Left In Lowell

In an editorial in today’s Sun, the paper asks the legislature (and for Governor Patrick, if it gets to his desk) to reject the request for a waiver on our city election primary. Some salient points, which have been made but should be made again:

Two years ago, state legislators warned the council to not request another waiver. Local legislators told councilors that deferring the preliminary was becoming habitual; they should either abide by the rules set forth in the city’s charter or change the rules.

Also, this, to explain why the Sun endorsed eliminating the primary two years ago:

Two years ago, The Sun supported the City Council in its push to waive the preliminary, but 2007 had unique circumstances. It included unexpected primary and general elections to fill former U.S. Rep. Marty Meehan’s seat. The two extra elections cost the city as much as $130,000 of which only $28,000 was reimbursed by the state.

However, there are no special elections this year and the money for the city preliminary election is already in the municipal budget.

It’s been pointed out to me, that in our last primary triggered by having over 18 candidates, there were a number of unserious campaigns, including one candidate who had pulled papers but was in jail. We had just 19 candidates. This time around, we have a great number of very serious candidates, much more than 19.

I also like this (bold mine):

We are additionally troubled by the council’s decision earlier this week to eliminate the preliminary regardless of the number of candidates running, which won’t be known for certain until Aug. 11, when nomination papers must be returned.

A big “duh” to that.

Finally, the really cool part (again, bold mine)!

In fact, The Sun communicated its position to Gov. Deval Patrick on Tuesday during an editorial board meeting. Patrick didn’t take a definite stance regarding a veto but said he hopes the petition never reaches his desk and that he would prefer to respect what a city’s charter provides.

I hope this is the case, and that’s why your letters and calls to Governor Patrick are so important. If you are a candidate who opposes waiving this primary, even better - make sure you let the Governor know you are running for city council and want a primary.

I never wanted LiL to be the story. That is why I regret that Councilor Rita Mercier chose to use the City Council meeting to lash out at anonymous commentators on blogs. I think a discussion on this topic is fair and necessary but mixing it up with the election process created confusion.

First and foremost, the great majority of individuals who post on this site our known to our community. Lynne, Kristin, Bob Forrant, Dayne, Kim, Paul, Jack and others. Yes, there are some who choose to remain anonymous for obvious reasons… like their job. I know the great majority of those individuals who post with a pen name. A few, I do not know, i.e. Prince Charming. By the way, why don’t we see such visceral reactions to Backtalk, or the paper’s topix section.

Yes, some comments on this blog as well as the other local ones are at times vicious and personal. But democracy can be ugly sometimes. However, one of its major components, ‘free speech,” gives all of us the opportunity to discredit the comments as well as the commentator.

At the heart of all this public criticism is not the anonymous commentators but the emergence of the blogsphere as a political force in Lowell. No, this has nothing to do with self-importance as I was accused by a commentator recently but an opportunity to discuss my views on the blogsphere and its impact.

In the past couple of years, the Lowell blogsphere (LiL, richardhowe, mrmillicty; jackiedoherty; right-side-of-lowell, the New Englander, lowellshallot) is impacting the public debate (well, maybe not the shallot; just kidding don’t start in on me ). In the past, the selection and advancement of public policy issues was solely in the hands of the City’s two media outlets: the newspaper and the radio station. In effect, a handful of people controlled the flow of information. So if you were a politician, your options were limited. Your rise and fall depended on the whims or agendas of editors and radio hosts. I like to think that the circle of influence and access has been fractured, if not broken.

The internet and blogging, including all the social network sites, have changed all of that. Anyone and everyone [with or without an agenda] who has access to a computer can voice his/her valid or invalid opinions. The message is then read, absorbed, debated, rejected or embraced, and those messages that withstand this scrutiny are then elevated to the larger public forum. The advantage and disadvantage of the internet is that it is almost impossible to control; that is where democracy comes in.

Given a choice between 100’s of people shouting in the public square or 4-5 whispering on the pages of the newspaper and on the airwaves, I will take the former.

I find the current city council majority appalling. I suppose that’s not a secret.

The first thing that comes to mind after watching them violate the spirit, if not the law, of our city charter in firing Sheehan, and now voting to save a few tens of thousand to deny us a charter-required primary if we see more than 18 candidates, is that I wonder just where this concern for the taxpayer was in every other damned meeting this last year?

