Born in Wellesley, Craig went to the University of Rochester on a NROTC scholarship, where he made Dean's list, received a BA in History and won the NROTC leadership award. After college, Craig served in the Marine Corps for four and a half years, seeing such faraway places as the Southern California desert, the Philippines and Malaysia. It was during these travels, that Craig first became interested in environmental issues, realizing that reducing abject poverty would decrease the likelihood of military conflict in developing nations. Less than four weeks after resigning his Marine Corps commission, Craig was knocking on doors for Greenpeace.

From Greenpeace, Craig moved on to Boston College Law School, where he served as Chair of the Environmental Law Society. Craig graduated cum laude in 1993 and earned the Susan B. Desmaris award for Public Service Achievement and Leadership for his work on environmental issues at school.

Following law school, Craig became an environmental consultant, married Hope (whom he met while she was biking with a cast on her leg) and, eventually, moved from a Porter Square apartment to a small house in North Cambridge. He has served as the Chair or Vice-chair of the North Cambridge Stabilization Committee since 1996, wrote the environmental grant that resulted in the founding of Alewife Neighbors, Inc. and played a major part in revitalizing the Sierra Club's Boston Inner City Outings program. Over the past several years, Craig has helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to preserve the Alewife floodplain, promote environmental issues and develop affordable housing throughout Cambridge. He has testified repeatedly on neighborhood concerns before the Board of Zoning Appeals, the License Commission, the Planning Board, the Conservation Commission, the City Council and the School Committee.

Craig is a regular contributor to a variety of journals and papers, including the Cambridge Chronicle, the Massachusetts Sierran, The Ride (a bicycle magazine) and The Word (a Marine Corps Reserve magazine). He was The Ride's September, 2005 "Supercommuter of the Month."

In addition to his neighborhood activities, Craig currently serves on the Maria L. Baldwin School Advisory Council and on the Board of the Sierra Club's Greater Boston Group. Besides playing with his wife and children, Craig enjoys canoeing, entertaining, cycling, hiking, reading and writing.

Top Priorities:
1st Priority: City Government, from the Councilors down, must do a better job of listening to area residents. On virtually any issue, the people who live in an area will know more about what works, or doesn't work, there than anyone at City Hall.

2nd Priority: Cambridge Public Schools must be improved to the point where everyone, including City Councilors, are willing to send their kids to our public schools. Far too many families are selling their Cambridge homes and moving to Belmont, Arlington, Brookline and Newton. As a result, our both our City and our public schools are becoming less economically diverse.

3rd Priority: Limiting growth of the City budget is key to keeping tax payments as low as possible. In the past two years, Cambridge's budget has grown by almost twice the rate of inflation (from $341,000,000 to $380,000,000), with a resulting residential tax increase that has been very difficult for many people to meet. Despite this increase in Cambridge's budget, our schools remain problematic, our traffic and parking problems are still horrendous and many of our neighborhoods are feeling squeezed by over-development. The Council, the City Manager and the School Committee cannot continue to spend money (in some case, like the new Police Station, vast amounts of money) without a clearer understanding and explanation of how those expenditures will make Cambridge a better place to live, work and visit.

Quality of Life and Public Safety:
Poorly designed, overly dense and unwelcome development has become the norm, with large, new developments overwhelming the infrastructure of our streets and sewer systems. Residents rarely see police officers on their streets and few know any officers personally. The result of poor planning and worse implementation is a congested, over-developed municipality where too many people do not feel safe traveling outside their homes. The responsibility for many of the traffic, parking and public safety problems we see in local neighborhoods rests squarely on the shoulder of incumbent councilors. They make the policy, and the City Manager implements it. What we see around us is what the current City Council has mandated. I will seek to change this. As your Councilor I will work to:

• Implement community policing and ensure that construction of a new police station will support the type of police work we want our law enforcement officials to do
• Commission a full and independent assessment of the City's infrastructure
• Create Council/citizen panels for performance reviews of appointed boards
• Mandate one Council meeting per year to be held in each neighborhood
• Propose and support zoning changes to mitigate development pressures

Traffic, Parking, and Transportation:
Residents increasingly find it difficult to park near their homes, while the lack of effective traffic enforcement makes walking or cycling around Cambridge far too dangerous. As a Councilor I will push hard for Cambridge Police Department to view traffic enforcement as one of its prime responsibilities and to develop and implement a comprehensive traffic management plan. I will urge my fellow Councilors to lead by example, by biking or taking public transit to City Hall instead of parking (sometimes illegally) in the reserved spaces behind the building. And perhaps most importantly, I will continue to urge, as I have before, that the City develop accurate parking/car registration data for residential units to help future development minimize impacts on limited on-street parking.

