Efforts by some Cambridge City Commissioners to review and re-write the contract terms that eliminated public review of alternate Cambridge Harbor development plans have been scrapped.
After a private conference call meeting last week with Cambridge Waterfront Development Incorporated and its broker, city officials on the call agreed to accept the terms that the city council passed last month.
That means the public will only get to see plans that CWDI has chosen - not all plans submitted, as the contract previously required.
The decision comes as a result of the conference call with city attorney Patrick Thomas, Mayor Lajan Cephas Bey, City Manager Glen Steckman, City Commissioner Brett Summers, some CWDI members and representatives of their broker.
Steckman said everyone on the call agreed to let the changes stand.
“This was adopted by the full council. Mr. Summers said he was satisfied with it,” Steckman said. “He was the one who raised the possible concerns. I don’t see this going any further unless a particular council member wants to address the issue again.”
Commissioners Brett Summers and Shay Lewis-Sisco had said they and their fellow council members had not noticed that CWDI lawyers had stricken the previous public review terms from the contract change the council passed on July 13.
After public outcry, the two commissioners said they wanted to review the changes. But in the conference call with city officials last week, CWDI members and representatives from their real estate broker – MacKenzie Commercial Real Estate – discouraged the public disclosure of unapproved plans.
“CWDI and the City Council have deferred to the experts, which in this case is MacKinzie Real Estate,” Summer said, “and they strongly advised us not to do that.”
Shay Lewis-Sisco could not be reached for comment. She was not on the call, and apparently not notified of the apparent conclusions.
Steckman said, "It's up to the city council to tell her."
Under the original “Exhibit C” covenant, CWDI was required to post for public view summaries of all plans submitted for Cambridge Harbor. What the city and CWDI representatives on the conference call agreed to was a 30 day period of public review only of plans CWDI intends to put under contract.
Summers said MacKinzie and CWDI cited two reasons not to disclose all plans submitted.
“If someone submitted an offer that was not realistic,” Summers said, “that may cause great debate among the community unnecessarily
The other reason, Summers said, was that MacKinzie was concerned public disclosure would discourage developers from submitting plans.
“I didn’t have the same concerns that it would discourage competition, discourage interest,” he said. “But I was a broker for 15 years. It’s been a while. So Maybe things have changed. So, I think right now MacKinzie is new on the project so I don’t want to step on their toes or discourage them by introducing something that is contrary to what they desire.
"My Attitude is, Let’s let MacKinzie do what MacKinzie does and hopefully they’ll be successful in bringing us great developers. I don’t want to put any roadblocks in front of them”
The council approved a revised document July 13 at the request of CWDI, which said a change was necessary to allow MacKinzie to reach interested developers, rather than CWDI issuing a request for proposals themselves.
At the time the city council reviewed the Exhibit C covenant, neither CWDI nor its attorneys pointed out that the altered document would also do away with the requirement that all developer plans would be made public.
But now, Steckman said, city officials have accepted those changes.
"All I can sasy is, based on what the city attorney, in his comments and direction, everybody was satisfied with it," Steckman said.
CWDI president Angie Hengst issued an email response saying that residents would have actually more view into the public process because the city also had hearings based on plans for development.
Hengst wrote, “IF every preliminary inquiry, conversation or offer were immediately made public, we could discourage exactly the experienced and well-capitalized developers we are trying to attract. That would put Cambridge Harbor at a competitive disadvantage….
“Confidentiality during negotiations and public decision making are not contradictory. We need both. That balance is what we are trying to accomplish with the amendment to Exhibit C.”