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Even as Cambridge City Councilors express frustration over funding allocation, City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 defended his financial decisions as Cambridge’s budget growth slows.
This year’s budget process has led to tense discussions in City Hall, as the budget grew by less than half of last year’s growth — limiting the council’s ability to fund new programs.
In a Monday interview with The Crimson, Huang acknowledged that the city’s budget has strained ties between his office and the Council.
“I think there’s always a little bit of this tension, because it is true that I’m working with city departments and staff much more closely,” Huang said.
“I’m trying to figure out how we make all of the trade-offs and deal with all the operational details that make the city run, and not all of that is easy to convey to the council,” he added.
Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern expressed frustration with Huang’s approach to the budget in a council meeting earlier this month.
“I don’t want councilors to be pit against each other,” McGovern said. “I don’t want to take a vote that’s going to make some people angry and some people feel like winners, and some people feel like losers if at the end of the day, the manager is going to come back and say, ‘Well, yeah, I'm still not going to do it.’”
In response to McGovern, Huang stressed on Monday that the goal of this year’s budget process was not to create tension but rather to find the best use of the city’s limited funding.
“It’s not about pitting city councilors against each other, or groups against each other, and yet, at the same time, we’re running a city where there are, ultimately, and this is the new part, a limited amount of dollars,” Huang said.
Huang also addressed councilors’ proposals to find existing city programs to cut, making space for new funding.
“Are there ways that we could find some savings? I think yes, and we’re going to continue to look for those. But, I don’t think we’re sitting on piles of waste in the city,” Huang said.
Huang also acknowledged that cutting funding for any one program would be unlikely to obtain a majority vote.
“It is probably easier for a single councilor to say, ‘This is a program that I wouldn’t mind losing.’ It is harder to find five votes to say that this is okay to cut,” he said.
The budgeting process has long been a point of contention between the Council and the city manager. Though the Council has final approval of the budget, the city manager largely has the power to make the budget and does not necessarily have to make changes.
In 2022, then City Manager Louis A. DePasquale got into an argument with Councilor Jivan G. Sobrinho-Wheeler during budget negotiations after Sobrinho-Wheeler called for a more transparent budget process.
Huang touted his involvement of the councilors in the decision-making process, something he said had not happened before his administration.
“The former government ran differently before, where the city manager would just say, ‘Look like I’m making the decisions. You can vote this budget up or down.’ I feel like the Council has wanted to have more of that engagement, and we’re trying to make it work,” Huang said.
He also emphasized the importance of thinking “incrementally” about the impact of what the city is funding.
“We need to think about it in the context of what is the role of the city? What is the way that we want to make an impact on these issues?,” Huang said. “I hope that we can have that conversation in a more sort of strategic way.”
—Staff writer Shawn A. Boehmer can be reached at shawn.boehmer@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @ShawnBoehmer.
—Staff writer Jack B. Reardon can be reached at jack.reardon@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @JackBReardon.