Municipal Finance, City Budget, Assessments, and Property Taxes:
Limiting growth of the City budget is key to keeping tax payments as low as possible. In the past two years, Cambridge's budget has grown by almost twice the rate of inflation (from $341,000,000 to $380,000,000), with a resulting residential tax increase that has been very difficult for many people to meet. Despite this increase in Cambridge's budget, our schools remain problematic, our traffic and parking problems are still horrendous and many of our neighborhoods are feeling squeezed by over-development. The Council, the City Manager and the School Committee cannot continue to spend money (in some case, like the new Police Station, vast amounts of money) without a clearer understanding and explanation of how those expenditures will make Cambridge a better place to live, work and visit.

Land Use, Planning, Economic Development:
As the Chair of my local neighborhood group for most of the past 10 years, I have seen firsthand how neighborhoods get squeezed by a variety of development forces. All too often, these forces, whether they are municipal or commercial, are in the position of having professional engineers, consultants and other hired "experts" push their agendas while the local residents simply have their personal experiences and common sense. Unfortunately, the City pays far too little attention to the valuable information these residents bring to the table.

The City must listen to its residents. The people who live in our neighborhoods know more about traffic patterns parking problems, density issues and how important the local Laundromat is than any panel of City-hired experts.

Cambridge residents know that people will bike around town when it really is safe to do so, not simply because the City painted some lines on a few roads. Locals know that large housing developments with only one parking space per unit will make it tougher to find parking on nearby streets.

The City should also explore other types of housing and transportation options than what is currently pushed on our zoning codes. Allowing denser development if a project's residents are not allowed on-street parking stickers is a possible option, one being explored by Harvard in one of its current student dormitory projects. Requiring two parking spaces per residential unit might lower the pressure on limited on-street parking while also creating larger, more family-friendly units than the small condos so often built these days.

As a City Councilor, I will push for the Council to get the power to appoint members of the Planning Board, the Board of Zoning Appeals and other City Boards and Agencies. Having Councilors more responsible for the decisions these Boards make will make the Boards more responsive to neighborhood input because, under my suggestion, the Buck will stop with the Councilors, not the City Manager.

Most of all, I will try, as hard as I can, to make my peers understand that our neighborhoods are fragile and the City must support them in every way it possibly can, whether it be underwriting the rent of a small corner store or minimizing auto-dependent development throughout our City.

Human Services Programs:
While I don't have much personal experience with them, Cambridge's general human services programs seem to be quite good. From what I have seen, however, on the whole they seem very segregated by race, class and age. I would like to see the various human service program, from library programs to youth programs to after-school programs to senior citizen programs designed and implemented in such a way that the diverse population of Cambridge actually funnels through these programs.

Open Space, Parks, and Recreation:
Cambridge is a very small place. Our parks are used by a lot of people and we need to work harder to make our common spaces work for everyone, to include dog-owners, people who don't like dogs, organized team sports, pick-up team sports and a myriad of other different, often competing uses. Rules for using common space need to be clear and to make sense, and they also need to be enforced so that people can go to parks and playgrounds with a reasonable understanding of what to expect, and not expect, there. When designing parks, the City needs to make sure it does its best to incorporate neighborhood suggestions, and it needs to make sure it answers residents questions before any final decisions are made.

Energy, the Environment, and Public Health:
With only 6.2 square miles of land, Cambridge is a city where even the smallest things can have a huge impact on our immediate environment and our public health. Whether it's the City's viewing its open space as "free" when it comes to situating City projects, traffic spewing fumes into air that already fails EPA health levels or industrial and city property that is laden with hazardous pollutants, we need a City government that can competently address these concerns.

As a neighborhood advocate, a member of the local Sierra Club's Executive Committee and a professional environmental author, lecturer and consultant, I have repeatedly argued that the City's open space is not "free." Whether it is a park or a community garden, our green space is precious and must be valued accordingly in any city decision. Once this land is built on- be it for housing, health care or educational uses- it will never be available as open space again. The City must give this open space the value it warrants.

When it comes to traffic, it is important that we minimize the exhaust from cars and trucks idling at our intersections and clogging our streets. First and foremost, we must get people out of their cars, making public transportation a more attractive alternative to the people who live and work in our town. The best way to do that is to limit the parking spaces at the millions of square feet of commercial development planned for many parts of Cambridge in the near future. The City Council could set a wonderful example by eliminating its own reserved parking spots behind City Hall. Once our elected officials start relying on mass transit, it seems very likely we'll see an improvement in transit service. Almost as important is to get the MBTA and other bus companies to use cleaner burning fuels and, during non-rush hours, to use smaller busses. The City should also encourage the use of Hybrid and other low-emission vehicles throughout the City by allowing new, non-transferable taxi medallions for such vehicles, by purchasing such vehicles for fleet use and by working with the state to give owners of such vehicles a break on their excise taxes.

