Amaad Rivera, Ward 6 representative to the Springfield City Council, says he’s proud of what he’s accomplished during his short time on the Council, and he intends to do even more—just from a different seat.
After initially taking out nomination papers to run for reelection to his ward seat, Rivera has changed his mind and decided to instead run for one of the Council’s five at-large seats—a decision that will undoubtedly lead to a much less dramatic election season in Ward 6 than what had been on the horizon.
Rivera took over the ward seat in January, after the mid-term resignation of Keith Wright, who’d beaten Rivera in the 2009 election. (Wright announced that he was stepping down to care for his infant son, who’d been born prematurely and has related health issues.)
The Ward 6 race was one of the most exciting of the 2009 election season. While in some neighborhoods, the races for ward seats were shamefully anemic, Ward 6 saw a lively race between Rivera and Wright (with the added drama of a write-in, proxy campaign for mayoral aide Tom Walsh, who insisted he wasn’t actually running). In broad strokes, Wright was backed by the Forest Park “political establishment,” while Rivera’s supporters included organized labor and activist groups. In the end, Wright defeated Rivera by a margin of 51 percent to 46 percent—1,444 votes to 1,292. (Another 80 voters cast write-in votes, the bulk of them, presumably, for Walsh.)
During the campaign, Rivera was criticized by some in the neighborhood for the amount of his support—financial and organizational—that came from outside Ward 6. Those criticisms resurfaced earlier this year as he prepared to assume the vacant seat, with at least two residents filing requests with the Secretary of the Commonwealth to determine if Rivera, who attends graduate school in the Boston area, actually lived in the ward. The city’s Election Commission ruled that he did; Rivera, meanwhile, protested that he was being unfairly targeted. In his early weeks on the Council, that tension was still in evidence, perhaps most notably in his battles with fellow councilor Kateri Walsh, an at-large rep and a long-time player in Ward 6’s political scene, over the approval of a renovation project at Forest Park Middle School.
But none of that, apparently, has dampened Rivera’s enthusiasm for his job. He says he’s proud of what he’s accomplished during his short time on the Council, from voting down the controversial wood-burning plant proposed in the city to organizing a new LGBT Pride week.
Rivera describes his broad base of support as one of his strengths, and says he thinks his work on the Council so far has won over some of the people who previously had supported Wright. “The problem with the situation I find myself in is, Forest Park is a fractured neighborhood that doesn’t need another divisive election,” he said.
“I did really well, when I ran last time, amidst lots of controversy,” Rivera said—controversy, he added, that he thinks was unwarranted. (“I’m not that exciting,” he joked. “I’m not a commie or a socialist.”)
An at-large seat would open up more opportunities for the kind of city-wide work he’d like to do, Rivera said. “My whole reason for running really was to work on issues that matter to everyone,” he said. “That’s not a cheesy tag line; that’s my whole background.” While Forest Park is a diverse neighborhood, he said, it’s not home to the kind of community organizations, such as the NAACP and the Urban League, that he describes as his “natural allies that I could work with on these issues.”
As of late last week, five candidates had taken out nomination papers to run for the Ward 6 seat, including former School Committee member Ken Shea, who has to be considered the early frontrunner. Opting out of the ward race, however, doesn’t mean Rivera won’t have a fight on his hands; of the five incumbent city councilors, four (Walsh, Tim Rooke, Jimmy Ferrera and Tom Ashe) have all taken out nomination papers. (The fifth, Council President Jose Tosado, is running for mayor.) In addition, nine other challengers have also taken out papers for at-large seats.