Voting to cut a single, solitary position from the budget. Voting to kill a primary. They doth protest too much about this being about money in hard times, so much so it’s obvious they know that we know that it just isn’t so. But the real, telling proof of this is the select nature of savings they’ve chosen to champion. My god, do they think the voters are stupid?

C. Armand Mercier told me to my face he didn’t think that eliminating the primary was that much of a disadvantage for the challengers. He’s wrong, so either he’s a) not thought this through or b) lying and preserving his own advantage. Either way, I find that incredibly disturbing. Having a nonthinking city councilor is almost as bad as a compromised one.

How does eliminating the primary disadvantage the challengers? Let me count the ways.

First, there’s the mixing up of the names instead of having the incumbents listed first. This is a huge point and needs to be made again and again.

Then, there’s the fact that having all comers on the general election ballot (instead of narrowing them down to 18) dilutes the anti-incumbent vote, should there be a large segment of the voters who want change. (Like, say, maybe this year?) A voter has only 9 votes, and if these are to be spread among more than 9 challengers, it is harder for any one challenger to make it to the winner’s circle. This is also a very huge disadvantage if we skip a primary. (Dick makes this same point on his own blog - both of us saw this argument independent of each other, by the way.)

Finally, there’s the publicity that a primary can bring. If a challenger does well enough, they will be taken more seriously and a buzz will be created around their campaign. It’ll be easier for them to get news coverage in the paper, on radio, and on blogs. The same dilution factor that exists for the votes exists for news coverage, after all.

The points that argue that a primary disadvantages challengers is far outweighed by these advantages for incumbents if we don’t have a primary. The mixing up of the names randomly is alone worth having our primary. As to a money disadvantage (campaign spending for two elections instead of one) no challenger I have talked to (and I’ve had the privilege of meeting some new faces this week) says they wouldn’t want that challenge. Not only for the sake of their own candidacies and their chances for election, but also for the sake of fairness, and democracy.

To be mocked and derided in breathtaking anger by the majority of city councilors for wanting that…I find this particularly reprehensible.

And then, the fact that this majority chose, instead of raising the number of candidates that would trigger a primary, to eliminate it altogether - so even if 50 people took out papers to run, there’d be no primary - is absolutely disgusting, and is reason enough for our delegation to not push for this Home Rule petition, or - for the Governor to veto it. In fact, you might just want to call the delegation, and the Governor’s office (617.725.4005 or 888.870.7770 in state), to register your opposition.

The public has not had their voice included in this decision, because once again our councilors decided to ask for a waiver via Home Rule instead of a charter change. If they had been so damned concerned about this, why not start the charter change process two years ago when this was brought up, rather than wait, once again, until the last minute, and bypass the voters?

Yes, I hide behind a fake moniker on this website. I hang my head in shame. And Mimi is a total anonymous nickname designed to lull you into a false sense of security.

All the prominent professors and community members who post here, all fake as well. We’ve been fooling you all for years.

Boy, didn’t Rita Mercier give this blog the best. Gift. Ever! at yesterday’s meeting.

The only word I can use to describe this is…unhinged.

On his blog, Dick has a concise report and analysis of yesterday’s City Council vote (5-3) to eliminate this year’s primary in order to save the City about $40,000. He writes:
Whether having a primary helps or hurts

incumbents is open to debate. One argument says a primary can serve as a wake-up call to an incumbent whose support has eroded, providing time to intensify campaign efforts before the final election. A contrary argument says that challengers are the beneficiaries of primary elections. The incumbents are constantly on TV, in the newspaper, and at official events and have an almost infinite opportunity for free media exposure. In contrast, challengers struggle for attention, exposure and, most of all, legitimacy. If the perception is that a challenger has a good shot at winning a seat, then he likely will. And what better way to create that perception than a strong finish in the primary election?

Some of the challengers were in attendance yesterday including Patrick Murphy who addressed the Council. Murphy began his speech by stating:

It is about the democratic process that I wish to speak tonight. There are differing thoughts on whether or not a primary election helps challengers or incumbents; yet this will not change how I campaign, nor is it my chief concern. Instead, what concerns me is the bypassing of our city charter which clearly calls for a primary election in the event that there are more than eighteen candidates.

Here is the clip of his 2 minute speech:

The City Council Rules Sub-Committee will have a meeting next week to begin the process of a Charter change. Hopefully, this will give the voters a chance to be part of the process and we will not need to go through this in 2 years.

Lynne, who attended last night’s meeting, will post on her observations later today.

