Cambridge Civic Journal Forum

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 The Cambridge’s City Charter: From Town Meeting to Plan E combines historical documents, images, maps, and statistics to present a provocative half-hour overview of Cambridge’s first 94 years as a city and the origins of the current Plan E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.