Leland Endorsed by Cambridge Day

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Created on Sunday, 06 November 2011 23:57

Written by Leland Cheung

Proud to be Endorsed by the Cambridge Day!

Leland Cheung has been on the council for only two years but has achieved a tremendous record balancing innovation and constituent service. It is a cliché to look at the youngest member of a body and identify that person as being the best able to guide a city into the future, but Cheung makes it difficult to avoid. Cheung is low-maintenance and high-productivity, and he listens.

Read the full article here:

http://www.cambridgeday.com/2011/11/06/who-to-vote-for/

Leland Cheung has been on the council for only two years but has achieved a tremendous record balancing innovation and constituent service. It is a cliché to look at the youngest member of a body and identify that person as being the best able to guide a city into the future, but Cheung makes it difficult to avoid. Throughout his first term he has sought technological solutions that serve the people, starting nearly immediately upon election with urging the city manager to bid for Google’s ultrafast Internet proposal and following it up with bringing crime statistics to citizens via the police BridgeStat system, Wi-Fi to people in city parks and the details of city manager contracts to at least the beginnings of transparency (as was supposed to happen the last time the contract was voted). With his entrepreneurial and international background and studies at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has an innate sense of the needs of Kendall Square and its denizens and pressure points in town-gown relationships, and a strong sense of where to guide Cambridge’s square mile of sheer innovation — his Entrepreneurs Walk of Fame being a masterstroke that needs to be maintained and capitalized on. He also stood up to the cynics and fought to meet with Boston officials to form a regional approach to luring businesses, another necessary step into an increasingly globalized future. Cheung is low-maintenance and high-productivity, and he listens.

It was mildly depressing to watch Cheung join the council with such enthusiasm and urgency and watch it be submerged into the mire of bureaucracy, caution and lack of creativity that bogs down so many of his fellow councillors, turning every council initiative into such a slow, dispiriting slog. This submersion (and subversion) started even before a mayor was elected, as Cheung presented three potential solutions to an eight-week stalemate that was keeping work from getting done and really starting to be embarrassing. But his older and allegedly wiser peers maintained the mantra that “this is our system; the system works” and raising objections that merely proved they hadn’t been listening. Even worse was when councillors David Maher (by then the mayor), Sam Seidel and Tim Toomey blocked Cheung’s effort to extract promises from Kendall Square developer Boston Properties for getting housing, low-cost office and lab space for entrepreneurs and public amenities such as a grocery store and public art for Kendall Square — exactly what the city’s highly paid consultant will eventually say is needed there.

“We never operate on this calendar,” Seidel told Cheung, explaining how the council prefers to move at mind-numbing slowness on even the simplest matter. “The shortest turnaround time typically is Monday to Monday. Zoning matters typically take weeks.” (Weeks? We wish.)

For the sake of Cambridge’s future and the people who need help and hope now, Cheung must be reelected with the revivifying message: “Don’t listen to the comatose councillors. Keep fighting. Take action.”

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