Robert Winters - Cambridge City Council Candidate 2023

I’m not here to promise you the world or to slay any dragons. I simply want to be your representative. Robert - 2023

I have been actively involved in civic affairs, voter education, and advocacy for over three decades and I would like the opportunity to have a vote in matters of consequence. This is a time when many residents have come to feel that most of the city councillors are too busy pursuing their own private agendas to actually take the time to listen to people. A heartfelt petition sent to the City Council signed by nearly a thousand residents was simply “Placed on File” without discussion or referral to an appropriate subcommittee. Apparently, the only available “Means of Redress” is the municipal election - and that’s not really a good mechanism for matters that come up during a City Council term.

I first became involved in civic affairs when I was appointed by Mayor Al Vellucci to a “Water & Sewer Advisory Committee” in the 1980s. I can’t say that we accomplished much of anything, but I learned a lot about the city’s infrastructure and I have been an “aquavangelist” ever since. I also met a lot of people who remain friends to this day. That’s one of the rarely mentioned benefits of serving on City boards - building relationships with other civic-minded people. This is something most of the purely political people will likely never understand or appreciate.

In the late 1980s I joined with a small group of residents to organize Cambridge’s all-volunteer drop-off recycling program that eventually became the curbside recycling program that we have today. At its peak we had almost 500 volunteers and we successfully lobbied to make recycling a permanant part of the Public Works Department. This was brutally hard work, but it led to lifelong friendships among the volunteers - especially the core group who did most of the organizing and handled all the logistics. My orange and brown VW Bus served as the supply vehicle and the place where volunteers could grab some food and coffee during our long work days at the Sherman Street site.

I was the guy on the other end of the Recycling Hotline for five years after the curbside recycling program was successfully established and handled lots of calls every day. We used an answering machine in those days that was located in the radio tower at DPW. I also was appointed to the Recycling Advisory Committee and served for the next 22 years.

In the early 1990s I also took on my next project – promoting backyard composting and distributing compost bins. In order to do this I created the nonprofit Cambridge Recycling, Inc. for the primary purpose of purchasing compost bins from the manufacturers and selling them at cost to residents. During those years my basement often looked like a warehouse, but we got the job done. My home phone number was at the desk of DPW and on the recycling information distributed by the City, and I received countless calls from people wanting to know about composting or compost bins. I enjoyed being “Compost Man” and made a lot of friends along the way. We distributed ~2000 bins before turning the job over to the good folks in the Recycling Division at DPW. I still occasionally get calls about composting and composters.

My next major involvement in the 1990s was the promotion of proportional representation (PR) and ranked-choice-voting. Cambridge had been using PR since 1941 but we were the only place in the USA still using it - even though some form of PR is used in most democracies around the world. We understood that no other municipality would ever adopt our system when they discovered that “The Count” took nearly a week to complete, so we got the bright idea to advocate for the computerization of the Cambridge elections. David Goode and I convinced Sheila Russell to submit a City Council order to explore the idea, and this led to the creation of the Technical Working Committee for Computerization of the Cambridge Elections (TWCC) on which I served and which led to the first computer count in 1997. I have served in an advisory capacity to the Election Commission ever since.

I have to admit that during the 1990s I was also a City Council candidate. In fact, in 1993 I got the #1 endorsement from the Cambridge Chronicle and the Cambridge Tab. That was a good education for me about the political side of Cambridge (as opposed to the civic side). I am actually using the buttons, bumper stickers, and yard signs this year that we ordered 30 years ago. How about that for Reduce, Reuse and Recycle!

In September 1997 I got the bright idea early one morning after a sleepless night to create the newsletter “Central Square News” which I soon renamed the “Cambridge Civic Journal”. That started out as a printed newsletter that was also distributed via email. It later became an online publication (curiously located at rwinters.com because that was the domain I claimed in my later days as a candidate). This year I re-claimed the subdomain http://vote.rwinters.com as my candidate site. It’s sobering to think that I have now been maintaining the Cambridge Civic Journal for more than a quarter-century.

