Denise Simmons
2019 Candidate for Cambridge City Council

Home address:
188 Harvard Street #4B
Cambridge, MA 02139

Contact information:
Tel: 617-491-7435
website: www.denisesimmons.com
e-mail: councilorsimmons1@gmail.com 
Facebook: facebook.com/SimmonsDenise/
Twitter: @E_DeniseSimmons

Send contributions to:
Committee to Elect Denise Simmons
P.O. Box 390602
Cambridge, MA 02139

2019 Statement:

Background and Experience in Public Service
I am currently serving my 9th term on the City Council, I’ve served two terms as Mayor, and I continue working hard to be a thoughtful, pragmatic, collaborative public servant. Throughout my time on the Council, I’ve sought to ensure that every voice has the opportunity to be heard in the discussions and debates that shape our community. I am humbly asking for your #1 vote on November 5 to continue my service on the City Council.

I am a proud wife, a mother, a grandmother, a small business owner, and public service is something that my family instilled in me starting at a young age. I grew up in Cambridge, I’ve lived my entire adult life here, and I care very much about what kind of city we’ll be leaving to our grandchildren, and to our grandchildren's children. That sensibility has been at the heart of all my public service dating back to my time as Executive Director of the Civic Unity Committee in the 1980s. Throughout my years on the School Committee in the 1990s, and my time on the City Council since 2002, it has been an honor and privilege to serve the community that I love.

Cambridge has been undergoing significant changes, and facing great challenges, over the past two decades. We are a community that is imbued with a deep, rich history, yet we are also evolving toward a future in which our biotech sector is drawing the greatest minds from the world over. Our challenge continues to be determining how to strike the appropriate balance in preserving our rich history – and holding on to the families that have been so essential to our character for generations – while acknowledging that all healthy cities grow, change, and evolve. I hope to continue tackling these challenges head on in the coming term, with my colleagues on the Council and with people throughout the community. Together, we have already accomplished many great things – and the work is far from over.

Housing
The City Council must continue looking at policies that promote creating more affordable units, and through my work as Co-Chair of the Housing Committee this term, we’ve built upon our success in recent years in tripling the linkage fees that commercial developers must pay toward affordable housing with an effective doubling of the Inclusionary rate – which now requires developers of apartment buildings to set aside 20 percent of their units as permanently affordable. These two actions are expected to bring in millions of new dollars, create or preserve hundreds of affordable units, and this will mean a larger number of Cambridge residents will be able to remain a part of this community. Yet we continue facing the affordable housing challenges afflicting the entire region, and the City must seek a multitude of different approaches to ease our housing crunch. This term, I have sought to implement elements of the Comprehensive Housing Plan that I first released to the City Council in September 2017 – chief among these are strengthening tenant protections, looking to review and revise the tenant selection preferences for Inclusionary housing, urging the City Manager to invest an additional $100 million towards the creation and preservation of affordable housing over the next five years, establishing a new Housing Ombudsman position to oversee our City’s housing policies and programming, and urging the City to implement a citywide Affordable Housing Overlay District. As of this writing, the AHOD has not yet been adopted, but my hope is that the Council will pass this in 2019, which (combined with the various other tools at our disposal) should make it easier for non-profit developers to acquire and develop land, more equitably distribute our affordable developments, and hopefully lead to the creation of an additional 30 - 50 affordable units per year. In the grand scheme of things, this is still not nearly enough to resolve our affordable housing crunch, but every advance helps move us closer to our goal, and we must utilize every tool that we can to help as many people stay in this community as we can. I hope to continue this work in the next term.  

I’ve also helped hundreds of constituents navigate through the housing search process over the years. I have learned many important things about this process just by virtue of doing the work so often, and that is why I have put together an Affordable Housing Search Guide for people throughout the City, which is available on my City Council webpage. This housing search guide has links to the various housing agencies in Cambridge and Greater Boston, contact information for housing and legal advocates, and lists of important questions to ask during the process of signing up for housing. I strongly encourage anyone who is at any stage of the housing search to download this guide, or to contact my office for a copy.

Economy
I remain committed to fostering a more vibrant, more robust local economy. As a small business owner myself, I appreciate and understand many of the challenges facing local business owners. This is one of the reasons why, during the City’s discussions around whether a street reconfiguration in Inman Square was necessary, I insisted that the City first establish an Inman Square Business Mitigation Plan geared to help the Inman Square businesses survive what would surely be a long, disruptive process to the area. I’m still not satisfied with the plan that the City put forward, but I remain committed to pushing the City to do more to assist these businesses.

