The dullest political campaign in recent Cambridge history drags to a close this week as voters head to the polls Tuesday to select nine city councilors and six members of the school committee.

Symptomatic of the political climate are the abysmally poor citizen turnouts at candidates' nights in which voters barely outnumber the candidates.

National news, especially the resignation of Elliot Richardson '41 and the firing of Archibald Cox '34, has overshadowed city politics over the last few months. But the lack of a single dramatic and divisive issue on the local level is perhaps the greatest factor in the current political malaise.

Not that the candidates haven't tried to find one.

Three weeks ago the city council spent two nights deliberating the merits of a six per cent pay raise for Cambridge police.

The police officers' union, the Cambridge Police Association, had agreed to accept the six per cent raise that the city offered to all municipal employees retroactive to January 1, 1973. Negotiations on the remainder of the agreement became snarled over the disposition of grievances under the previous contract.

In effect, city manager John H. Corcoran has refused to sign the new contract until the Police Association drops its application to the American Arbitration Association for arbitration of longevity and night differential pay.

The council's liberal faction--Robert P. Moncreiff, Francis H. Duehay '55, Saundra Graham, and Mayor Barbara Ackerman--is backing Corcoran and has voted against appropriating the pay raise until the contract is signed.

The five councilors who call themselves Independents--Walter J. Sullivan, Thomas W. Danehy, Alfred E. Vellucci, Daniel Clinton, and Henry F. Owens III--have all lined up behind the police, voting for immediate enactment of the pay raise ordinance.

Since the measure requires at least six votes to pass, it has been stymied each time it has been introduced. Not so coincidentally, the councilors who voted for the pay raise were the only incumbents to receive the endorsement of the Police Association, the first time in its five year history that the union has endorsed political candidates.

Support for the measure has failed to materialize out in the electorate as understandably few Cambridge taxpayers are enthusiastic about a move that will increase the cost of their city services.

Nevertheless, Vellucci made a valiant effort to associate the pay raise with the need for better police protection, repeatedly calling upon the council to hire 100 new patrolmen.

At one meeting Vellucci berated Police Chief James Regan, charging that patrolmen are transferred out of East Cambridge and other neighborhoods to handle traffic following Harvard football games.

"You're trying to make the people of Cambridge believe that they have ample police protection when they don't," he said.

The council later passed a statute that specifies that there be at least one foot patrolman per 10,000 inhabitants on duty at all times. Regan estimated that the measure will entail the hiring of 30 to 40 additional policemen.