CORRECTION APPENDED

As Jerry Garcia put it, what a long, strange trip it’s been.

Mayor of Cambridge Kenneth E. Reeves ’72 has been an active figure in local politics since his senior year of college, when he participated in a University Hall sit-in against Harvard’s Angolan investments. As a Cambridge city councillor since 1989, and with his third term as America’s first openly gay black mayor coming to a close, Reeves has established himself as a Cambridge icon.

Yet of all his years in Cambridge, a budget spat with a local newspaper has turned 2007 into one of his most fractious.

Reeves has been in financial hot water before, when the FBI investigated allegations of financial wrongdoing during his previous mayoral term. But given the political theater of this year’s scandals—farcical enough to earn the title “Ken’s crazy Chronicle kerfuffle” from The Boston Globe—Reeves could find himself in an unusually tenuous position entering this November’s council election.

BLOWING THE BUDGET?

The controversy surrounding Reeves began on December 18, when City Manager Robert W. Healy asked the council for an additional $19,750—on top of a previously allocated $20,500 budget—to subsidize the mayor’s travels to conferences around the country.

The council meeting that week was dominated by a throng of hotel workers, who had just been notified that their jobs had been terminated. After nearly 90 minutes of public comment—and several photo opportunities with the council—the travel appropriation passed unanimously and without debate.

However, the Cambridge Chronicle highlighted the measure later in the week with a story that accused the mayor of “blowing” through his travel budget and asking for even more money. After the paper filed a Freedom of Information Act request for details of Reeves’ travel costs, Reeves appointed John Clifford, an ex-Marine, union organizer, and political operative for the mayor, as his spokesman—a highly unconventional move given the council’s general openness to the public.

Following his appointment, Clifford orchestrated several efforts to defend the mayor’s reputation. He published an editorial in the Chronicle on January 3, defending Reeves’ actions and saying, “we should be proud of the mayor.” In the following weeks, Reeves’ office sent the Chronicle a spreadsheet of his credit card expenses from the latter half of 2006, which showed that Reeves charged the city with an average of $41.44 for each of his meals out.

The report showed Reeves had only spent $11,000 of his travel budget, not the full allotment as the Chronicle previously reported. Chronicle Editor David Harris says that the error “was because [Reeves] never returned our phone calls, and we relied on the fact that he requested this extra money. We acknowledge... that he hadn’t blown through the budget.”

The Chronicle did not print a correction, however. Instead, Reeves’ office placed a full-page, 2,000-word ad in the paper, saying the travel expenses were a necessary cost of forging political ties with other municipalities. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

The Chronicle still was not satisfied with the information Reeves’ office provided, leading the paper to request his travel receipts from City Hall. Reeves first refused the request, but after the city auditor’s office said it would release records of his expenditures, he said he never kept the receipts in the first place. When the auditor ultimately released his credit card records to the Chronicle in April, the paper reported Reeves had spent over $8,400 in decorating expenses for his office alone.

In an interview in mid-April, Reeves said his credit card expenses all came from city-related business, calling the Chronicle’s reporting on the matter “open character assassination done without research, with no respect for fact at all and not for context.”

Reeves also levied several charges at the Chronicle over its choice of sources.

“There is no one at the Chronicle who knows much about Cambridge at all, so they rely exclusively on a blogger who was a former political candidate,” Reeves says. “A two-time failed political candidate is not where you go to get objective political information about Cambridge politics today.”

Though Reeves could not be reached for clarification, Robert Winters—the editor of the Cambridge Civic Journal, a Web site that tracks local politics, and an Extension School professor—says the comments likely referred to him.

“[Reeves] has simply tried to find a fall guy to pin his troubles on. I deeply resent the accusations toward me, and I deeply resent that my tax dollars are being used by his staff to point figures at me,” says Winters, who lost his bid for a council seat in four 1990s elections. “If anything, Ken Reeves is trying to portray himself as somehow the victim of the campaign of a local newspaper. If he can successfully convey this mistruth to others, it only helps him politically.”

According to Harris, however, Winters was an ancillary figure in the travel expense story.

“Mayor Reeves and John Clifford seem to think that this whole story came from Robert Winters’ Web site,” he says. “It wasn’t that we got some kind of tip from Robert Winters.”

‘CENTER OF CONTROVERSY’

Local political analyst Glenn S. Koocher ’71 recalls that the relationship between Reeves and the Chronicle has rarely been harmonious.

“I think the Cambridge Chronicle has been lying in wait for Reeves for a long time. If there is a media basis for the attack on Reeves, it is the weekly paper of record that has beat up on him constantly and to which he in turn has shown his scorn for some time,” Koocher says.

Still, Koocher and Winters both say it’s unlikely the “travelgate” affair will cost Reeves his council seat.

“He’s always been the center of controversy,” Koocher says. “You need only play to your base, and remember, the base only needs to be 10 percent of the voting block. Reeves may not have good media days, but he has great days for his constituents.”

This base is even more likely to deliver Reeves a council seat if Councillor Anthony D. Galluccio focuses his time and money on the race for the state senate seat to be vacated by Jarrett T. Barrios ’90 later this year. However, Galluccio—who told The Crimson he was “seriously considering” running for Barrios’s seat—would not be obligated to surrender his place on the council if elected to the state senate.

Winters speculated in an earlier interview that Galluccio could likely earn a council victory even while focusing on the senate race. However, doing so might diminish the large margin of victory he normally earns in council elections, freeing up votes for other candidates.

“[With] a candidate like Anthony, it has not been an issue of his being elected; it’s been an issue of his getting elected big, especially since he very much wanted to get the mayor’s slot again at some point, and getting some popular mandate is helpful for that,” Winters said.

If such a surplus of available votes materializes, it could be a windfall for Reeves. Only the election will tell if Reeves can hold his seat, or if the first half of 2007 was just the calm before the storm.

—Paras D. Bhayani contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Nicholas K. Tabor can be reached at ntabor@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION: The June 7 story "Mayor in Media Tiff" incorrectly stated that the Cambridge Chronicle did not print a correction after it learned that it had overstated the amount of travel expenses incurred by Cambridge Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves '72. In fact, the newspaper published a clarification on Jan. 11 stating that Reeves had only spent $11,188 on travel—not the more than $40,000 figure the paper initially reported.