It’s not easy catching up on Springfield news after a vacation. I miss the days when MassLive had a special section just for Springfield news; now, I have to slog through a generic “news” section, skimming an endless string of stories I don’t care about (“4 Dead After Indiana State Fair Stage Collapses in Advance of Sugarland Concert”) to find the things I do care about (“Activists and Critics Disagree on Success of Ward Representation System in Springfield.”)
I cut corners a bit by checking in with my favorite Springfield blogs. While Western Mass. Politics and Insight was rather quiet last week, especially on city matters, over at the Springfield Intruder, Bill Dusty weighed in on the Superintendent Ingram contract fiasco (apparently now old news, given Ingram’s announcement today that he’ll leave the job next year), and on the upcoming City Council election (where I learned that candidate Bruce Adams has hired good old Danny Kelly, the former councilor, to represent him in a criminal case for allegedly stealing money from a Longmeadow Country Club where he once worked—charges he denies.) At Tommy Devine’s Cosmos Report, meanwhile, I got caught up on the latest in the painfully public battle between Ward 8 Councilor John Lysak and his ex-wife, who’s disseminated a couple of letters to local media (Devine was the only one to publish them) accusing him of abuse.
I also rely on some of my most reliable contacts for a crash course on what I missed while I was out of town, like the emails I got apprising me of the latest controversy to stick itself to City Councilor Amaad Rivera—namely, his failure to file campaign finance reports since October of 2009. (By law, candidates are supposed to file monthly finance reports, then twice-a-month reports in the last half of an election year.) That was shortly before Rivera lost his bid for the Ward 6 Council seat to Keith Wright; when Wright resigned early this year to care for his ill child, Rivera took over the seat. He’s running for re-election this fall, although for an at-large seat, not the ward seat.
Rivera told the Springfield Republican that the lack of reports was the result of a technical error. Similarly, at-large Councilor Tommy Ashe, who’s missing a couple of monhtly reports from this year, blamed the omission on “an improperly filled-out form,” according to the newspaper.
Good grief, just how tough is it to file your reports correctly, and on time? Is it harder than the work that city councilors are supposed to be able to do, like approving the city budget, or writing ordinances, or evaluating special permit applications? Let’s face it, Springfield City Hall has seen more than its share of numbskull pols over the years, and most of them have been able to master the finance-reporting laws, or at least find a campaign worker who can do it for them.
For Rivera, the omission could be particularly damaging. Opting to run at-large rather than for the Ward 6 seat would, presumably, have spared Rivera from dealing directly with the ire of his most critical Ward 6 constituents, who’ve complained that he appears more interested in a broader-based political career than in engaging with issues in the neighborhood (see, for instance, the messy battle over the new Forest Park middle school). Rivera also took a good deal of flack for how much of his campaign donations came from outside of the ward, and, in fact, outside of the city and state. No doubt, whenever his reports are made available (he told the Republican it will be by month’s end), political junkies in the city will go over them with a fine-toothed comb.
This spring, Rivera told me that he was running at-large in part to spare the ward another “divisive” election. But it’s looking like this time around, he won’t get that pacific election season he was hoping for.