By the way, someone recent raised the issue of whether someone who maintains a website coving Cambridge could also be a candidate. For that, I simply note that Edward J. Sennott was the editor/reporter for The Cambridge Reporter and was later elected as an at-large city councillor for Cambridge. He died unexpectedly on the eve of the 1933 municipal election. It is a remarkable coincidence that at that time his address was 366 Broadway – the triple-decker I have owned since 1985 and where I have lived since February 1978. I don’t yet know for sure, but Ned may even have lived in my apartment. Sennott Park in The Port is named for Ned Sennott.

I have taken on countless tasks with the Cambridge Civic Journal over the years - all in the quest for education about civic (and occasionally political) affairs in and around Cambridge. I have a particular penchant for all things historical in Cambridge, and that included compiling a record of all of the candidates and all of the elections since 1941 including all the details of each of the PR Counts which I update every two years. This is now THE place where everyone goes to access that information. Even though Cambridge operates under the Plan E Charter, there didn’t used to be anywhere on the City’s website that actually spelled out the Plan E Charter or the law governing our PR elections, so I created web pages and documentation for these. [My documents were later downloaded and made available on the City’s website - with my blessing.]

One thing that always disturbed me was how there was no level playing field for candidates in our municipal elections. That’s why I created the Cambridge Candidate Pages - to create a uniform interface and gallery where voters could find out about all the candidates - in their own words and with links to their own candidate sites. I never expressed opinions or preferences on the Candidate Pages. In recent Cambridge elections, they have received as high as 21,656 unique visitors and 150,374 individual pages viewed in the days leading up to the municipal election. Strange as this may seem, I am still maintaining these pages for all candidates - even though I am now a candidate myself. Worry not – it rarely takes me more than a few minutes to upload the information and images for any candidate, though I sometimes wish I had some help. Nevertheless, I see this as my duty and responsibility.

Starting in 2013 I have been hosting Cambridge InsideOut on Cambridge Community Television (CCTV). We have now broadcast almost 600 half-hour programs. The name is borrowed from the original Cambridge Inside Out show created and hosted by Glenn Koocher with regular panelists Barbara Ackermann, Saundra Graham, Tom Rafferty, and Marty Foster.

I also served on the City’s Green Ribbon Open Space Committee as well as the Library 21 Committee. In addition to generating good ideas, these endeavors also led to some great friendships. I can never recommend enough the many benefits of serving on City boards and commissions. It is perhaps unfortunate that they have been subject to political influences more recently – and objectivity, creativity, and responsiveness to city residents may be a casualty of this trend. [My current wish is that they take most of these meetings out of Zoom and reserve that option only for remote access for those unable to attend in person.]

I have served on the Central Square Advisory Committee since 2001 and have been its most active participating member. I hope the only reason that may end will be my election as a city councillor.

I also served on the Envision Cambridge Advisory Committee as well as its Housing Working Group. This was a “learning experience” in how City staff has come to dominate and in many ways direct the outcomes of what are supposed to be collaborative efforts between residents and other essential parties.

I also wanted very much to serve on the current Charter Review Committee – since I felt I was perhaps the most qualified person in the city for that role, but that’s an intriguing story perhaps best told elsewhere – and a good indicator of how the current City Council now often acts privately in ways that they’ll never acknowledge publicly. Nonetheless, John Pitkin, Gregorio Leon, and I researched and produced (with a few voice-overs by Jim Braude) the half-hour video “The Cambridge City Charter: From Town Meeting to Plan E” in order to provide some historical context on how we eventually came to adopt our current Charter. We are planning additional episodes – though the municipal election is definitely competing for our time.

By the way, I also have a Ph.D. in Mathematics and teach Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Ordinary Differential Equations courses at the Harvard Extension School and Harvard Summer School. I have previously held various faculty positions at Boston University, Wellesley College, Harvard University, Brandeis University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I also have a vast collection of underground comics and the complete run of the National Lampoon. I also created the National Lampoon Covers page. [This may at least partially explain my iconoclastic sense of humor.] I am also the webmaster, Board member, principal walk leader, and publisher of the Towpath Topics newsletter for the Middlesex Canal Association.

