Ayah Al-Zubi, one of our two new City Councilors this year, came to introduce herself and her legislative priorities, and to meet approximately 15 members of our group and understand what issues are most of interest to us. She is digging in deeply on one of those issues, housing, and especially "social housing" which is publicly owned or controlled and involves community governance. A task force has been established to investigate how this might work in Cambridge and whether it would be more or less cost-efficient than other forms of affordable housing currently in place.
Joanne Kossuth, Chief Operations Officer of Lesley University for the past five years joined us as well to provide an update on Lesley's strategy and progress on all three of its campuses. Her portfolio of responsibilities is astonishingly broad and constantly evolving. We thanked her for Lesley's generous provision of the room we meet in and urged her to see if the other nighborhood accommodations that fell by the wayside during Covid could be re-instated.
We ended with a vote to adopt two proposed changes to the PSNA bylaws: (a) to expand the definition of Regular Meeting to include hybrid meetings (i.e. no longer an exception) and (b) to narrow the definition of Regular Meeting to exclude the October Candidate Forums held in election years since attendance is not taken and usual information is not presented.