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November 12, 2007
All eyes are on Nangle's next move
WITH THE City Council election now history, the political focus shifts to state Rep. David Nangle, who could announce as early as this week that he's resigning to become the Legislature's $85,000-a-year sergeant-at-arms.
That move will trigger a special election for the open rep's seat, covering Lowell's Belvidere and South Lowell sections and East Chelmsford. Tuesday's results may have shifted the potential field already.
Mayor Bill Martin finished a strong third, behind perennial ticket-topper Rita Mercier and Edward "Bud" Caulfield. He may run, considering his strong ties in the former Sacred Heart parish, covering South Lowell and East Chelmsford. That strong base will help, should other candidates run and splinter the city vote. Martin took his first swing at the Statehouse in 1998, losing to Nangle in a crowded field.
Meanwhile, Councilor Kevin Broderick was considered a solid candidate, but his sixth-place finish Tuesday has him rethinking whether to run (our money says yes).
Local lawyer Stephen Geary, chairman of the city Zoning Board of Appeals, tells us he's considering running again. Other potential candidates include City Councilor Eileen Donoghue, pumped up by her recent run for U.S. Congress; Assistant City Solicitor Maria Sheehy; local lawyer David Hall; and Lowell Democratic activist Michael Demarais.
School Committee member John Leahy, Nangle's cousin, has rejected the idea. Leahy said he and his wife, Joan, have decided, "it's just not the right time for us."
Lowell police Detective Chris Panagiotakos, younger brother of state Sen. Steven Panagiotakos, looked at running, but has decided against it.
Potential East Chelmsford candidates are beginning to surface, too.
Lowell police Sgt. Thomas Fleming grew up in the Sacred Heart neighborhood. His parents Brendan (the former councilor and mayor) and Bernice Fleming, still live in the neighborhood. Fleming said a run is unlikely.
More realistic is a run by former Lowell police officer-turned-union-activist Jerry Flynn. His union, the New England Police Benevolent Association, is busy and seemingly doing well. Flynn is very close with Sen. Panagiotakos and Nangle, ties that could serve him well.
Another addition might be Patrick Murphy, a Lowell resident ran unsuccessfully for the 5th District Congressional seat as an Independent. Murphy, who opened eyes on the campaign trail, sent an e-mail to The Sun saying he's looking at Nangle's seat with "interest."
HERE'S THE order of finish in the 1998 Democratic primary that Nangle won. Many forget how close it was: Nangle, 1,268 votes; Martin, 1,048; Geary, 978; Rita Mercier, 817; Karin Theodoros, 766; Scott Consaul, 291. Nangle then went on to beat Republican Karen Simao in the general election.
MEHMED ALI will be watching any special election closely. Ali finished a surprisingly strong 10th in the council race. If a sitting councilor wins the rep seat and leaves the council, Ali's next in line.
State law allows a local official to also serve in the Legislature, so no resignation is required.
A CURSORY glance at City Council election numbers show:
* Turnout was 60 votes more than in 2005, 12,713 to 12,653.
* There were 6.36 votes cast per voter, consistent with 2005 (6.46) and 2003 (6.28), so the widespread theory that people would bullet for one group of candidates had no traction.
* Since 1999, Armand Mercier has been Mr. Consistent, finishing fifth, fifth, fifth, tied fourth-fifth, and fifth.
* The new denizens of downtown, in Ward 2, Precinct 3, did not turn out in large numbers. There were only 75 more ballots cast in that precinct on Tuesday than two years ago.
* The shocker: A massive drop in the vote totals of just about every candidate who also ran two years ago, caused by the larger number of strong candidates splitting up nearly the same number of total voters. Rita Mercier was down 12 percent, Caulfield down 9 percent, and Armand Mercier, Broderick and Rodney Elliott were in the 13 percent range. Jim Milinazzo lost 8 percent. Kristin Ross-Sitcawich dropped 29 percent. Martin apparently got a mayoral bounce, and was only down 3 percent. With everyone else backpedaling, Martin went from ninth in 2005 to third this year.
Only one candidate picked up more votes in '07 than '05. Incumbent Joseph Mendonca was up 6 percent, but not enough to hold a seat with Mike Lenzi and Alan Kazanjian surging forward.
So where did the votes go? Every candidate who finished 10th to 18th this year had about 500 votes more than those in the same spots in 2005.
