Make that four days until the preliminary election—and yes, things are heating up.
Yesterday, City Council President Jose Tosado announced a rather nice coup: he’s scored the endorsement of the Springfield patrol officers’ union. “We believe José has the right temperament to lead this city,” Joe Gentile, the union president, said in the announcement. “He has shown a strong willingness to listen to differing opinions and look for new and innovative ways to solve problems. These are characteristics that are very important to us.”
Tosado, who served as a member of the Police Commissioner during the Albano administration, had been meeting with city cops for months, and his campaign was practically hyperventilating over the endorsement. (The day before the announcement, on the steps of SPD headquarters, Tosado campaign consultant Ryan McCollum sent out a press release in which he employed the double-whammy of both bold and italic fonts: “I cannot stress enough that the subject matter is urgent and in my opinion the biggest announcement of the campaign to date.”)
The cops’ decision to back Tosado is a blow to incumbent Mayor Domenic Sarno, who’s long ran as a law-and-order candidate. “This endorsement says two things loud and clear,” Tosado said. “One: our current mayor is simply not getting the job done when it comes to public safety. And two: my concrete ideas for proactive policing, creating a gun squad, working with the DA to establish a gun court, and rebuilding trust in the community should become a reality. Rank and file police officers have been listening, and today they have taken a strong stand.”
The Tosado endorsement also raises the question of how much support Police Commissioner William Fitchet has from the SPD’s rank and file. This summer, Tosado told the Advocate that, if elected, he’d replace Fitchet when his contract expires in 2013. “I think the job’s gotten beyond him at this point,” Tosado said—a strong statement that perhaps he would not have made if the patrol officers he was courting at the time embraced Fitchet. (The third mayoral candidate, School Committee member Antonette Pepe, is also critical of Fitchet, recently telling the Advocate, “He’s not getting the job done.”)
While Sarno has publicly downplayed the mayoral race, saying he’s more focused on doing his job, as the Sept. 20 preliminary approaches, that job has been, let’s say, rather heavy on the photo ops. This morning, Sarno and on-again-off-again ally state Rep. Cheryl Coakley-Rivera are in the North End holding a press conference about a neighborhood improvement construction project; at noon, he’ll be back at City Hall for a Native American flag-raising ceremony, with members of the Native American Intertribal Council of Western Mass. Earlier in the week, Sarno presided over an anti-bullying flag-raising ceremony, connected to a road race to be held tomorrow at Forest Park by the Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover Foundation, in honor of the city boy who committed suicide in 2009 after being bullied in school.
(A side note: What’s with all the grumpy pants on MassLive complaining about the decision by ABC’s Extreme Makeover show to build a new house for Walker-Hoover’s family, rather than picking a tornado victim? Look, I’m as creeped out as anyone by the exploitative/Queen for a Day aspect of those kinds of shows, but really? To quote that wise MassLive poster who goes by the name “granitefalls”: “Aren’t you just a little bit ashamed of yourselves? Don’t you even feel just the tiniest bit uncomfortable about the things you’re posting on this subject? Would any of you say these things out loud or post them if you had to use your full name?”)
Throughout the campaign, Tosado and Pepe have accused Sarno of an unhealthy attraction to the spotlight (“It’s nice to be nice, nice to have nicknames for everybody, nice to go to everybody’s funeral, nice to do the cha cha,” as Pepe colorfully put it in an interview with the Advocate. “It would be nicer if we didn’t have 15 murders, didn’t have the robberies, didn’t have the failing schools and the mess we have.”) Now, an anonymous Sarno critic has picked up the theme, via a Twitter account called “NoMoreSarno.”
“There was another ribbon ruthlessly cut by our mayor,” the wag recently tweeted. And, in another post: “WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF RIBBONS ALREADY. Every day your slick Dom cuts another poor defenseless ribbon in an effort to go home and be able to sleep at night! His lust for ribbon cutting is insatiable, it’s been 4 years and in 4 more years our ribbon population will be extinct.”