I had the pleasure of spending some time with the Governor and his people (and adorable new black lab puppy) in downtown Lowell today. Marie has a great post about this morning’s campaign meeting (including her run in with the puppy hehe). The campaign for reelection is official!

As Marie mentioned, I jumped in with a question I think a lot of progressives are going to have about the Governor’s new push for more charter schools. Progressives themselves are on both sides of this issue, and it’s one that I don’t have a specific passion for or against, though I do have a lot of skepticism about them.

For some people, this new policy announcement on charters is make or break for them, and they are highly disappointed. I hope the Governor gets an opportunity to engage with these folks, as their opposition is well-founded, in several studies that show that charters are hit or miss when it comes to performance on educating their students, and on a concern of withdrawing vital resources from public schools.

However, the Governor did point out that this policy is part of a larger one involving other options for still-failing school systems (the “Readiness” program), as well as some more accountability and more restrictions on charters, the concept that they will have to begin taking all comers, not just “skimming the cream,” and be measured on a yearly basis. I hope we can get more details on this (for us policy wonks) so we can truly examine it.

On a lighter side, it was fun, and amusing to hang out downtown (in the rain) watching the Governor coax his new best friend to keep up. Toby often had other ideas about when he wanted to stop and sniff, or sit down, including one episode where Toby plopped himself right in the middle of a crosswalk on Merrimack St. Too funny.

Patrick visited several places in downtown, including the Market St Market, Mambo Grill (getting reacquainted with now-candidate Franky Descoteaux!), Chantilly Place - now owned by a young woman whose mother called in during the Governor’s WCAP visit, Brew’d Awakening, and one place I didn’t catch the name of…a program for helping people with addictions, I think. (I know, sorry, I should have been paying more attention, but Toby was soooooooo cute!) Also at this morning’s meeting and at Brew’d later on (by happenstance) was CC candidate Ryan Berard.

The Governor also visited UTEC today. I love UTEC. You guys are awesome, and I know that the Governor was very impressed with your work. And I got to say hi to my peeps, Gregg and Juan Carlos, who stopped by afterwards.

Just as a quick aside, I’ve created a regular page where a list of candidates, links to candidate pages, and some of our past posts on the city council and school committee races will reside as a sort of conglomerate information clearing house.

If I’m missing anyone or anything, or you want to send me links to other blogs’ posts on these subjects (I won’t have time to go through everyone else’s blog to do this myself), please email me (lynne at leftinlowell.com - replace “at” with an @).

I’ve only had time to write up the CC race; but also, the SC race is a little more…nebulous. So if you want to hand me that info in comments I’ll gladly update.

You can also reach this page in the upper lefthand column, and I will put a prominent link in the header as well.

The special city council meeting to discuss denying the voters their right to have a primary, ostensibly to save us poor taxpayers pittance for money (but we know better). Instead of holding it at a time when viewers will be home from work and available to attend or view the meeting, they are holding it at 5:30 pm tonight.

As you can tell, I’m very disappointed in our city council for considering this, yet again, when it only benefits the incumbents. If you can get to the meeting (harder since they scheduled it so early) please do it.

Edit: from a comment by KRS:

Was just advised that the cost for the primary as CC AK, indicated (in the cost he pulled out of is netherlands), is NOT $60,000. The cost of the primary in the City of Lowell, is more likely cost in the area of $25,000.
So, for the cost of fireworks, we could have two elections!

Is it time for a primal scream moment? SIGH.

[Bumped - event is tomorrow morning.]

As mired as we are in our local elections right now, there’s another election gearing up too. This next Tuesday, Governor Patrick and his campaign team will be in Lowell to meet with people interested in working with the campaign. I got this invite from Clare Kelly of the Deval Patrick Committee:

As the campaign is gearing up, we would like to invite you to a meeting with the Governor and Chairman of the state party, John Walsh. Hear directly from the Governor on some of the upcoming initiatives and find out how to get involved in the campaign as we are gearing up.

The meeting will be held on Tuesday, June 21st at 8:30 AM at the Western Ave Art Studios, at 122 Western Ave, Lowell.

To start, we would like to you tell us you’re still with Deval by clicking here. (Note: you will be required to create an account if you do not already have one at apebble.com.) If you have any problems please feel free to contact me.

Hope to see you there.

So if you are interested in learning more about Governor Patrick’s campaign for reelection, this is a good place to do it!

Anchorman Walter Cronkite has died. He was the voice of news for decades, and spent his influence well.

Rest in peace, sir.