MILINAZZO WAS at a loss to explain how he lost 1,000 votes from 2005. He fell to the ninth, gaining the final council seat after placing seventh two years ago. "I was surprised, partly because people were telling me I was going to be bunched in the third, fourth, fifth area, and I thought I worked hard," he said,
He said he was particularly disappointed to have finished out of the top nine in neighborhoods like Centralville and Pawtucketville.
"I'm happy to be back on, but some of my disappointment was not doing as well in some of the neighborhoods that I really tried to be visible in and work hard," he said.
DONOGHUE CALLED many Lowell voters with a recorded message in the days leading up to the election, asking voters to support "progress" being made in the city.
Some saw that cryptic comment as code: Support the incumbent councilors who forced out former City Manager John Cox and brought in Bernie Lynch to replace him.
Donoghue said that's a misinterpretation.
"It was just to remind people because there have been so many elections" in the past two months, she said. "It was just an opportunity to remind people we've made progress and their vote really matters. It wasn't specific to anybody, just you know, support your city."
Just so you know, the call was paid for by the Broderick, Martin and Milinazzo campaigns.
COX'S INITIAL horse in the October race for Congress, James DiPaola, abandoned early because he missed Malden.
Then Cox's second choice for his endorsement, Andover state Rep. Barry Finegold, received only about 500 votes in Lowell, compared to more than 5,400 for Eileen Donoghue. (Cox's wife, Colleen, however, had a sign on the couple's front lawn for eventual Democratic primary winner Niki Tsongas, with whom she worked at Middlesex Community College.)
But Cox's endorsements for City Council? Five of the six candidates who received his blessing were elected: Caufield, the two Merciers, Lenzi and Kazanjian. Four of them grabbed the top five spots in total votes. And in the Centralville-Christian Hill districts where Cox grew up, the votes poured in for all the above candidates while the pro-Lynch crowd got drubbed.
The only Cox candidate who didn't get elected was SAC club bartender Bob McMahon, finishing 12th.
THE BIGGEST losers on Tuesday were the local bloggers and their anyone-but-Cox-endorsed candidates. Wearing the long faces were the Left in Lowell liberals and Richard Howe Jr., the full-time Middlesex Register of Deeds, part-time Middlesex Community College instructor, occasional talk-show gadfly and incessant political blogger. (As previously mentioned, Ross-Sitcawich, a big LIL favorite, saw her council vote total drop 29 percent. On the School Committee side, LIL sister blogger Jackie Doherty dropped 18 percent, finishing fourth this year after topping the ticket in 2005. Oh my!)
For more than a year, Left in Lowell bloggers greedily published undocumented negative rumors and unverified comments pertaining to Cox, while pushing the "professional" government of the pro-Lynch crowd. Howe more stylishly did the same, painting Cox and friends as the bad guys in a power struggle with the good guys. In the end, the bloggers' blather for control of cyberminds -- and votes -- lacked credibility and had no impact. Every Cox candidate they blasted, except one, won council seats.
WHERE WOULD a candidate Lynch have finished in the Council race? A poll taken by Martin and Broderick, whose results were never released publicly, supposedly said Lynch was Lowell's most popular politician. It led to Lynch getting a controversial two-year contract extension before to the election. But of the five councilors facing re-election who voted for the extension only one -- Martin -- got a bounce. Lynch's perceived popularity didn't help incumbent Mendonca, who lost his seat, while Broderick, Elliott and Milinazzo fared worse than they expected in regaining theirs.
DENNIS CANNEY finished last in the eight-way race for School Committee, but he's not sad.
"Hey, I got 4,904 votes, so I almost could have got on the City Council," said Canney with a smile. (Milinazzo's total was 4,908.)
The former Lowell High teacher and coach raised about $5,000, so the way he figures each vote cost him about a buck.
"My mother always told me as one door closes, another opens," said Canney. "So that's how I'm viewing this election."
SUPERINTENDENT OF Schools Karla Brooks Baehr was pragmatic about the election that saw Lowell High School housemaster Dave Conway top the ticket.
"Elections happen," Baehr said Wednesday. "School committees change, but my job is to be the superintendent of schools and that does not change."
Baehr's current contract expires at the end of the current school year. The road toward a new contract will be bumpy.
Conway's campaign largely made an issue of Baehr's hiring practices, saying the superintendent overlooks Lowell residents for promotions. Frequent Baehr critic Regina Faticanti finished second.
Conway was diplomatic about Baehr's position during the campaign, saying he needs to evaluate her performance from a seat on the committee before making up his mind. But he is expected to side with Faticanti, who thinks the superintendent's seven years on the job might be enough. Committee member Jim Leary seems to be leaning in Faticanti's direction.
