Councillors Argue at Session

A conflict erupted between freshman Cambridge City Councillor Craig A. Kelley and the rest of the council during yesterday’s meeting, after a discussion of pothole repair gave way to a critique of Kelley’s administrative approach.

Councillors assailed Kelley for his tendency to request longer, more quantitative reports from City Manager Robert W. Healy than do the rest of his peers.

The council spends a portion of each weekly meeting discussing reports from the city manager, who is responsible for implementing policy initiatives that the council promulgates.

Last night’s tussle began during discussion of a report from Healy that investigated the city’s liability from safety hazards, such as potholes that had been reported but not repaired.

During discussion of the report, Kelley asked Healy for more specific details about the city’s liability. Healy responded that his office could not account for every situation and thus could not answer the councillor’s question.

However, Kelley continued to press Healy, saying the council would have possessed more useful information had Healy provided a “three-page resolution instead of a three-paragraph one.”

“I’m not in favor of reports for the sake of reports,” Healy responded.

Several other councillors, including Henrietta Davis and Brian Murphy, voiced their agreement with the manager and expressed their frustration at the number of reports Kelley requests from the manager’s office at each meeting.

“I do not put every question I have in the form of a policy order,” said Councillor Marjorie Decker.

Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves ’72 offered a longer criticism of Kelley’s behavior.

“It is my view that in one’s first term in the council, you can err on the side of needing more information because you want to fully understand a thing,” Reeves said. “[But] at some point, you want to put in the human factor and say, do you want to torture the manager enough?”

“A lot of people feel that if you’ve filed a lot of orders, you’ve somehow done a better job than someone else, which is absolutely not true, and in fact the opposite may be true,” Reeves added.

Kelley again drew fire after requesting more information on the difference between speed bumps and speed humps.

“You could find this out verbally; why have someone sit down for two to three days to write a report that may not meet your needs? Why not have a verbal exchange?” Davis asked.

In an interview, Decker said she thought “people are just frustrated trying to understand Councillor Kelley. I don’t think there’s ever been such an 8-1 record [in which Kelley was lone dissenter] in the history of the city council.”

But Kelley said he has no qualms about pressing Healy for information.

“I am an eight-to-one person because I have very different ideas about what I want out of the council than my peers,” Kelley said.

Monday’s meeting also commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Cambridge Peace Commission, a local group of peace advocates.

Eight members spoke on the Commission’s behalf, including seventy-nine year-old former schoolteacher Francis J.S. Pierce, who described herself as “retired, but not tired.”

Pierce expressed her support for the Commission, saying that “the decisions that we make today will not only affect our young people...but will affect our generation yet unborn.”

“When I hear the word ‘peace,’ I get excited,” Pierce said.

—Staff writer William M. Goldsmith can be reached at wgoldsm@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff Writer Nicholas K. Tabor can be reached at ntabor@fas.harvard.edu.