielmo councillors. They pledged themselves to a 90-day nation-wide search for a "professional" City manager. Besides Mahoney, only one other member of the five--Barbara Ackermann -- enthusiastically favored the search. The other three--Crane, Alfred E. Vellucci, and Thomas W. Danehy--reportedly went along with the memorandum as the price of getting rid of DeGuglielmo.

The Council ran ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the city manager journals asking for applications for the post. They got over 70 replies, and asked 15 of the applicants to come to Cambridge for interviews.

As March faded into April, the Council screened applicants in the plush private rooms of a restaurant near Porter Square. The mid-April deadline for appointment of a new manager came and went. Mahoney, serving as the chairman of the search, assured the public that all was going well. The Council just needed more time to finish screening all the applicants, he said.

Some other councillors laughed up their sleeves. "It's a joke, interviewing these characters from all over--Alaska, Montana, and everywhere," Vellucci said in private. The East Cambridge councillor related with relish the council's interview with an applicant from a western state. "We asked him if he had any experience in arbitration. He answered that the City owned all the bars out there and one day the bartenders went on strike. But this guy fixed things up," Vellucci roared.

It was not, however, the quality of the applicants--which several councillors admitted had been good--but the divisions within the Council that made the search a flop.

The Council is now split three ways over the manager issue. The deepest division--one created by two and a half years of infighting--is between the five councillors who voted to fire DeGuglielmo, and the former City Manager's three supporters on the Council--Daniel J. Hayes Jr., Bernard Goldberg, and Cornelia B. Wheeler. As DeGuglielmo becomes more a memory, this chasm may be bridge, but for the moment it still exists.

The so-called "firing five" are, however, themselves divided. At one pole, Ackermann and Mahoney stand firm for hiring a "professional" City Manager--probably from outside of Cambridge--to run the City. At the other pole, Danehy and Vellucci loudly proclaim their intention to hire someone versed in the rough and tumble of Cambridge government for the job. Crane, with a master politician's instinct for the middle, stays silent, but is thought to strongly prefer a manager with a Cambridge background polished with professional training--someone like his old friend Curry, who was a headmaster of a local school before appointment to the manager's post.

Though the split between pro and anti-DeGuglielmo coalitions has a sizable quotient of personality clashes behind it, the differences between those who would be willing to hire a manager from outside the City, and those who would fight such a move is rooted in the diverse nature of Cambridge. The Italians, Portuguese, and blacks who live in one and two family houses in East Cambridge, Cambridgepot, Riverside and other neighborhoods have little in common with the businessmen and academics who reside along pleasant Brattle Street.

Just next door to Harvard--along Putnam Ave. down to the Charles--is the home territory of Mayor Walter J. Sullivan, member of one of the City's powerful political families. At best the Sullivans have, over the years, maintained an uneasy relationship with the University whose Houses now stand where their families grew up in the early part of the century. Sullivan, who has said little about the firing of DeGuglielmo, has made clear his preference for a native-born City Manager.

Cambridge's unique electoral system, Proportional Representation (PR), assures that the diversity of the City will be reflected in the City council. Under PR, voters rank their choices for Council in order (1, 2, 3, etc.). A quota for election is set; after a candidate has reached the quota, his surplus votes are redistributed among his supporters' second choices. After several days of such shuffling, a new council is finally elected. Few Cambridge residents outside of political circles understand the mechanics of the system; all the politicians know its implication--the way to get elected is to seize and hold a band of "number ones," usually through ethnic and neighborhood background.

One fan of the Council describes the result like this: "The councillors are like nine Indian chiefs from nine separate tribes." The only informal parties are the "goo-goo" CCA, and the "independents" who like to describe themselves as representing "the little people." Even these lines have been blurred in recent years, as they were in the hiring and firing of DeGuglielmo.

As a result of this diversity of background, the Council, which under Cambridge's Plan E. charter is supposed to set policy for the City, usually doesn't even do that. The direction of the City's government is set either by the manager himself, as it was in the DeGuglielmo regime, or by one councillor with the ear of the manager--a role which Crane fulfilled skillfully during the Curry administration. At present, Crane appears to be developing the same sort of close working relationship with Dunphy. An arrangement like this probably necessary if the City is to act at all.

The effects of last January's change in administration are now becoming apparent. The image which DeGuglielmo tried to build for his administration was summed up in the 1966 annual report. "Cambridge is on the move again," he wrote. During the week before election day, the City Manager put up displays in City Hall of City building projects (the new hospital, schools, etc.) Many of the projects had been planned under the Curry administration, but DeGuglielmo claimed them as his own, reasoning that Curry had not moved quickly enough on them.

Since January, the tax rate has been a big topic in the Council chambers. During Curry's last four years in office, it remained stable at about $72 per $1000 assessed valuation, and was once even slightly reduced. By DeGuglielmo's second year in office, it stood at $82.50. During the last election campaign, advertisements of Crane and Danehy supporters in particular hit the rising taxes, and promised a return to the stability of the Curry years. The tax rate became one of the few City-wide issues in Cambridge political annals, and probably contributed to the defeat of the two DeGuglielmo supporters.

During the spring, the new administration pulled an act which reminded many observers of President Johnson's 1964 budget--the one which miraculously stayed beneath $100 billion, despite weeks of White House leaks warning of a higher figure. Dunphy presented the council with a budget which would have raised the tax rate by six or eight dollars, but when the hearings on the budget were over, the rate remained at the same level as last year. Dunphy and the councillors transferred money from capital to current accounts, and trimmed $300,000 from the School Department budget without much difficulty.

"They were dancing in the streets when we brought this tax rate in," Vellucci says. He and other members of the council majority have made sure that the voters will not forget it. During a hearing on a routine renewal of the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee, Crane sharply questioned the group's director about the costs of its work, and noded approvingly when he was assured that overhead was kept below ten per cent of project costs. At another hearing--this one with Justin M. Gray, the city manager's assistant for Community Development Crane wanted to know when a Federal grant would come through for a playground in East Cambridge. "You know, there are still some people in this city who care where the money comes from," he said.

Fiscal responsibility--the theme of Cambridge City government in the next few years, even if the Council can at some time agree on the choice of a new city manager. Few councillors, especially those on the majority five, will want to risk being vulnerable targets for the charges of free-spending which they feel swung the election last time.

Meanwhile, the council stays divided, and Ralph J. Dunphy remains in the City Manager's office. Last week, he asked for an appropriation of $100 for medical expenses of his office. One councillor--a pharmacist by trade--suggested that the money would go to Bufferin. His colleagues laughed, but not too heartily, for they knew the headaches that Cambridge politics can bring.John G. ShortA meeting of the City Council