And one councillor criticized the report for allowing the universities to get away with making insufficient payments to the city.

"Harvard and MIT combined own 11 percent of the city's property--that's a lot," says Councillor William H. Walsh. "We're going to be up against the wall with almost a zero-based budget next year. Reality has got to set into the universities."

Both Harvard and MIT are exempt from paying Cambridge taxes because of their status as educational institutions, but they have negotiated in-lieu-of-tax agreements to compensate the city for the revenues it would earn if the properties were not tax-exempt.

Lasting Implications

With the town-gown task force's year-long stint now over, committee members and city officials agree that a permanent forum for communication needs to be established.

"My feeling is if this is something that's just thrown in the trash and never looked at again, then it was a total waste of time," says R. Philip Dowds, committee member and a representative of Cambridge Citizens for Livable Neighborhoods.

The report urges that an advisory committee be established to ensure that the issues discussed in the document remain in the public arena.

Such a committee would meet every three to six months, the report suggests, and would draw on representatives of the city government, citizens' groups, and the colleges and universities.

Several members of the current committee and the proposed one would probably overlap, Dowds says, adding that John Shattuck would likely continue to represent Harvard's interests on a permanent advisory board.

In addition to encouraging continued communications between the city and its universities, the committee would conduct an annual review of the publication in order to keep it continually updated, Pitkin says.

"[The advisory committee] is expressly not intended to act as a replacement or overseer of any of the public or private bodies currently at work in the city," the document states. "Rather, it is a vehicle to insure continued thoughtful public dialogue on these issues, and to foster continued university and community cooperation in the interest of a strong, diverse city for us all."

Pitkin says the council may not fully understand that the proposed purpose of the advisory board would not be to implement the document, but rather to continue brainstorming ideas.

"The council has understood the report in a way that I find somewhat surprising and that was not what we intended," Pitkin says. "It's far more appropriate for existing institutions like the council to address these issues than to set up a new one."

Committee members did clash somewhat during the process of formulating the report over what they saw as the role of the advisory board, Wolf says.

But she says that most of them now agree with Pitkin that the proposed committee should serve mostly to provide recommendations.

"The advisory committee is very important, because there has to be follow-up for [the report] to have any meaning," Wolf says. "This is only the beginning of the process, not the end."

"I think a lot of things are going to grow out of this," Pitkin says. "It's going to be a very significant document."