I have also been working to strengthen our local job training and job placement programs. I’ve continued working to bring officials from Cambridge and Boston together, to help establish links between our Office of Workforce Development and Boston's "Building Pathways" program, which is a fantastic entryway into the local building trades. I’ve also worked to call out the large, multi-billion dollar corporations in Cambridge who have sought to cut corners on the backs of their lowest-paid workers, and I’ve urged for these businesses to reconsider these cutbacks. I also continue to stand in staunch support of those who wish to bargain collectively for fairer contracts, and for easier, clearer guidelines to report and resolve issues around workplace harassment and discrimination.

Last but certainly not least, this term I’ve also been working to promote fairness, equity, and equal opportunity in workplaces throughout the City (including within the City’s own workforce), and I’ve been pleased to see (and support) similar efforts being introduced by our esteemed congressional representatives, Ayanna Pressley and Katherine Clark, in just the past few months. I very much hope to expand upon this work in the upcoming term.  

Civic Unity
Another of my top priorities remains continuing my work around Civic Unity and issues of fairness and diversity. In addition to leading a number of public rallies in support of our great diversity and our inclusive nature (and against the hate and bigotry we’ve seen across the country in the past few years), I have led the City toward looking inward at our own policies, practices, and procedures to learn where our blind spots might be, and to determine how to better practice what we preach in terms of equal treatment and equal opportunity for all members of our workforce.

I have been leading my colleagues on the Council, the City's administrators, and the public through some difficult, but important, discussions about best employment practices and policies. We have discussed areas where the City has not done a good enough job in the past, and areas where we must work to improve in the future. Cambridge prides itself in being a beacon of tolerance and a community that draws strength from its great diversity. The City, as an employer, must also adhere to those ideals, and I certainly hope to be leading these most important discussions and meetings in the coming year.

During my second term as Mayor, I was pleased to hold a number of Town Hall meetings, focusing on everything from the LGBTQ Community in the Age of Trump, to a forum for Tenants in Cambridge, to a forum on the intersection of Race, Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity in the City. These have all been energetic and thought-provoking discussions in which the citizens of Cambridge came in and spoke their minds, informing City leaders about ways in which we can and must be more sensitive, more inclusive, and more responsive to their concerns. I am hoping to revisit some of these discussions in the coming Council term, and I shall continue to seek ways to bring more people to the table to get involved, be more engaged, and to be heard in the conversations that shape our community. Our Town Hall meetings continue to be a fantastic forum for this.

Energy, the Environment, and Public Health
I was proud to vote in favor of establishing the Net Zero Task Force. I support the goals of this task force, I believe it is imperative that Cambridge works to limit our ecological footprint as best we can, and I want Cambridge to be a shining example to other communities on how a thriving city can incorporate these environmentally-necessary ideas into its guiding framework. I have continued speaking out about the need for more communities to look to clean energy, and I remain proud of the fact that I was among the many mayors nationwide to loudly speak out and condemn President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord.

Traffic, Parking, and Transportation
Cambridge continues to grapple with how to best ensure that our public streets remain open, accessible, and safe for everyone, regardless of age, mobility, or how they choose to utilize these public roads. I remain in favor of moving to make our streets safer for bicyclists than they traditionally have been, while also recognizing that we must also retain the ability of our seniors and those with mobility impairments to utilize these same streets. This is a delicate balancing act, and it remains a basic truth that in order for the City to come up with a workable solution, everyone is going to have to be willing to compromise, to walk in one another’s shoes, and to understand that nobody is going to get one hundred percent of what they want. I believe it is within our capability to move forward in a productive manner with that collective understanding. 

With the continued rise in popularity of TNC’s like Uber and Lyft, and the continued regional concerns around the safety and reliability of the MBTA, I continue to believe that Cambridge’s transportation discussions cannot be limited to just ourselves – these are regional issues, and therefore they require regional conversations. During my second term as Mayor, I was heartened to learn that the Transportation planners for Cambridge, Boston, Somerville and the surrounding communities do regularly communicate with one another – yet these informal discussions often take place in the background, and the results of these discussions do not necessarily directly inform the policymakers in each of these communities. In the coming term, I would like to push for the establishment of a framework for a regional, public discussion to be held once or twice a year that would allow the regional Transportation planners, elected officials, and members of the public to engage with one another in an open dialogue that would help us all better understand how we can address these shared issues in a more holistic, region-wide way.

The Interfaith Community and Our Senior Community
This term, I have continued to hold regular, bi-monthly meetings with the leaders of the local interfaith community to strengthen the connective tissue amongst one another. We all have so many overlapping services, such as hosting food pantries, connecting people with shelters, working with various immigrant communities, and other social service programs, and the more that we all know about our shared, overlapping programs, the better we can all do in supporting one another and coordinating our work to better serve the entirety of Cambridge. These increased ties amongst all of the interfaith communities are also particularly important during this era in which we have a hateful, divisive president who is intent upon turning people of different faiths, ethnicities, and orientations against one another. In Cambridge, we must continue to fight back against such vile and hurtful policies and pronouncements by uniting as a strong, diverse community that looks to support one another.

