CAMBRIDGE — Retired Judge and former City Commissioner Steve Rideout announced his candidacy for mayor of Cambridge after filing for the position on Tuesday. His prior experience here in Cambridge includes helping to lead a group of citizens to encourage a prior City Council to change the City Charter to make Cambridge a Council-City Manager form of government. Those Charter Changes were adopted by the City Council and implemented in 2015. Following that experience he ran for and was elected to the Ward 1 seat on City Council for the term that Started in mid-2016 and ended with the installation of the current council in January 2021. He intentionally did not run for re-election, as he felt that it was time for new elected leadership for the city.
During his time on City Council, despite close votes on a number of issues, the city was able through the leadership of our first City Manager, to reduce our debt. Commissioner Rideout’s advocacy for improving one of the city’s significant assets, the city marina, resulted in it being contracted to be run by a private provider. Shortly after his term expired the debt on the marina was paid off. He believes that more needs to be done to turn that resource into an even greater asset for the community.
Near the end of his term, he was able to negotiate and draft for council approval a Memorandum of Understanding with the Maces Lane Alumni organization regarding their effort to establish the Maces Lane Community Center. City Council unanimously approved that MOU. The purpose of the MOU is to provide long term financial support for the Maces Lane Community Center and provide an ongoing funding stream from the city to ensure the fiscal stability of the Community Center once it has been built.
Since leaving the City Council, he became one of the founders of Moving Dorchester Forward that has as its focus on addressing the multiple educational, mental health, and after school needs of the children of Cambridge and Dorchester County. His area of work at MDF has been parent, family, and community engagement and developing programs and support for court involved and court diverted children. He has been able to obtain funding for two programs for children. One is a photography program that is running this summer and the other is the Coalition 4 Court Kids that provides limited scholarship and grant funding through MDF for court involved or court diverted youth. In addition, MDF has been able to obtain funding to support a consultant to help a full-time staff person focus on engaging more parents and families in working with our public schools to improve educational outcomes of their children.
Judge Rideout’s interest in court involved children comes from his years on the juvenile court bench where he led and supported programs that help cut in half the number of delinquency court cases in his former community and increased services to children who were truant or having difficulties in school. Early in his judicial career he also helped found the Alexandria Tutoring Consortium – www.alexandriatutors.org – a faith-based reading program that has been helping children to read on grade level for more than 20 years to address the early childhood literacy challenges that he saw in his court caseload of teenagers in his community.
He is currently on the board of the MidShore Community Mediation Center that provides services in Cambridge and Dorchester County and is also a board member of the MidShore Community Foundation. He also volunteers with other groups to help improve the quality of life in the community.
Rideout indicated that his intent, if elected, is to serve out the remainder of the current term of office. He will not run for reelection, as he still feels that Cambridge needs to have its next generation of citizens, such as our current council, take over the leadership of the community. If elected, during the remaining months of his term, he hopes to provide leadership in helping to reduce crime, increase resources for children and families in the community, support the work of MDF to improve educational, mental health outcomes, and summer job opportunities for children throughout the community while listening to the community to hear and understand needs of our citizens so that they can be shared with City Council, which has the role of making decisions on the direction of our community.
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Keep it Clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexually-oriented language.
PLEASE TURN OFF YOUR CAPS LOCK.
Don't Threaten. Threats of harming another person will not be tolerated.
Be Truthful. Don't knowingly lie about anyone or anything.
Be Nice. No racism, sexism or any sort of -ism that is degrading to another person.
Be Proactive. Use the 'Report' link on each comment to let us know of abusive posts.
Share with Us. We'd love to hear eyewitness accounts, the history behind an article.