We all must also remember that Cambridge is a City with a very industrial history. Working with others, I helped obtain tens of thousands of dollars to help monitor remediation work at the contaminated W.R. Grace site in North Cambridge. Alongside other neighborhood advocates, against the will of the City, I helped prove that not only was the Grace site contaminated with asbestos, but so was nearby City-owned playing fields. As a result of this discovery, and lots of hard work by the neighborhood and former Councilor Triantafillou, Cambridge now has an asbestos protection ordinance that will help minimize the public's exposure to this dangerous fiber. My history of environmental protection and public health advocacy in a myriad of fashions is equal to anyone's.

Housing:

Cambridge needs a comprehensive affordable-housing policy. In fact, it needs a Comprehensive Housing policy, period. Apparently, not even the City Council knows if the City has such a policy or, if it does, what the policy is. Without a substantive housing policy, and a substantive affordable housing policy, it is impossible to determine if Cambridge is actually meeting its goals in these areas.

Few things are as important as providing housing for Cambridge residents who can't afford it. But there is a limit, financially, to what the City can do and without any sort of formal policy in this regard, it is not possible to decide whether the City is spending its housing resources wisely. The city must do a better job of ensuring that government-subsidized housing is also decent, desirable housing-not simply housing of last resort. That means not putting affordable housing complexes on contaminated, inaccessible lots as seems to happen far too often. Affordable units, to include limited equity condos purchased with City assistance, should be scattered across the City in ones, twos and threes, not concentrated in economically segregated, undesirable areas.

Further, while the City can only do so much to provide affordable housing, it can, and should, do a much better job of making sure the inhabitants of our affordable housing units receive an education that will, in future years, allow them to compete successfully for high-paying jobs and market rate housing. Cambridge Public Schools, for a variety of reasons, have been disproportionately unable to educate our lower-income neighbors and the result is that large numbers of affordable housing residents are not gaining the educational skills to move up economically.

As your Councilor, I will work to:

• Set specific, measurable affordable-housing goals and create policies that avoid economic and social segregation
• Develop a clear, balanced affordable-housing policy that promotes appropriate siting, respects neighborhood zoning, and restores growth policies, land-use planning, and public interest as considerations (rather than the current approach – "As much as possible, as dense as possible" – favored by the City).
• Make Cambridge Public Schools a system that gives everyone, including inhabitants of low-income households, the educational skills to succeed and find market rate housing of their choice.

Arts and Public Celebrations:
Cambridge's 1% for public art program is a good idea, enhancing the public's general visual experience around town. Larger festivals help draw attention to Cambridge's many strengths, while the City also encourages local block parties to build neighborhood cohesiveness. These seem to be reasonable goals and I don't have any concrete suggestions for improving these programs.

University Relations:
Cambridge owes much of its current status to the abundance of fine colleges and universities within its borders. MIT and Harvard are two of the City's largest employers and both, along with Lesley and other schools, offer a variety of amenities to all Cambridge residents.

That being said, the power of these universities to change our City with their massive development plans is very intimidating. Whether it be Harvard wanting to build on the Charles River or Lesley looking to expand over the Porter Square MBTA tracks, far too many parts of Cambridge face university expansion threats that are extremely disquieting. While there is no perfect solution, the City should continue to work on getting universities to be taxed as the corporations they essentially are. When it comes to constructing dorms or research labs, local universities are more like well-funded developers than they are benign non-profits and they should be taxed as such. Similarly, the boarding room fees paid by these large universities, which operate thousands and thousands of rooming units in Cambridge, are absurdly low. Cambridge could gain millions of dollars in revenue, and scrap the scrounging for the relatively small PILOT contributions, simply by altering the permit fee. Finally, land owned by, or coveted by, these universities should be zoned to protect local neighborhoods just as if any other developer were interesting in building there.

Interagency 'favors' should continue as is. For example, the universities provide assistant teachers for our schools. Cambridge allows street closures for university events. This arrangement is not exactly a quid pro quo, but simply a reflection of the belief that everyone, and everything, co-exists in Cambridge and we all should do our best to accommodate and help each other. These positive aspects of Cambridge's relationship with its universities should continue even as we explore ways to ensure that these institutions of higher learning are fulfilling their own civic responsibilities.

