This was not an easy summer for Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno.
The season started with a tornado that ripped through his city, wiping out homes and schools and businesses, some of which are unlikely ever to be rebuilt. The city’s murder rate continued to climb—15 so far this year—and it seemed like not a weekend went by without reports of shootings and stabbings around town.
And Sarno’s administration caught all kinds of heat, first for a little-known sweetheart deal granted to School Superintendent Alan Ingram, who got $30,000 to buy a house in the city but never did, then for a couple of sloppy City Hall payroll errors—including one that resulted in the city’s owing Ingram even more money—just a few months after news broke of an earlier screw-up in which the city’s teachers were overpaid to the tune of $1.2 million.
Should Springfield residents have missed any of Sarno’s woes, well, there were two people determined to make sure they got the news: City Council President Jose Tosado and School Committee member Antonette Pepe, Sarno’s two challengers in this fall’s mayoral election. In the months leading up to last week’s mayoral preliminary election, Pepe and Tosado largely gave one another free passes, saving all their ire for the incumbent.
In tag-team fashion, the two accused Sarno of sloppy fiscal management, of failing to develop an effective public safety plan, of rewarding Ingram (including voting to give him a $12,000 raise) while the city’s public schools floundered. Not even Sarno’s shining moment this summer—his shirtsleeves tour of tornado-ravaged neighborhoods, where he shook hands and assured victims that the city would support them through the difficult rebuilding process—was exempt from criticism; his opponents charged him with posturing for the cameras.
“The time has come to expect more for our city, and more from our leaders,” Tosado intoned in campaign press release after press release.
“It’s time we had honesty, fairness and accountability from those at the top,” Pepe, for her part, said in a release calling for a state audit of Ingram’s contract. And, in a statement criticizing the administration for a payroll error that affected teachers’ aides: “It is time for Mr. Sarno to take a better look at his finance department and finally get to the bottom of this.” The message from Pepe and Tosado couldn’t be clearer: It’s time for a change in Springfield—time for a new mayor.
At last week’s preliminary, Springfield voters responded to that message by giving Sarno 60 percent of the vote—a margin of more than two to one over the second-place finisher Tosado. Pepe, the gutsiest and most audacious of the three candidates, took just 16.5 percent of the vote. The challengers were peddling change, but the voters, apparently, weren’t buying.
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Just up the highway in Holyoke, preliminary day had a very different feel.
There, voters let it be known that they are at least open to change, by putting political newcomer Alex Morse at the top of the election results by one slim but oh-so-significant vote over incumbent Mayor Elaine Pluta. (The other two candidates, Dan Boyle and Dan Burns, finished well behind Morse’s and Pluta’s 39 percent almost-dead heat.)
A one-vote victory is not a mandate for Morse, but it is a powerful momentum booster. It’s also a strong sign that a sizeable portion of Holyoke’s voters (or at least of the ones that cared enough to cast a ballot) are excited by Morse’s positive and energetic campaign, and are undeterred by—or perhaps even attracted to—his relative lack of political experience, at least compared to the first-term Pluta, a 67-year-old former city councilor who’s also worked as an aide to U.S. Rep. John Olver and to former Mayor Danny Szostkiewicz.
The 22-year-old Morse, who graduated from Brown University this spring, has had to answer the age-and-experience question many times on the campaign trail already, and he’ll have to do it many more times before the Nov. 8 general election. And while the candidate seems to be growing weary of the issue (“Not about age, not about age,” he told Springfield Republican reporter Mike Plaisance on preliminary night), he’s handled those questions pretty well. In an interview with the Advocate this summer, Morse argued that his age gives him energy, means he’s not hooked up with entrenched political factions, grants him the edge when it comes to understanding the tech industry that he sees as key to Holyoke’s future.
Much as Morse might hate answering the question, it’s a fair one for voters to ask. Holyoke has an annual budget of $120 million, and it struggles with the kinds of problems that are all too common in post-industrial cities: crime, unemployment, struggling schools. Wise voters want to make sure that the person they select to lead their community has the qualifications for that tough job.
Based on last week’s results, a good portion of Holyoke voters think Morse is the wisest choice. For the next six weeks, Morse will continue to push his message hard—and the formidable Pluta, left on the defensive by the preliminary results, will be pushing back just as hard.
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Back in Springfield, it’s the challenger, not the incumbent, who will be sweating bullets between now and Election Day. With the aggressive campaigner Pepe now eliminated, Tosado’s left pushing the anti-Sarno message alone—and he’s pushing it uphill.
Tosado’s poor showing last week was not for lack of trying. His campaign has worked hard to cast him as a forward thinker with progressive ideas for the city. He’s called for adopting “best practices” from other urban areas, and surrounded himself with young activists and progressives like Aron Goldman, head of the Springfield Institute.
Calls for “change” are, of course, a political clich? and don’t mean anything without some substance behind them. Perhaps Tosado’s 23 percent support means that Springfield voters considered his ideas for change and just aren’t interested. Perhaps they’re just not buying the idea of Tosado—who entered city politics via Mike Albano’s 1995 mayoral campaign and sat on the School Committee and then the City Council during the years of the city’s fiscal decline—as a “change agent.” Or maybe they just like Sarno, think he’s doing a good job in difficult times, or consider him—as one voter told Republican reporter George Graham as he left the polls—”a nice guy.”
Lest anyone forget, Sarno is also a tough politician. In 2007, he shocked the city by defeating incumbent Mayor Charlie Ryan, the man who led Springfield out of the financial and ethical mess left by the Albano administration. That year, interestingly, the 44-year-old Sarno pitched himself as a fresh new alternative—a change, if you will—to the 80-year-old old Ryan. (Sarno also pitched himself as the guy who would rescind the city’s controversial trash fee, but changed his mind once he was elected.) Two years later, Sarno kept his job by walloping City Councilor Bud Williams (admittedly, a considerably weaker opponent than Ryan).
If Tosado’s going to fare any better, it seems, he’d better do some serious campaign retooling, or try to persuade a lot more people to show up to the polls on Election Day. Just 14.7 percent of registered voters—13,706 people in a city of 150,000—weighed in at the mayoral preliminary, and if precedent holds, not a whole lot more will come out in November. Forget, perhaps, the question of whether Springfield voters want change—do they even want a voice in their city?
