Cambridge is tightening its budget and narrowing long-term priorities as city officials confront shrinking federal grants that support a wide range of municipal programs.
The City Council’s Finance Committee met Wednesday to consider how to allocate the city’s remaining pandemic-era relief funds and to begin setting budget priorities for 2028 and beyond, as officials warned that cuts to federal funding could bring prolonged fiscal strain.
Committee members said the city would likely need to focus on just two or three major initiatives as it distributes its limited resources. Matt P. Nelson, Cambridge’s director of administration and operations, told councilors that the city has $3.75 million remaining in Federal Grant Stabilization Funds from the $5 million it set aside last June.
Councilor Patricia M. “Patty” Nolan ’80, who co-chairs the committee, said long-term planning would require the city to resist the urge to advance too many priorities at once.
To that end, the committee plans to circulate a nonbinding survey to councilors next week. Nolan said the committee’s chairs and Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui would review the responses and identify priority areas, outlining a path to advance “two or three priorities in a streamlined way over the next two years.”
“The message we’re trying to make clear is that we all have priorities,” Nolan said. “The only way we can guarantee that a few of them end up scoped and progressed is to prioritize a select few because we can’t work on them all.”
While the City Council sets the city’s budget priorities, programs funded with city dollars ultimately fall under the authority of City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05. Councilor Marc C. McGovern cautioned that any effort to improve efficiency or reduce spending should be guided by city staff before cuts are proposed.
“This is where we would need some guidance from the city,” McGovern said. “We don’t run the programs.”
“Whatever program we think works well, someone will say it doesn’t,” he added. “Whatever program we think doesn’t work well, it’s the lifeline for somebody.”
Councilor Catherine “Cathie” Zusy said her top priorities included expanding workforce housing and improving transportation, goals she said could be advanced without necessarily increasing spending.
“I’m eager to see some amendments to some existing zoning proposals that will make them better, and I want to see broader transportation planning,” Zusy said.
“That may just be a matter of a philosophical shift or broadening our focus, rather than expenditures,” she added.
The committee also reviewed potential cost-saving measures that would avoid cutting programs or services outright, including closer scrutiny of out-of-state travel and consultant contracts. Huang said he had asked every city department to identify roughly 2 percent in savings and temporarily suspended out-of-state travel through the end of the fiscal year in November.
Still, Zusy said additional fiscal restraint may be unavoidable.
“We’re going to need to make cuts that may feel a little uncomfortable. That may just be essential in this new climate, and I appreciate that all the different departments have cut 2.3 percent from their budget — and maybe they’ll need to cut a little more,” she said.
The committee also received updates on the city’s remaining American Rescue Plan Act funds, part of the federal stimulus package intended to support post-pandemic recovery. ARPA dollars have funded 84 programs across Cambridge, including the Cambridge Recurring Income for Success and Empowerment, a guaranteed-income pilot program championed by Siddiqui during her first term.
Of the $88 million allocated to Cambridge in early 2022, about 10 percent remains unspent, Nelson said. He outlined finalized expenditures for ongoing projects ranging from housing affordability to immigration services. The city must commit the remaining funds before they expire at the end of December.
—Staff writer Risha Sinha can be reached at [email protected].