Denise Simmons
2021 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

Background and Experience in Public Service
I am currently serving my 10th 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 chance to be heard in the discussions and debates that shape our community. I am humbly asking for your #1 vote on November 2 to continue my service on the Council.

I’m a proud wife, a mother, a grandmother, a small business owner, a member of the LGBTQ+ Community, and I’ve been engaged in public service for decades – as Executive Director of the Civic Unity Committee in the 1980s, as a member of the School Committee throughout the 1990s, and since 2001, as a member of the City Council. It has been an honor to help lead the community that I love.

Cambridge has faced many challenges in recent years – from the affordable housing crunch, to debates around how to best keep our community safe, to striving to find the balance that allows bicyclists, pedestrians, and motorists to peacefully co-exist, to weathering the Covid-19 pandemic – and there is no shortage of work facing the next City Council. I hope to continue tackling these challenges head on in the coming term. Below are just some examples of my recent work and priorities:

Affordable Housing
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 allow a larger number of Cambridge residents to remain a part of this community.

The biggest items we passed this term were the citywide Affordable Housing Overlay district, which will make it easier for developers (such as the CHA, Homeowners Rehab, or Just a Start) of affordable housing to acquire land and build units throughout the city; we also established the position of the Housing Liaison to the City Manager, and significantly increased the amount of funding for rental assistance and legal assistance to those tenants most at risk of being evicted due to the pandemic.

Going forward, I want to continue working to implement more 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, and urging the City Manager to invest an additional $100 million towards the creation and preservation of affordable housing over the next five years.

I also continue working with countless numbers of constituents in their search for affordable housing – and I’ve done this so often that I’ve put together an Affordable Housing Search Guide for people to use as a tool.

Economy
Without a doubt, the biggest challenge to our local businesses in this past term has been the Covid-19 pandemic. I worked with my colleagues to provide a fiscal lifeline to our restaurants via the significant expansion of outdoor dining, which has allowed people to congregate and patronize these establishments in a safer manner, while allowing the businesses to generate enough revenue to avoid complete closure. The City has wisely worked to make it easier for restaurants to establish outside dining through a variety of measures, such as by allowing restaurants to utilize some spaces that had previously been reserved for sidewalk use and vehicular parking, by cutting some of the red tape required for such operations, and by allowing outdoor dining to last deeper into the autumn.

I have also continued working to strengthen our local job training and job placement programs, working 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.

Seniors/Bicycles
As a small business owner – and as a senior – I appreciate the concerns expressed by both seniors and by our small business owners over the recent loss of parking spaces throughout our community in order to create a network of critical bicycle safety infrastructure. The way the City has gone about this process has earned some deserved criticism, and it has certainly made it more difficult for those with mobility issues to patronize some of our local businesses. What I reject is the false notion that the City can either have a bicycle infrastructure or we can have thriving local businesses and a community that allows our seniors to fully participate. This need not be an either/or scenario; it may take more work and more willingness for compromise, but I do believe that we can have both if we’re willing to think creatively and work more collaboratively.

I also continue to meet regularly, via Zoom, with my Senior Advisory Group members, who serve as my eyes and ears on the ground for any issues that may be of particular concern to Cambridge seniors (similarly, I must note that I continue to hold regular Zoom calls with members of the city’s Interfaith Community – both of these groups have always helped me gain critical insights into providing better service to members of our community, and both groups have proven particular vital during this pandemic period).

Public Safety
In April 2020, the tragic murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis sent shockwaves across the country, with protests erupting in city after city over the need for police reforms.  While the Cambridge Police Department has actually already implemented many of the reforms that other communities are just now calling for, our community was nonetheless impacted by the traumas of events like what happened in Minneapolis. This led the City Manager to appoint a diverse mix of Cambridge residents, with myself and Councilor McGovern as co-chairs, to participate in a Task Force To Reimagine Public Safety. We worked for months to come up with recommendations on how the City might look to send unarmed first responders to a number of emergency calls, and to take some of the responsibilities currently handled by our police department and place those under the umbrella of a new Department of Public Safety. The report of the process, along with our recommendations, is now available online and is awaiting the City Manager’s implementation.

With violent crime and gun violence on the rise earlier this year, I have continued to host my periodic "Safe Streets, Safe City" meetings to bring City officials, the Police Department, business owners, members of the interfaith community, and other neighborhood stakeholders together to determine what steps we must take to tamp down on the violence and how to address it at the root causes. These meetings have yielded good ideas and strengthened the collaborations between critical community partners.

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.

Preserving Our History
In addition to the work I’ve been engaged in around keeping our community safe, working to advocate for our seniors and those with mobility issues, working to protect our tenants and connecting people with resources to help them find affordable housing, I have also been making a renewed push to create a Cambridge Museum of History and Culture – this has been a true labor of love for me, we just had our first ever “Cambridge History Stroll” in the summer of 2021 and a second mobile exhibit is being planned for later this year, and work is moving forward to locate a physical home for this museum. I very much hope to build on this momentum in the coming year.

I wish to thank Robert Winters for providing this informational site, and to thank anyone who takes the time to review all the candidate profiles and educate yourselves on this election. I invite you all to follow my daily activity on Facebook (Denise Simmons) and Twitter (@E_DeniseSimmons), and again, I am humbly asking for your #1 Vote on Tuesday, November 2.

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