PR places a premium on "number one" votes and the surest way to get them is by appealing to a small but solid block of voters-often the residents of one particular area of the City. Though the City's elections are non-partisan, attempts are sometimes made to arrange electoral coalitions. The Cambridge Civic Association (CCA), for example, encourages its supporters to give all their votes to endorsed candidates pledging to follow its "good government" politics. Yet each of the CCA councillors-who always number four-can be identified, without too much difficulty, with one or more particular blocs of CCA type voters. The specific backing of each "independent" (non-CCA) councillor can be even more easily identified.
Thus, PR-and the lack of any real political parties in local politics-produces a council with little cohesiveness. Each councillor tends to look after the affairs of his own particular turf. "What about the children of East Cambridge? Don't they have a right to play too?" Councillor Alfred E Vellucci-a vocal foe of the universities-has many times roared when a playground for another section of the City is under discussion.
In the past, informal coalitions-either along CCA-independent lines or split by personalities-have lessened somewhat the centrifugal forces inherent in the council. But during the past four years, fights over the firing of two city managers have broken down most of these coalitions. Now, more than ever, the council is a fragmented group of nine individuals; it is never easy to get five of them to agree on any given issue.
In many respects the council's power is more negative than positive. It can block projects initiated by the City Manager. but it has relatively little authority to begin them on its own. Only the manager can propose appropriations: he also retains the power to appoint most of the important administrators in the City.
The council's negative power stems partly from authority granted it by the City Charter, such as a veto over most appropriations. More important, however, is a fact of Cambridge political life of which any City Manager is aware: the council can fire the manager at any time and, indeed, has done so twice in the past four years. This makes a City Manager receptive to policy guidance from the council on crucial issues: at least informally, he wants to make sure he has five council votes backing him before he proceeds on an important question.
In sum, the structure of politics which evolved under Cambridge's PR-Council-Manager system was one admirably suited to its chief problems of five, ten or twenty years ago, which were to maintain peace among the sometimes antagonistic groups making up the City to give each its fair share of services, and to make sure that taxes did not increase over-much.
Though many of these tasks still remain important in City politics, the current period of change is making new demands on the political system. The housing convention, for example, has in essence been asking the council to take some decisive action against the forces which appear to be transforming-Cambridge into a new, predominantly middle-class city. Such demands for more active political leadership are something new in Cambridge.
The council has been grappling with this question for some time now, but the outcome is not yet clear. The remedies needed to case the changes now threatening the old Cambridge are not obvious: they may not even exist. Finding out if they do exist, and mustering the unity needed to implement them remains the most difficult job the City's political system has faced in memory.