After years of hard work and political agitation, in 2007, reformers in Springfield achieved a sweet victory: voters approved, by a three-to-one margin, a plan to expand the City Council from its existing nine members, all elected at-large, to include eight members elected from their respective wards, with the number of at-large members reduced to five.
The change, supporters argued, would open up city government, allowing candidates to succeed based on their work and reputations within their neighborhood—not on citywide name recognition or the ability to raise campaign funds—and making those elected to the Council more accountable to the voters who put them there.
The new system got off to a slow start. While the 2009 election—the first in which ward councilors were elected—saw several spirited contests, the level of competition for the ward seats, overall, was disappointing. So was voter turnout: only 25 percent of registered voters even bothered to get to the polls. Supporters of ward representation suggested, hopefully, that the sluggish numbers didn’t indicate a lack of interest in the new form of government, but rather showed that the electorate and would-be candidates alike would need time to acclimate to the changes, before ward representation came to feel like business as usual in city government.
So two years later, what explains the abysmal level of competition in this fall’s ward races?
Last week was the deadline for candidates to submit the necessary signatures to get on the November ballot. And of the eight wards in the city, only one will have a contested race. (That race, in Ward 8, pits incumbent John Lysak against Orlando Ramos, whom he beat in a heated, and at times ugly, race in 2009. So far, all indications point to that race being another nasty one.) Six of the ward reps will simply slide back into their seats unopposed. (The remaining seat, Ward 6’s, is an open seat, left vacant by incumbent Amaad Rivera’s decision to run at-large this fall. And the race for that seat is already locked up by Ken Shea, a former School Committee member.)
If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because one persuasive argument for ward representation was that it would break up the long tradition of incumbents holding on to their seats unchallenged, the beneficiaries of some sort of divine right of city councilors. Ward councilors, the thinking went, would be more accountable for their actions and inactions—and more vulnerable to challengers who would seize their seats if their job performance wasn’t up to snuff.
Now, perhaps the lack of activity in this fall’s ward races means that all the non-challenged incumbent ward reps are doing such a super job that voters simply couldn’t imagine a better alternative. And indeed, a number of the ward reps have distinguished themselves for being especially responsive to constituents, or for taking on leadership roles in city-wide issues (Ward 2’s Mike Fenton, Ward 3’s Melvin Edwards and Ward 7’s Tim Allen come to mind). In fact, the City Council has, overall, been a rather lively body since the addition of the ward councilors; when was the last time, for instance, that the Council worked together to make cuts to the mayor’s proposed budget?
Still, a healthy democracy is supposed to include healthy competition—something that’s just not in evidence on this fall’s ballot, at least not when it comes to the Council’s ward seats. The five at-large seats, by contrast, are in such demand that the city will hold a preliminary election in September to narrow down the field before the November election. (There will also be a preliminary to reduce the three candidates for mayor—incumbent Domenic Sarno, School Committee member Antonette Pepe and City Council President Jose Tosado—to two.)
Four of the five at-large incumbents—Tommy Ashe, Jimmy Ferrera, Tim Rooke and Kateri Walsh—are running for re-election. Tosado’s decision to run for mayor leaves his seat free, which no doubt contributes to the large number of challengers. In addition to the incumbents, nine other candidates, including Rivera, are running for at-large seats.
Does that flurry of activity suggest that, in the end, at-large seats are still the Council’s glamour positions, viewed by candidates as somehow more valuable than the ward seats? If so, it’s the city neighborhoods that—once again—lose.