Civic Participation:
City Council Service is a Privilege City Councilors must recognize that they serve the public. Councilors cannot, ever, take the public for granted. City Council meetings often start late, Councilors frequently chat or leave the chambers during public comment, and Councilors rarely seem to attend an entire public meeting where they can hear the general public explain their views. As a Councilor, I will:

• Pay attention during the Council's Public Comment period
• Work to create more representative Public Boards and Committees
• Support Citizen efforts to get honest, prompt and complete responses from City Hall

Cambridge government at all levels, and especially at City Council, should do more to encourage Civic Participation.

For starters, participation on City Boards and Committees should be expanded beyond the current core group from which the City Manager picks his members. The long-term effect of the City Manager's close control over Board appointments is that the general public has begun to view these public forums as little more than local 'dog and pony' shows. Even if City Councilors are not able to appoint board members themselves, the Council should insist that the Manager alter his appointment practices to include a wider variety of neighborhood voices.

A second, and very easy, thing the City Council should do is to modify its rules to allow anyone to show up at City Council to talk about any item, whether or not it is on the Council's agenda. I would also suggest that any Councilor be allowed to waive the Council rules three times per meeting to allow two additional people to speak beyond the current three-minute limit. And while the public is speaking, the Councilors should be in their seats, paying attention, not in the room next door eating dinner. Few things discourage civic participation more than taking the time to go to City Hall to speak at a Council meeting only to find just one or two, if that many, of the Councilors are paying the slightest attention to what the public is saying.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the City Council and all City officials should avoid using harsh or hurtful language in public. Insulting or belittling citizens who are simply voicing their opinions is harmful to the public dialogue. Opinions can, and should, be expressed clearly, but there is no need to be offensive when doing so.

Cambridge Public Schools:
A Good School System is the Heart of a Healthy City

As anyone concerned about the Cambridge Public School system understands, we need to ensure that the much-touted "Excellent Education in Every Classroom" is a reality in every school. To that end, we need clearly defined, quantifiable, and well-designed goals, plus effective supervision and adequate funding, or CPS risks becoming a school system of last resort, used primarily by those who cannot afford private school and are unable to move elsewhere.

The plan for excellent education must be more than simply merging or closing schools, cutting teachers and support staff, and redesigning the high school. In particular, there must be proper implementation of the recently approved K-8 re-organization plan or there can be little doubt that Cambridge's public schools will continue to shed lower-grade students at a rate that will cripple the entire system.

My wife, Hope, and I have been happy with virtually every aspect of our children's public school education thus far, (both of our boys attend the Baldwin School), but it is clear that many students, especially those in the higher grades, need the Cambridge Public School system to challenge them more. It is equally clear that many other CPS students are not succeeding academically. This "performance gap" threatens to overwhelm our schools and needs immediate attention through a planning process that is based on sound educational policies--not spreadsheet politics!

WE MUST

Determine our academic needs--Then FUND A PLAN to meet those needs.
    While it's hard to argue that the Cambridge Public School system needs more than the roughly $20,000 per student it currently spends each year, it's just as hard to determine exactly how much our public school system does need to teach our students well. We must decide how we will best educate our children, then obtain and disburse the necessary funds to accomplish that goal.

Systematically Survey exiting parents and other families who 'opt-out' of the Public Schools.
    The results of these surveys would allow CPS officials to better determine where staffing and budget changes must be met to keep more families in our schools.

Engage lower-performing students and their families in the academic environment.
    The importance of motivating students to excel in the classroom cannot be overstated, yet too many students, for a variety of reasons, fall by the academic wayside. CPS, and all of Cambridge, must develop and fund new ways to help these children achieve the academic success, which is such a crucial foundation for their success in later life.

Identify where the Cambridge Public School system is spending its money.
    At its heart, the recent K through 8 re-organization was driven by budget considerations. Yet, since virtually no one understands how our public school system spends its money now, it is impossible to figure out how to spend it more wisely in the future.

    Even when leveled for Special Education needs and students for whom English is not the primary language (two oft-cited reasons for Cambridge's massive expenditures), the Cambridge Public School system spends far more on overhead than similar municipalities. As a first step in effectively managing its finances, our public school system should justify every position and contract on which it spends money to a board of parents, teachers, staff and students.

AS CITY COUNCILLOR, I WILL

Bring my first-hand knowledge of the Cambridge Public Schools, as a Public School parent and active member of the school community, to the Council. When the City Council gets involved in Public School issues, it needs a member who understands the impact of the Council's actions on the education of our children.

Work to ensure that the City Council passes a budget that provides our Public Schools with the funds they need to educate our children to reach their highest personal potentials.

Promote healthy neighborhoods, through zoning reform, appropriate affordable housing creation and child-friendly streets--neighborhoods that will support a vibrant school system.

Other:
For more information on my positions, please visit my website at www.CraigKelley.org.