I also continue to hold monthly meetings with my Senior Advisory Committee, which is comprised of seniors from all across the community who all come from a variety of different socio-economic backgrounds. We continue to explore ways to ensure that the City is being more responsive to our senior residents, including working to ensure that seniors are connected to more transportation options (such as the TNCs), ensuring that senior concerns are factored into how we manage extreme weather events, and also via holding our now-annual Senior Service Providers Information Fair. This fair, held each September, is now entering its 4th iteration and it creates a one-stop-shopping environment in which seniors can come and learn about the wide variety of services and programs available to them from the City, from the Commonwealth, and from the numerous organizations that cater to seniors in this area.

Public Safety
Cambridge is fortunate in that we are much safer than many other cities – but no city is completely immune to violence. This is why I continue to host my periodic "Safe Streets, Safe City" meetings featuring City officials, the Police Department, business owners, members of the interfaith community, and other stakeholders to determine what steps we must take to reduce the possibility of violence erupting. These meetings have yielded good ideas and strengthened the information-sharing and collaborations between critical community partners, and I shall continue to host these throughout the remainder of 2019 and, I hope, well into our next term.

One of the frequent items of concern in our past Safe Streets meetings was Central Square, which many have associated with excessive panhandling, public intoxication, and occasional eruptions of violence. That is why I spent years pushing for the Police Department to return to Central Square with a permanent sub-station, and I was incredibly pleased that this finally came to fruition in December 2018. Commissioner Bard reports that the sub-station has already made an appreciable impact in lowering crime and undesirable behaviors in Central Square, and I expect to see these positive trends continue as the City Council continues to work with the local business community and other local stakeholders to revitalize the area.  

I am also mindful of the fact that the various social service programs across the City, which provide essential stabilization services, are perpetually overburdened and underfunded (I was proud to lead the charge in our last term urging the City to help fund Cambridge and Somerville Legal Services – and to support these efforts again just this past June). We must continue offering services to the most fragile members of our community, and that means supporting these important programs as much as possible. We have some extraordinary service providers in Cambridge, and we must also recognize the extraordinary work that our Cambridge Police patrol officers in Central Square and Harvard Square do on a regular basis, reaching out to chronically homeless individuals in an effort to connect them with the appropriate social services.

Children and Public Education
As Chair of the Finance Committee this term, I was pleased to see the increased funding devoted to our public schools – and yet, I was again deeply disappointed with the results we are getting for our investments. The Achievement Gap stubbornly persists, and in a City which houses many of the world’s leading biotech companies, I find it unacceptable to see so many of our students (many of them students of color) graduating without fluency in computer coding and the other skills that would be a prerequisite to obtaining careers in these companies. Throwing more money at the schools clearly isn’t the sole solution, and I remain frustrated that many of us do not seem willing to even acknowledge that the City may need to re-think some of our basic approaches to how we educate our young people. I will, however, continue to seek out allies who share my concerns and who are willing to work together to do right by all our students.

Of course, one of my proudest achievements has been growing the Girls Only Leadership Development Program, which I started during my first term as Mayor and which has steadily grown through my collaboration with the YWCA Cambridge. The GOLD Program is a weekly program which teaches life and leadership skills to help guide participants on a path toward future success. This program is free for 8th grade girls from across Cambridge, who meet and learn from a diverse cast of strong, local female business, political, and civic leaders. Meeting topics for the program included high school and college preparation; preparing for different career paths; learning proper social etiquette for formal settings; learning about appropriate online and smartphone etiquette; how to make a strong and positive first impression; and learning about the benefits of civic engagement and the importance of networking.

Closing Thoughts
I have been so incredibly privileged to serve my community over these past nine terms. I feel that, with every passing year, I gain a little additional insight into how to better carry out my duties and represent those who have sent me to City Hall. I continue to see my role as speaking up at every meeting and every discussion for those whom otherwise would not have a voice in that room. For all the parents working two or three jobs who do not have the luxury of time to come out to every evening meeting, for all the residents who may incorrectly think that nobody would care what they have to say anyway and so they don’t raise their voices, and for all those who want their civic leaders to be pragmatic, collaborative problem solvers – I very consciously work to speak up on their behalf inside City Hall. I show up and I work to remind everyone that this City belongs to all of us, regardless of skin color, ethnicity, gender, or zip code. It is an honor to be your champion on this City Council, and as I said, there is still so much important work left to do. 

CCTV candidate video (2019)

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