Cambridge City Council Communication Censored by City Clerk’s Office?
1. The Situation.
2. Follow on communication.
3. The History.
1. The Situation.
My last blog post presented a distressing report which was the blog version of a letter which SHOULD HAVE BEEN received by the Cambridge City Council on Monday. It is posted at: https://charlesriverwhitegeeseblog.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-terrible-dcr-falsely-claims.html.
The letter was damning. Unfortunately, damning situations are altogether too normal with regard to the Charles River in the habitat of the Charles River White Geese.
The Cambridge City Council has recently changed its policies on timing of delivery to the Cambridge City Clerk of communications to be received at its Monday meeting. The deadline used to be 3 pm the preceding Thursday. The change made the deadline 12 pm the preceding Thursday. The letter was received AND STAMPED AS RECEIVED at 11:41 am the preceding Thursday. Here is a copy of the acknowledgment.
At about 9 pm on December 5, 2022, I checked the city council agenda for the meeting which was then ongoing or had been completed. I checked the list of communications carefully and repeatedly.
My communication did not appear.
At the upper right hand corner is the City Clerk Office’s date stamp, December 1, 2022, 11:41 am.
The list of communications is all that most people are aware of in the agendas.
The communications presented to the City Council are, of necessity in different format than appear in the various posting on line. I have a PDF copy of the City Council submission. PDF copies are very much not compatible with efficient on line practices, but I would be pleased to provide the PDF of the communication which did not reach the City Council. Please email me at boblat@yahoo.com. Make your request clear in the subject line. Junk mail is a nightmare, and communications from new names stand a very good chance of being trashed.
2. Follow on communication.
December 6, 2022, I delivered a city council communication to the City Clerk’s office. As has been my custom, I co-addressed the communication to the City Manager and the City Clerk. This communication acknowledged “cc”’s to the City Clerk and City Solicitor.
The communication read:
* * * *
RE: Yet another properly filed document CENSORED from the City Council Agenda.
Enclosed is the first page of a 20 page document (including attachments) filed with, stamped by and accepted by the City Clerk at 11:49 am on December 1, 2022, clearly ahead of the 12:00 pm deadline to get in the City Council agenda for December 5, 2022
It is not there. The rules modifications are very clear. This fits a REPEATED FAILURE of the City Clerk’s Office to fulfill its duty to process our communications in a clear manner, including making the full public notice required thereof.
In the past, our communications have repeatedly been CENSORED by hiding them in all sort of bizarre locations. Nightmares have delayed communications as much as a month at particular time.
This repeated censorship fits the established practice of HIDING actions in this part of the Charles River from the public and the public record. As PARTIALLY objected to in this CENSORED letter.
Outrageous.
We object!!!!
* * * *
The title used the word “CENSORED.” There is no intention to state whether censorship was deliberate or accidental. The reality is that it was censored.
3. The History.
The censored letter included two attachments. Both are included in the blog post.
Attachment 1 is a PARTIAL résumé of my activities in the most politically controversial part of the City of Cambridge. Here is that attachment.
Since 1974, I have been active in Cambridge politics with emphasis on planning issues, property use and transportation.
My first zoning activity was in 1978. The résumé has two pages. The first page is a table which functions as an explanation of the second page, which is a map of the Harvard Square - Central Square portion of Cambridge including residential neighborhoods above and below Massachusetts Avenue, which street connects the two squares.
The upper left corner of the map has inserted several blocks north of Harvard Square directly north of Harvard Law School and including residence halls. That area is also abuts Leslie University. That area was my first experience in zoning. I worked together with residents to protect a small scale neighborhood (by Cambridge standards) of housing threatened by expansion both by Leslie and Harvard. It was a major victory.
In the years since then, I helped out many neighborhood groups. A key factor in our activities AT ALL TIMES has been to keep the groups separate from “neighborhood associations” recognized by the City of Cambridge in the areas. This separation is needed from fear of destructive membership, to put it mildly.
The people I advised have had strong records of achieving their goals. People dealing with recognized neighborhood associations too often have achieved the opposite of their goals.
In my activities, I have kept an eye on the composition of the Cambridge City Council. My activities always allowed for the proclivities of members on issues of interest to me. I advised people to avoid “bad” city councils and to approach “good” city councils.
City Councils have varied from election to election. The thing that has not varied has been the office of the City Clerk. The City Clerk’s office simply and professionally did their job. UNTIL AFTER THE RETIREMENT OF DONNA LOPEZ.
Since then, THINGS HAVE HAPPENED WHICH SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED. It is impossible to say where the problem is. It could be in an employee or employees in the office. It could be in the City Clerk position. It could be in the failure of the City Clerk position to supervise employees. Donna was the last of a series of internal promotions. Thus Donna knew how the office had been run. Donna’s first successor was external and thus was not familiar with practices. The name of the latest City Clerk is not familiar to me. I do not know if she is external or an internal promotion.
The reality, however, is that communications NEVER DISAPPEARED OR HAD BIZARRE HANDLINGS before the retirement of Donna Lopez. Communications were automatically presented to the City Council at its next meeting as long as deadlines were met. A communication which missed the deadline would be presented at the following meeting.
Since Donna’s retirement, there have been difficulties getting communications to the City Council. Mishandlings have suddenly appeared which NEVER occurred before Donna’s retirement. I had a communication which took a month to get to the City Council and the City Council’s PUBLIC list of communications.
People might not know the exact details of the communications in the list, but they knew there was something there, and could find the communication should they go to the effort.
The communication which did not make the list of communications is damning. And SOMEHOW it did not make the list of communications
