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With nearly two decades in public service under his belt, Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern is now running for another reelection to the Cambridge City Council, pitching himself as a dedicated public servant who’s played a decisive role in the council’s landmark policies over the last decade.
In an interview, McGovern, the second longest-serving member of the Council, traced his extensive experience in Cambridge city government as evidence he remains qualified to keep his spot.
The councilor has previously spent terms as vice mayor and mayor following that, and is now serving again as vice mayor. And before joining the Council, he spent eight years on the School Committee.
“The issues that I have fought for, such as housing affordability, ending poverty and food insecurity, addressing homelessness and mental illness, these are not problems that you solve in a two-year election cycle, right?” McGovern said.
“The work that I was doing 12 years ago when I joined the Council, is very much that I’m still doing today,” he said.
For McGovern, much has remained constant over his many years in public office. The values McGovern received from his Cambridge upbringing brought him to public life twenty years ago and are still guiding his run for a seventh term.
“I was raised in a family here in Cambridge that taught me that you work to leave your community better than how it was left to you, and that we have a responsibility — particularly those of us who have had certain privileges in this society — to make sure that we are doing everything that we can to make sure everybody has the opportunity to be successful,” McGovern said.
“And I bring those values to the council,” he added.
McGovern, one of eight incumbents, is running on housing affordability, food insecurity and poverty, and providing accessible, high-quality education for everyone as his primary issues.
One of the landmarks of McGovern’s current term, which he had spent years advocating for, was the abolition of single-family zoning across the city.
“The multi-family housing ordinance, which I understand is controversial, is something that I think is extremely important, and I’m proud of the role I played,” McGovern said.
“By allowing multi-family housing to be built across the city, we did away with what was a racist and classist decision back 100 or so years ago,” he added.
McGovern is also proud of his involvement in funding the construction of fully subsidized housing units, a project that will provide reduced-rate housing to residents for decades.
“One of the things I’m most proud of, we have close to 1000 units of 100 percent subsidized housing in some stage of development in the city,” McGovern said.
Outside of housing, McGovern said he has also been a longtime advocate for the expansion of high-quality education in the City, having called for the Cambridge Early Childhood Task Force in 2015.
One of the first policy orders McGovern proposed when he joined the School Committee in 2003 aimed to provide universal preschool for all four-year-olds in Cambridge, a project that at last came to fruition last school year — more than 20 years later.
On his platform this time around, McGovern is proposing an increase to the universal preschool program budget in order to reach children younger than four, which the program is currently limited to.
His other proposals range from requiring new buildings in Cambridge to be more sustainable, to retrofitting older buildings to cut down on emissions and opening new substance abuse beds and overdose prevention centers.
Though the city faces the slowest budget growth it has seen in the last decade and a “federal funding cliff” due to the expiration of Covid-era grant money, McGovern keeps an optimistic outlook.
“We are financially more stable than virtually every other city. So I think we’re going to be able to weather this storm better than most, but it is going to be tighter for Cambridge,” McGovern said.
— 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.
