Shawn Oliver and Carmen Amaral will now face off in a Feb. 28 special final election that looks like it could bring as much attention to Ward 3 as has anything in years.
It was not her good qualifications that defeated Carol Pimentel. Rather it was the determination of the City Council not to follow the state’s 2021 directive to vocational technical schools to change their admission policies so that more English learners and disabled students can attend. Pimentel and the mayor support the reforms.
In the past month or so, I’ve had a chance to walk with all of these candidates in their home neighborhoods within the ward. I’ve learned a whole lot about both them and the different enclaves — some of them quite out of the way — that they call home.
Ventura is running perhaps the most traditional of the campaigns. He has issued a spate of press releases outlining his positions on issues, even criticizing certain actions of the current council.
“I’m just mad about what’s going on. I want to get in and basically right the ship, get it in place, and then be able to move on and pass it on to somebody else.”
Her advocacy is hard-won and emblematic of an immigrant’s success story. Amaral came to the U.S. when she was 4 years old, with parents who spoke no English. She grew up in the Portuguese enclave of triple-deckers around Madeira Field.
He’s taking a chance to see if he can knock on enough doors, leaflet enough cars, to possibly win this seat and perhaps shake this city government up a bit.
“No one person is going to solve all the problems in the city. You have to listen to other voices. I know we do that in my own family. There’s people out there that probably have the greatest ideas that I never thought of.”
Oliver talks like a guy who’s interested in building consensus, almost like a Team New Bedford. “We’re all trying to fight for the same goal, to live well in a city and a place that we enjoy,” he said.
Join longtime New Bedford political writer Jack Spillane as he interviews the candidates during a special edition of The Chat on Wednesday, Jan. 11 at 7 p.m.
Sometimes I think that the smaller the stakes are, the worse elected officials behave. But that doesn’t mean we the public have to like it. And it doesn’t mean that this kind of hard-ball tactics and mean-spiritedness in our office-holders is right.
The council ignored the human resources expert, and in the end, voted 10-0 in favor of the raises. What all the council’s shenanigans did was to raise the cost of these salaries by about a million dollars a year.
This year, for the first time in a decade or so, there are no Christmas lights at Custom House Park. The downtown squirrels evidently ate through the wires for so many years that the DPI has given up, declining to spend “thousands and thousands” of dollars on replacements.
Ward 3 candidate is now saying the document is “proof” that he lives in New Bedford. That’s fair enough, I guess, as legal proof of his residency. But I don’t think it says anything about whether he lives there on a day-to-day basis.
Lee Blake and Timothy Dale Walker will join New Bedford Light columnist Jack Spillane for the latest episode of The Chat on Wednesday, Dec. 7 at 1 p.m. for a free hour-long discussion via Zoom about New Bedford’s place in the Underground Railroad.
RCCA lawyer Benjamin Fierro came before the ZBA last week and basically threatened that if New Bedford did not allow his client to open its medical office to dispense Suboxone prescriptions on Union Street, it would sue.
What finally did in Tom Hodgson was the decent, hard-working people of the city of New Bedford, Bristol County’s largest working-class community and the place that undoubtedly has sent the largest number of inmates and correctional officers to tangle with the county’s chief jailer these last 2½ decades.
Loading…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Sign up for our free newsletter
Receive in-depth news stories and arts & culture coverage from around New Bedford in your inbox every weekday.
SUPPORT LOCAL NEWS
Give today to keep The Light shining. As a nonprofit with no paywall we rely on reader donations to fund our high-quality reporting.
New Bedford Light is an IRS-determined 501(c)(3) Public Charity; all gifts are tax-deductible. Our EIN number is 86-2407296.