Monday evening’s public hearing was a wake-up call for Cambridge’s elected officials. What a disgrace that no one on the Cambridge City Council or in the city manager’s office apparently bothered to pay attention at the Feb. 13 public meeting on “proposed amendments to the Cambridge Municipal Ordinance Chapter 6 entitled Animal Control Regulations,” where the same information presented on April 9 was initially laid out orally and verbally to both elected and appointed officials. (Visit www.cambridgema.gov/CityClerk/CommitteeReport.)

Too bad that few councilors bothered to read constituents’ March through April 2007 e-mails, faxes, letters detailing answers to their questions raised both in February and on April 9. Few of the councilors and members of the city manager’s office could have actually read the 24 months’ worth of proposed new Fresh Pond regulations and Dog Medallion Program texts. (A copy of the Fresh Pond Reservation Master Plan is available for review in the Ranger Station at 250 Fresh Pond Parkway, or visit www.cambridgema.gov/CWD/fresh_pond_master_plan.)

No councilors have even raised eyebrows over the many, many months at Fresh Pond Reservation of phobic and draconian enforcements of not-council-approved Chapter 6 Animal Control amendments. To this April 9 hearing observer, only one or two councilors managed to pay attention to any member of the public on April 9 on any subject at all, let alone that there exists no hard data justifying the Water Department’s Fresh Pond xenophobic, anti-canine linkages between landscaping and nonresidents and dogs and drinking water and safety and children.

Fact: The city manager’s office received in March-April communications from Cambridge Dog Owners Group members and others (www.cdog.org) detailing the Water Department’s managing director’s March 2007 statements that the Water Department has no hard data linking dogs at Fresh Pond to the quality of city drinking water; no data on hazards or unsafe incidents between FP users, human and otherwise; no data that FP users, human and nonhuman, impact the FP landscape or the “mowed, grassy areas.” Moreover, the managing director of Fresh Pond confirmed in the same interview the ability of the new water treatment plant to filter out what non-hazardous contaminants do exist in the FP “raw” water and that it is federally documented upstream sources accounting for FP water’s contaminants.

Are the Cambridge Water Department’s and the city manager’s offices advocating a dog-phobic, xenophobic Peril Act in 2007 Cambridge modeled along the lines of immigration legislation in the 19th and 20th centuries from the “Yellow Peril” scare initiated by North American whites’ belief that immigration threatened white-race wage levels and whites’ standards of living? Sure sounded like it on April 9.