Fourth-place finisher Doherty has remained a strong Baehr supporter. Connie Martin narrowly edged out Kevin McHugh for the sixth and final school-board seat by 78 votes, good news for Baehr, because Martin has been a much stronger backer.
John Leahy has often been on Baehr's side as well, though he now says he'd like to see a plan for the future of Lowell High School before he can give her firm support.
YOU'D THINK the first person Baehr would have called post-election would be Conway, the No. 1 vote-getter in the school board race. But Conway says he never received a congratulatory phone call. Two days after the election, Conway said he literally bumped into Baehr at a school event when the superintendent congratulated him and quickly moved on.
IF THE board is split 3-3, the new mayor -- likely Caulfield -- will have the deciding vote. That could be more bad news for Baehr.
Caulfield will likely join the chorus critical of Baehr for hiring from the outside, a charge her administration has denied with exhaustive reports showing evidence to the contrary.
Most significantly, a Mayor Caulfield will exert considerable pressure on Baehr to keep Lowell High School Headmaster Bill Samaras on the job. Earlier this year, she refused Samaras' request for another year at the school.
"The man should receive a medal for the work he's done at Lowell High School," Caulfield said. "To more or less say, 'it's all over, Bill,' I don't like that. But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it."
SPEAKING OF THE impending mayor's race, Rita Mercier had some choice words about Mayor Martin's comments in a Sun article on Wednesday. Martin said Mercier and Caulfield should make a "magnanimous gesture" and vote for Elliott's mayoral bid, because Elliott is the longest-serving councilor who hasn't held the ceremonial post.
"Why wasn't (Martin) magnanimous two years ago when Elliott was in the same position but (Martin) decided to leapfrog over Elliott?" Mercier asked. "He wasn't thinking of Rodney then, was he? I don't owe Rodney anything," she added.
"All the mayor's trying to do is put me and Councilor Caulfield on the defensive. He's done it for the past year. It didn't work then and it won't work now."
Mercier made her comments following an appearance Thursday night on NewsTalk Live hosted by Sun Editor Jim Campanini.
LOWELL IS now the only Plan E city in the state to have winner-take-all elections for council. Voters in Springfield overwhelmingly supported a new district/at-large council starting in the 2009 elections, which supporters say will open government there. E. Henry Twiggs, chairman of that Springfield's Democratic City Committee, told the local newspaper, "We have finally taken ourselves out of the dark ages."
LOWELL PATROLMAN John Boutselis' reign as head of the patrolmen's' union is over. Patrolman Frank Nobrega crushed Boutselis, something like 140-30 we're told. One former union president said it was the most lopsided defeat in the union's history.
LAST SUNDAY, WCVB Channel 5 exposed that all members of the state's Sex Offender Registry Board lack the appropriate qualifications for the $85,000-per-year job.
One of those members is Vesna Nuon, who serves on Lowell's Zoning Board of Appeals. Nuon escaped mention during the broadcast, but his resume was posted on the WCVB Web site. It lacks any mention of education or experience that would qualify him to classify how likely a convicted sex offender is to re-offend.
The only thing close is the nine years he spent as a victim-witness advocate at the Middlesex District Attorney's Office, from 1991 to 2000.
FRANK SILVA, president of the Billerica Municipal Employees Association, was suspended for two days without pay in September for conducting union business during work hours. Silva has been banned from Town Hall, and is unable to enter the building without prior approval.
In turn, the leader of the 75-member union that covers the town's DPW employees filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Labor Relations Board, charging that Town Manager Rocco Longo, Assistant Town Manager John Sanguinet and DPW Director Abdul Alkhatib are preventing the union from conducting business and are not following Civil Service rules.
The union and the town have been in contract negotiations for a year and a half.
The complaint alleges that Alkathib met with members of the Engineering Department in September and October and tried to persuade them to leave the union; that Chester Puffer was not given a heavy-machine operator position because he is a union member and member of the collective-bargaining team; and that despite ample notice, town officials refused to allow James Herrick to leave his position at Town Hall to attend a union meeting.
Longo declined comment. The town has until tomorrow to respond in writing to the state.
This week's Column was written by City Editor Christopher Scott, Assistant Managing Editor/Local News Tom Zuppa, City Hall reporter Michael Lafleur, Lowell Schools reporter Jennifer Myers, Statehouse reporter Matt Murphy and Sun Editor Jim Campanini.
Posted by jimcamp at November 12, 2007 7:33 PM
