To someone from outside Northampton, it may be hard to see much difference between the two candidates vying for mayor.
On policy, the differences between acting mayor David Narkewicz and former city councilor Michael Bardsley are, for the most part, nuanced. In recent interviews with the Advocate, both were, to a certain degree, critical of the way the city, under former Mayor Clare Higgins, approached a number of recent issues, especially issues of transparency and public process. In some cases, they recommended similar remedies.
In many ways, Bardsley and Narkewicz speak the same language. Both are former ward councilors, councilors at large, and City Council presidents.
Both appeared to be close allies of Higgins at one time; both eventually took stands against her. Bardsley opposed her plan to rezone neighborhoods around Smith College; Narkewicz parted ways with Higgins over what to do with the community landfill.
As campaigners, neither has been content to let his record speak for itself. Each has sought to sell a persona in media interviews, debates and advertising.
“So when there’s a time needed, I will take the difficult, courageous step, and that’s leadership,” Bardsley said earlier this month—during a two-hour debate in which he used the word “courageous” five times.
“I … feel like many of the issues that have been discussed here are … part of another generation of political leaders,” Narkewicz said, referring to questions about incidents that had happened during Mayor Higgins’ term. “I’m not a part of that. I’m putting myself as a new generation of leadership for the city, in an attempt to try and move us forward.”
These aren’t new identities—the cagey activist and the forward-thinking soccer dad. Narkewicz and Bardsley have been growing into them for years. And judging bythe early harvest of political lawn signs this season, more than a few voters already knew which identity they liked best long before the debate deluge began.
This year’s debates, though, have revealed real distinctions between these two progressive liberal Democrats. They’ve also revealed, on occasion, the varying degrees of truth behind the personas the candidates are trying to project.
“It’s not something that I believe will be the magic bullet,” Narkewicz said, referring to the state’s move to legalize casino gambling. The candidate was answering a question in an October 12 Advocate debate about how Northampton should deal with casino gambling coming to Western Mass., perhaps to Holyoke. “But if it’s coming, it’s coming, and we have to be proactive and make sure Northampton has a voice in that process. That is something I would try to do as the mayor.”
Throughout the debates, Narkewicz repeatedly took the same approach: rather than voicing harsh criticism and a will to fight for an ideal he believed in, he lamented a bad policy decision or situation, but bowed to its inevitability.
Another example: “I think that this is a game that the state has set up in terms of school choice,” Narkewicz said. “It’s here to stay, and it’s not going away. I think we need to promote our schools and market our schools like every other district. If it helps us to be able to have the revenue to provide a great education, then we have to work within that system.”
Activist Bardsley, meanwhile, responded to the question about casino gambling by recalling what he said a long time ago, emphasizing his experience: “In previous discussions around the Council—this goes back 10, I want to say 16 or 18 years, because I remember [former] Councilor Judith Fine was part of the discussion—my concerns have always been about the economic and cultural impact a casino would have on Northampton. It could really have a serious negative effect on some of the restaurants here. On some of our shops. On our cultural events.”
Bardsley’s habit of expressing the degree of his commitment to issues by underscoring the length of time he’s been around may remind his detractors of his former incarnation. Before his defeat by Higgins in the last election, Bardsley had spent his long political career working in concert with other insiders, not against them.
Up close and in person, he’s more the longtime high school guidance councilor than flag-waving maverick. Still, the straight-shooting activist comes spilling out:
“I think the School of Choice is another sort of broken system,” Bardsley said in answer to the question of public schools marketing themselves to attract School Choice students. “I think it penalizes schools and communities and pits people against each other. Education shouldn’t be a competitive sport. We need to put the resources in there to support all children of all communities.”
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Throughout the campaign, both candidates have used accounts of previous political experiences to questionable effect.
When invoking the courageous stances he’s taken, Bardsley often alludes to his opposition to a zoning deal the city made with Smith College and the passionate speech he made in September, 2006 critiquing the process. While pivotal professionally for the former councilor—it was the alleged beginning of a movement by the mayor and her allies on the Council to oust Bardsley as Council president and derail any mayoral aspirations he might have—the issue and his position on it are less memorable. Further, since he made his critique so late in the zoning approval process, many critics, including fellow councilors, have seen his break as both politically motivated and hypocritical in relation to his previous stances.
Bardsley appears stronger when he offers more recent examples of his responsiveness to public outcry.