As I mentioned above, I am neither a dragon-slayer nor someone who would ever feel comfortable making big promises that only a majority of city councillors and the cooperation of City staff could ever possibly deliver, but I can list a number of statements, principles, priorities, and ideas that may either distinguish me from other candidates or make me sound just like the other candidates. Here’s a list (more to come as the spirit moves me):

I have been known to express some points of view on our Cambridge InsideOut show. Here are the two most recent programs (Sept 5, 2023):

New Video Series Opens With Focus on Cambridge’s Charter Leading to Plan E

The Cambridge City Charter: From Town Meeting to Plan E premiered on Monday, May 15 at 5:30pm on CCTV Channel 9 and is now viewable on YouTube.

Created by a multi-generational team of writer-narrators John Pitkin and Robert Winters, both long-time Cambridge residents, and director Gregorio Leon, a 2016 graduate of CRLS and Emerson College, the video is introduced by WGBH’s Jim Braude. The Cambridge’s City Charter: From Town Meeting to Plan E combines historical documents, images, maps, and statistics to present a provocative half-hour overview of Cambridge’s first 94 years as a city and the origins of the current Plan E charter.

The episode examines our shared history through the lens of the City Charter and local elections. It shows how the Town Meeting style of government became impracticable and led to the consolidation of Old Cambridge, the neighborhood around Harvard College, with the villages of Cambridgeport and East Cambridge to create the city of Cambridge, chartered by the Commonwealth in 1846. The half-hour video presents a provocative and visually engaging review of the expansion of Cambridge as bridges linked Old Cambridge to Boston in the 18th and early 19th century, as migration drove population growth, suffrage expanded, and participation in local elections increased.

The second episode of Cambridge Civic View, now in production, will look at the 83-year history of the current Plan E charter. Since 1940, Plan E has defined our local government, given us the existing system of nine City Councillors with a City Manager as our chief executive, and established the ranked-choice proportional representation voting system used to elect our Councillors and School Committee.

Together, the first two episodes in the series will provide background and perspective on the issues facing Cambridge’s Charter Review Committee as it proposes changes to the Charter and for Cambridge citizens when they vote on whether to adopt proposed changes.

In November, Cambridge will elect a new City Council of nine at-large Councillors and a School Committee of six. Cambridge Civic View strives to engage and inform all residents, whatever their policy priorities and political values, on civic issues and how our municipal government and local democracy are working.

Cambridge’s City Charter: From Town Meeting to Plan E will be also be shown on CCTV Channel 9 (and on the web at https://www.cctvcambridge.org/channel-9/) at the following times: 4:30pm on Wed. May 17, 6:30pm on Fri. May 19, and 12:00pm on Sun. May 21 and is available for streaming from YouTube and for classroom use.

Comments?

More to come, but in the meantime here are some pictures - some embarassing, some not:

I literally grew up under an oak tree. The tree predates the house and it’s still there (and bigger) - over a century later:
underoaktree

My first foray into candidacy - Flushing High School, 1973 (and I plan to go to the 50th Reunion this year)
PFP

Then I was something of a “hippie”
RW-floor

Beginning in 1989, I helped get Cambridge’s recycling program started. In 1992 I formed Cambridge Recycling, Inc. which for many years purchased backyard composters and provided them at cost (and even set them up) to many Cambridge households. My phone number was on the reference sheet at Cambridge DPW for many years.
Recycling 1989

In 1997, I started publishing the Cambridge Civic Journal - originally as a print and email newsletter.
CCJ1

As part of that effort, I created the Cambridge Candidate Pages in 2003 as a means of leveling the playing field for all candidates, and that tradition continues.

Starting in 2013 we started doing the TV show Cambridge InsideOut (with the name borrowed with the permission of Glenn Koocher who did the original
Cambridge Inside Out show for many years along with panelists Barbara Ackermann, Saundra Graham, Tom Rafferty, and Marty Foster.

I was a Preceptor of Mathematics in the Harvard University Mathematics Department from 1994 through 2001, and I continue to teach Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Ordinary Differential Equations courses at the Harvard Extension School and Harvard Summer School. I intend to continue teaching regardless of the outcome in the municipal election because nobody should give up their regular job in order to serve in elective office.

A Different Kind of Candidate

Since you asked … and even if you didn’t … here are my top priorities and concerns:

New Video Series Opens With Focus on Cambridge’s Charter Leading to Plan E