After a good deal of eleventh-hour drama, it looks like the long-awaited renovation of Springfield’s Forest Park Middle School is back on track.
The political fallout from the aforementioned drama? That could take a little longer to resolve.
Last week, the Springfield City Council took a series of votes necessary to move the project forward, including taking, by eminent domain, six properties adjacent to the school and authorizing spending $2.1 million to pay for those properties and help relocate the displaced owners and tenants, as well as other related costs. That move opens the way for the renovation and expansion of the century-old school building, which will gain more parking and a new gymnasium, among other improvements.
The vote was widely applauded by Forest Park residents, who’ve been waiting years for the project to get off the ground. But undercutting that relief is a sense of frustration from some in the neighborhood toward their newly sworn-in ward councilor, Amaad Rivera.
A week earlier, Rivera had halted a first attempt at voting through the middle school project, raising general concerns about the public process and specific concerns about whether the displaced property owners were getting a fair deal from the city. Rivera invoked “Rule 20,” a Council rule that allows any single councilor to postpone a vote until the city comptroller produces a report on its financial effects. That move prompted cries of protest from residents anxious to get the project done, as well as warnings from city officials that delays could cause the city to lose a 90 percent cost reimbursement promised by the state.
It also tore open a political wound that has been festering since the 2009 election, and that has had little time to begin healing.
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Rivera assumed the Ward 6 councilor’s seat in January, after the midterm resignation of Keith Wright, the candidate who beat him in the 2009 election. That election was a contentious one, pitting Wright, who was generally viewed as the pick of the Forest Park “establishment,” including the Forest Park Civic Association, against Rivera, the “outsider” with a track record as a social justice activist.
Rivera’s supporters praised his commitment to the kinds of social issues that are key to the city’s future; his detractors questioned his commitment to connecting with Forest Park’s diverse constituencies, and raised their eyebrows at the amount of financial support he received from donors outside the ward, and outside the city.
According to campaign finance reports, Rivera received 98 campaign contributions, totaling about $10,500, during his 2009 campaign. Only 19 of those donations—about 20 percent of the total—came from donors who listed Springfield addresses. The rest of his contributions came from donors from other Valley towns, from the Boston area, and from a number of other states, including New York, Connecticut, Texas, Maryland, Florida and Iowa. While it’s not unheard of for candidates to raise some money outside the city, the large number of Rivera’s outside contributions was unusual, particularly for a ward councilor, whose first responsibility is assumed to be the residents of his or her immediate community.
No sooner had Wright announced his plans to leave the Ward 6 seat—the councilor said he wanted to spend time with his infant son, who was born prematurely last summer and continues to have health struggles—than some of that election-season rancor resurfaced. A few residents asked the city’s Election Commission to verify that Rivera, who attends graduate school in eastern Mass., still lived in the ward; their requests were backed by some councilors, including at-large Councilors Tim Rooke and Kateri Walsh. Rivera and his supporters protested that request, with some charging sour-gapes motivation, and others calling it bigotry. (Rivera is of black and Latino heritage; Wright is white. Forest Park is a racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood.)
The Elections Commission confirmed that Rivera was a resident of Ward 6, and the new councilor was sworn in to his seat in January. The ceremony, however, was not without its awkward moments: at the same meeting, the Council elected its president and vice president for 2011. Typically, councilors scrap and horse trade and otherwise hash out who will get those positions prior to the meeting, then, for the sake of form, elect the new officers unanimously. This year, however, Rivera declined to vote for Walsh—one of the councilors who supported requests that his residency be verified—for Council vice president, instead voting “present” during the roll call.
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Soon enough, Walsh and Rivera were butting heads again over the Forest Park Middle School. (While Walsh is an at-large councilor, she lives in Forest Park and has taken a lead on the renovation project.)
At the Feb. 7 Council meeting, Walsh and Rivera clashed over the latter’s contention that the project had not been sufficiently aired at public meetings. A few days later, such a public opportunity did, in fact, present itself, at the annual meeting of the Forest Park Civic Association. Rivera had initially been expected to attend, along with a number of other city officials. In the end, however, he did not appear, citing a teaching commitment in Boston.
Rivera did send along a representative to present his side of the debate. But that did little to appease those residents who felt slighted by his absence and frustrated by their inability to discuss the school project with him in person.
Two days later, the Council—now supplied with the comptroller’s report triggered by Rivera’s invocation of Rule 20—took up the matter again, passing the land-taking and financial orders. This time, Rivera supported the measures, which passed by votes of 11 to 0. (Two councilors were absent.) And, in fact, Rivera can claim a moral victory from the affair: the financial order approved by the Council increased the total amount of money to be paid to the displaced property owners by $130,000. (Rivera also got an acknowledgement from Rita Coppola-Wallace, the city’s director of capital asset construction, that the end-of-February deadline to qualify for the state reimbursement earlier invoked was, in fact, a city-imposed deadline, not a state deadline. Coppola-Wallace maintained that the tight schedule was necessary to get the project done.)
While the property owners and tenants who will be moved to make way for the project might feel grateful to Rivera for the increased payments, that development has been to a large extent overshadowed by neighborhood resentment over his initial vote and his failure to appear at the Forest Park Civic Association meeting. In the days following the association meeting, an anonymous contributor on MassLive’s Springfield forum posted contact information for residents interested in starting a petition to recall Rivera.
A recall effort seems unlikely, and perhaps unwise; it’s a contentious process in general and, in this case, if Rivera were recalled, the city would find itself in the sticky situation of figuring out just who would get the vacated seat. (There was no third-place finisher named on the ballot in the 2009 election, although Tom Walsh, a FPCA member and spokesman for Mayor Domenic Sarno, did receive a number of write-in votes after a group of neighbors began circulating his name as a candidate. Walsh did not, however, actively campaign for the seat.)
Perhaps a better solution would be to use the nine months between now and the regular election as a cooling-off period, a time for Rivera and those dissatisfied constituents in his ward to try to get past their presumably mutual resentments and frustrations and develop a healthy, if not always harmonious, working relationship. Barring that, it’s hard to imagine that a rival candidate won’t step up to challenge Rivera in the fall.