“I played a large role in getting [a non-binding referendum on whether to close the Northampton landfill] on the ballot,” he said in the Advocate debate. Bardsley also put his name to an effort to appeal approval of redevelopment plans for the Three County Fairgrounds. Yet he did not respond to a request for comment on the matter from the Advocate (“Looking for a Fair Fight,” Oct. 13, 2011), and during the debate he only mentioned it tangentially, as part of a more involved thought.
“With a process, we need to be above board and transparent at all times,” Bardsley said, responding to a followup question about economic development in Northampton. “People felt like that hasn’t been done at various times with the hotel, with the fairgrounds, and with Hospital Hill. Hospital Hill and the fairgrounds represent these partnerships, public private partnerships, and I think we really need to make it clear what the role of the public representatives are in these partnerships, because I think we’re treading areas here where there may be a conflict of interest.”
Such a critique, which may delight his most attentive supporters, seems to get lost. Instead of screaming these important points from posters or campaign advertisements, they are nested deep in debates.
In a similar way, Bardsley’s early campaign ad stunt, hiring a plane to fly over the city trailing a banner that read “Mayors Should Be Elected, Not Selected,” set an odd tone for the race, with a point missed by many. The slogan—referring to the head start Narkewicz may have received by being named acting mayor after Higgins’ premature exit from office to take a top spot at a local nonprofit—sounds more like an explanation for defeat than a cogent reason to vote for him.
If Bardsley seems to have had a hard time getting his pointed criticisms to add up to the portrait of a fearless leader, Narkewicz has had some trouble getting to his point without looking like an ineffectual bureaucrat. Here, for example, is his response to a question about complaints leveled at the Village Hill development for not providing the parks, community center or historic memorial as promised:
“When I served on the [Citizens’ Advisory Committee that oversees the development], I was on a subcommittee …to look at these issues of the amenities and the community center, and I know this is a strong piece that needs to remain part of the master plan.”
Narkewicz didn’t say what he plans to do to make certain the parks, memorial and community center are provided.
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During the Advocate debate and in many of the others, Bardsley generally kept his responses concise, often using less time than allotted.
Narkewicz packed his responses with detailed information, but he regularly brushed up against the time limit without making his own position clear. Typically, there was a formula to each of his answers: explain the two sides of a controversial issue, prescribe clear communication, and outline a process that would answer all dimensions of the problem through teamwork. By accentuating the positive, Narkewicz sidestepped the negative.
At one point in the debate, both candidates were asked to respond to the fact that Northampton’s population has grown little in 50 years while housing development in the city has exploded, leading to massive urban sprawl.
“Yeah, and this is true, and this is something that came out in our Sustainable Northampton plan,” Narkewicz said. He used the rest of his time to rephrase the question as an issue about transportation, not development and sprawl: “Whether you’re talking about homes or cars, the population is flat, but we have more cars. I think it’s just the structure of how people are living. Many people are having less children. Many people are retiring here from other places. And we’ve talked about this issue, about how we want to manage how our city grows. Part of Sustainable Northampton is about looking at what are the areas of the city where we want to encourage growth, and what are the areas the city wants to try to [keep] open. And retain that open-space character of the city as well. And also try to make sure that people are living close to where we can provide city services and city utilities, so that housing doesn’t become like a loss-leader in terms of impact on the city budget….”
If Narkewicz has a clear position on how to deal with urban sprawl, it didn’t come out in response to direct questions about the issue, but in an explanation of his campaign slogan, “Moving a Great City Forward.”
To move the city forward, Narkewicz said, “We have to try to expand our commercial tax base especially. I think we need to take advantage of the small amount of developable land we have, but really try to maximize that so we can grow the tax base without putting pressure on homeowners.”
It still isn’t clear how Narkewicz will balance sprawl against his plan to “take advantage of the small amount of developable land we have,” or, perhaps more important to his campaign for mayor, how his approach will substantially differ from his predecessor’s.
The emphasis each of the Northampton mayoral candidates has placed on critiquing the other’s projected image and defending the accuracy of his own has not served either particularly well. Both have seemed too often passionate about petty political disputes; neither has been able to completely lift himself above the fray and demonstrate a clear vision for the city’s future.
For Narkewicz, the disconnect between his rhetoric about moving the city forward and his rhetoric about the city’s many successes ultimately sidesteps at least some of the concerns of the city’s many disaffected voters—concerns that undoubtedly animated Michael Bardsley’s 2009 squeaker against Clare Higgins. Meanwhile, Bardsley, whose near-upset of Higgins last time suggested an insurgency with sustainable momentum, has had a hard time tying Narkewicz to the Higgins regime without appearing to be swinging at ghosts.
