Leland Cheung

Cheung was first elected to the Cambridge City Council in 2009 while pursuing a Masters in Public Administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and an MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to returning to graduate school, Cheung earned a BS in Physics, BA in Economics and MS in Aerospace Engineering from Stanford University. Following graduation, Cheung worked as a Senior Associate at Masthead Partners, a Cambridge-based venture capital firm focusing on digital media, mobile, and internet infrastructure.^[2]

From 2000–2005, Cheung served as Chief Information Officer at Space Adventures in Arlington, VA,^[4] the only company to have successfully launched private explorers to space.^[5] Cheung ran an unsuccessful campaign as the Republican candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates in 2005.^[6] Cheung lost a campaign in the Democratic primary for Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts in 2014.^[7] He had been endorsed by The Boston Globe.^[8] On September 8, 2016, Cheung lost the Democratic primary for the Massachusetts State Senate in the Second Middlesex district.^[9] Cheung announced he was not running for reelection in a statement released August 1, 2017.^[10]

As a City Councillor, he advocated for open data, Net Zero Zoning, composting and recycling programs. Cheung was a vocal critic of Harvard University and MIT laying off some workers and cutting hours of others.^[11] As City Councillor, he was an early supporter of the Harvard divestment from fossil fuel movement.^[12] Additionally, he showed his support for the Responsible Investment at Harvard when they campaigned to end Harvard's management of Argentina Timber Plantations.^[13]

His top priorities included shifting the increased burden of property taxes to contractors and developers, completing the green line extension, and implementing universal pre-K. He also supports lifting the charter school cap and overhauling education reform by increasing the overall budget, as Massachusetts ranks 47th in spending on education as a percentage of the total budget.^[14] He also proposed anticipating the policy issues of the future, addressing driverless cars' impact on transportation, the gig economy's impact on income inequality, and Airbnb's impact on the housing market.