Council Approves Rent Board Plan

The Cambridge City Council last night officially accepted a set of comprehensive recommendations to improve the efficiency of the city's rent control board.

The council unanimously passed an order by Francis H. Duehay '55 accepting the report and asking City Manager Robert W. Healy for periodic updates on its implementation. None of the four conservative independent councilors was present for the vote.

Submitted a month ago by a special commission appointed by Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci, the proposal calls for a substantial reorganization of the controversial agency, including the hiring of 10 new, full-time staff and dividing the staff between case workers and clerical personnel.

The rent board, which administers the city's comprehensive ordinances regulating rents and evictions, has drawn heavy criticism in its 10-year existence from landlords, tenants, and Cambridge elected officials for inefficiency. According to the commission's report, the board currently has a backlog of more than 300 cases, and half the cases take more than four months to process.

Healy said last night he is "going forward" with the commission's recommendations. He added that a new executive director was appointed last week (see story below) and he has begun advertising for two other types of positions created in the new organizational structure.

Healy said he is unsure how the rent board will attack the existing backlog. "The report is a little vague on that," he explained, adding that several hearing examiners might be assigned to only handle old cases. "But we don't want to have new cases defeating that effort."

In a public hearing last night, council members questioned Healy and three members of the commission on specific parts of the report. The only objection to the recommendations by a private citizen came from Daniel C. Crane '72, chairman of the real estate committee of the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce.

Crane, a former city councilor, stated that as an additional recommendation, the general rent adjustments the rent board makes should be scaled to federal government figures released by either the Bureau of Labor Statistics or Department of Housing and Urban Development.

"Those types of statistically adjusted figures are used daily for commercial and business transaction," he explained, adding that the board spends "too much time for something that should be able to be reduced to some kind of mechanical computation."

Councilor David A. Wylie objected to Crane's proposal, stating that landlords are not entitled to collect benefits for inflation in many of the items computed in those statistics.

In his question to Healy and the commission members, Councilor David E. Sullivan asked specifically about the budget of the rent board after the recommendations were implemented, and about the duties of the two positions created in the report public information officer and rent adjustments specialists.

Sullivan noted that the proposed budget in the recommendations was $32,910 over the current budget allocation. But Healy said he could finance the difference by eliminating the position of ombudsperson--whose functions almost coincide with those of the public information officer. The council approved the hiring of an ombudsperson earlier this year, but the post was never filled.

Although willing to eliminate the old position. Sullivan said he was worried that two duties of the ombudsperson--preparing an information booklet for the agency and indexing the rent board's decisions--were contracted to outside groups.

"Both the information book and the indexing are things that have to be kept up to date," explained Sullivan.

Healy agreed that both were "functions that need to be assigned to someone."

Sullivan added he was concerned about "burnout" in the staff.

"I think in the case of the rent adjustor the job would become very tedious and very high pressured in the case of the public information officer."