During the past twenty years, however, nearly all councillors at one time or another have interfered with the City manager's business, Vice Mayor Henry F. Owens III said last week. "There is a very fine line between the Council's policy-making decisions and the City manager's business."
Owens said, "Plan E's primary advantage is the strong independent City manager when the manager is good. If the Manager is not good, not professional, you have the Council getting involved all the time." He added that a Charter Commission to investigate other options open to the City's government would be "a very good idea, especially at this time."
Cambridge is overwhelmingly Democratic although technically City politics are non-partisan. In reality, Cambridge politics is fiercely competitive even though most of the City councillors are in agreement on several basic issues. It is hard, for example, to name a councillor who does not view Harvard University as one of the primary sources of the City's housing, unemployment, and tax-base problems.
There is only one established local political group, the Cambridge Civic Association (CCA), which originally represented the wealthy neighborhoods in west Cambridge, mainly along fashionable Brattle Street.
TODAY IT IS a shaky liberal coalition mainly of moderate professionals and working poor devoted to "good government." There are no longer any clear definitions of CCA policy or membership. The CCA will hold a convention in late September to decide which candidates they will endorse in the fall elections.
Three City councillors identify themselves as "Independent" even though they are strong Democrats. They do not affiliate themselves with any other candidate.
Councillor Saundra Graham ran on the CCA platform in her first campaign two years ago. She is now helping establish the Grass Roots Organization (GRO), which seems to be to the CCA's left.
The GRO initial platform focuses on ten areas of municipal activity including city-wide down-zoning, takeover of local privately-owned power and gas companies, opening a city-owned public bank, prohibition of evictions and neighborhood control of police and public housing.
Its goal, according to the draft, is to make Cambridge a city where everyone "enjoys the highest standard of living that human knowledge and technology can provide." GRO meets weekly in private homes, but Graham says the group will soon have a central office. "GRO is very unstructured at this point and there is still a lot of argument within the group," Graham said last month.
In Cambridge politics established groups find it as easy to have fallings-out as do Independents. Although the voters elected a CCA majority to the City Council in 1971 the slate fell apart shortly after it took office in January 1972.
The group reneged on its campaign pledge to fire City Manager John Corcoran, who one CCA councillor had described as a "political hack." The CCA councillors were divided over their choice for a new City manager for nine months. They could not come to a compromise.
Vice-Mayor Henry Owens preferred another candidate and refused to bend. All CCA had personally pledged to "consult together earnestly and in good faith" and "to vote together" on the new City manager, but Corcoran is still in City Hall.
The present City Council is a fascinating crew which includes a welfare mother, a Harvard dean, a black millionaire's son, a mailman-turned-engineer, and a Rhodes scholar from Yale.
The mayor of Cambridge is CCA-endorsed Barbara Ackerman, a Smith alumna and housewife with ten years of elective municipal posts behind her. She chaired the City's Committee on Transportation which successfully battled the State Department of Public Works over several unsightly gargantuan expressways that would have exacerbated the city's housing crisis.
Despite her often lonely liberal stance, many left-wingers dislike what they describe as her willingness to compromise and her lack of militancy and long-range vision. Her term as mayor ends December 31.
Vice-Mayor Owens is young, fairly liberal and enjoys middle-class black and professional white support. He is the son of a trucking magnate and served four years as assistant district attorney of the Middlesex County Court. He will run for re-election this fall stressing three issues: Kendall Square development and blue-collar jobs, the University's "irrelevant" tax exempt status and, most importantly, getting a new City's manager.