Join Cambridge Alliance and Improve City

To the Editors of The Crimson:

On behalf of the board of directors of the Cambridge Alliance, and as president of Cambridge's new private non-profit educational civic organization, I would like to take this opportunity to extend a personal invitation to all of Cambridge to join with us to improve and sustain the quality of life in Cambridge.

The Cambridge Alliance is a socially, ethnically and economically diverse group of residents who have formed this private non-profit educational organization to serve as a fiscal watchdog over local government and to hold our elected officials accountable. We dedicate ourselves to educate the local electorate to the pressing issues facing our city and to attempt to broaden participation in the electoral process by reaching out to those who don't traditionally participate in the election process. To this end, we will sponsor voter registration drives to increase participation in and understanding of the political process.

The Alliance will, from time to time, sponsor forums to examine public policy issues, encourage public debate over policy direction and present the facts of particularly confusing issues which warrant exploration and full disclosure. We will analyze the City's budget priorities, appropriations and the actual expenditures in an attempt to ensure effective and efficient local government.

Many people have asked us, "Why another Civic Association?" The answer is simple--Cambridge needs a real civic organization. The longstanding and politically powerful Cambridge Civic Association (CCA) is actually a political party. The members of its board of directors act as power brokers and policy makers for the city. It is a clear conflict of interest for the CCA to serve as a "watchdog" over elected officials, since they have a contractual arrangement with their endorsed candidates. Cambridge needs a civic organization that is unencumbered by these incestuous conflicts to impartially assess the actions of local government and its elected and contracted officials.

Cambridge's proportional representation ballot process is a complex and confusing system which we believe contributes greatly to the underlying divisiveness and gridlock in Cambridge's elected government.

Proportional representation requires successful candidates to get only one tenth of the number one votes cast (approximately 2,300 votes in 1991, in a city with a population of about 93,000) to be elected to the city council. This rather small fraction of the total vote allows, and actually encourages, candidates to cultivate issues and policies that generate the limited but very staunch supporters who can deliver their number one vote for reelection. These staunch supporters come to expect absolute partisan loyalty from candidates, and this leaves no room for compromise on many policy issues. Minority policy positions are ignored to cement the constituencies needed for reelection, oftentimes at the considerable expense of fairness and equity. Extreme positions are encouraged under the proportional representation system. A moderate candidate, seeking to appeal to a broad plurality of constituents interested in compromise, is likely to receive too many middle of the pack number five votes, and would probably not be elected.

Cambridge needs to move beyond this divisiveness to solve perpetual conflicts in the city, so we can get about the business of solving real problems for real people--job and career opportunities for Cambridge residents, encouraging mixed income housing and home ownership opportunities for residents, improving the business climate to retain our much-coveted commercial tax base and thereby avoid the considerable shift in tax burden towards homeowners and tenants, improving our school's curriculum to equip our children for standardized test performances and the future, advancing a sound fiscal municipal plah that allows and encourages reasonable limited development and renewal in appropriate areas with appropriate public review, and creating a more efficient local government to maximize the resources available for the social, educational, health and human services for all our residents.

The Cambridge Alliance calls on all incumbents and candidates for City Council and School Committee to pledge to work toward meaningful compromise on difficult public policy issues. No longer is it acceptable to pit segments of our community against one another for political perpetuity.

Over the coming months, the Alliance will advance public policy issues for contemplation, conversation and debate. We encourage all to take part in the discussions. Thank you for your commitment to Cambridge. Bill Zamparelli