On the Agenda

Pitkin says he would have three main focuses if he were elected to the City Council next month: following through on citywide rezoning, developing a closer working relationship between city government and neighborhood groups and putting town-gown relations on a better footing.

Pitkin said he sees protecting changing neighborhoods as his most important goal.

“It’s critically important for the government to be working more closely with residents who are advocating for their neighborhoods,” Pitkin says.

And as the home of two of the country’s most well-known universities, a major concern for many Cambridge residents is managing the growth of both Harvard and MIT.

Pitkin says that while many disputes between residents and universities are caused by a fear of expansion encroaching on their residential neighborhoods, respect is often a main issue.

“It’s about development, but it’s also about more than that,” Pitkin says. “It has to do with the universities’ obligations to their neighbors.”

Pitkin says as a councillor he would push for a more “systematic and sustained effort” to better work with Cambridge’s universities.

For the last 10 years, he has served as the co-chair of the University’s Joint Committee on Neighborhood/Harvard Consultation, which holds monthly meetings with Harvard community relations officials.

“There has to be more of a continued ongoing development of priorities and expectations,” Pitkin says. “I don’t think this can be done on an issue by issue basis.”

He hopes to use a council seat to make Harvard take more of a “planning approach instead of a project approach” to future development and community initatives.

“These questions are too important for the city and for the University to do on what I’m afraid is a somewhat ad hoc basis,” Pitkin says.

Harvard’s Director of Community Relations for Cambridge Travis McCready says that while he and Pitkin are often on “opposite sides of the fence” regarding University development, he says Pitkin is for the most part reasonable in his dealings with Harvard.

“He understands by experience the complexities of not only the University, but also the city of Cambridge,” McCready says.

Pitkin hopes to bring his work with the University, the city and its neighborhoods to a position on the council.