At a campaign stop in Springfield last week, Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker was joined by at least one unexpected supporter: City Councilor Tim Rooke, a long-time Democrat.
“What I like about Baker is, he has a proven track record in private business. As a small-business person myself, I found that very attractive,” Rooke, who’s vice president of a Springfield insurance agency, told the Advocate.
Particularly resonant with Rooke are Baker’s calls for ending wasteful government spending. Throwing his support to Baker offered Rooke another opportunity to draw attention to—and take some swings over—the decision to move the Springfield School Department into the vacated federal building on Main Street without seeking competitive bids for other sites. Rooke was infuriated by the decision, backed locally by the Sarno administration and on the state level by the Patrick administration, to sign a 20-year lease for that building, which is now owned by MassDevelopment, rather than shop around to see if the city could get a better deal elsewhere. Factoring in rent and renovation costs that will be picked up by the city, Rooke estimates the deal will waste about $11.5 million in taxpayers’ money. (See “The Right Move?” Aug. 27, 2009)
Rooke said he’d made repeated calls to Patrick’s office and to the Executive Office of Administration and Finance about his concerns, but was ignored. (The only return call he got, Rooke said, was from A and F chief Leslie Kirwan, who no longer holds that job.) He’d also challenged Mayor Domenic Sarno to a public debate on the issue; the mayor didn’t bite.
Rooke compares the fiscal crises both in Springfield and on the state level to a torpedo hit on a submarine. “We’ve been hit by the torpedo and nobody wants to close the door, and we’re all sinking because nobody wants to make a difficult decision,” he said. He points to Baker’s turnaround of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, which included layoffs, as the kind of tough but necessary decisions that will be required of the next governor.
Will the councilor receive flack for turning his back on his party’s candidate to endorse the Republican? Rooke, a member of Springfield’s Ward 7 Democratic City Committee, said he called the committee’s chair (former City Councilor Bud Williams) to inform him of his plans to back Baker and to say that he’d resign from the committee if any other members called for him to do so. At last check, that hadn’t happened.
