Inaugurations in New Bedford are a homespun thing.
The high school band plays “America the Beautiful” and the police and veterans march in with rifles, the firefighters with axes. The mayor, City Council, School Committee, etc., behind them.
I love it, and it’s important. It sets the tone for the very vital area of our lives dominated by local government.
This year’s important festivities, however, were regaled by the odd appearance of the sitting governor of the state, Maura Healey, who unexpectedly turned up to swear in Jon Mitchell to his astounding sixth consecutive term.
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To a local scribe more used to seeing the affable retired local judge Armand Fernandes swear in a succession of New Bedford mayors, it was striking. What could this honor from the governor herself possibly be due to?
Healey was mostly invisible during her brief stop in the city. She sat in the audience, not with the other dignitaries on the stage. She didn’t walk in with the procession.
When the state’s chief executive finally appeared at the podium, she talked for six brief minutes about all the important stuff, you know, like that “we” all know that New Bedford is a city that cares deeply about arts and culture and history. And then the governor of Massachusetts proceeded to say absolutely nothing about the biggest current topic of arts, culture and history in New Bedford — the closure of the UMass Dartmouth arts campus in the historic Star Store building in the middle of the downtown.
Healey announced no media availability ahead of her New Bedford cameo even though the mayor’s office had asked if she wanted one. As she exited the auditorium, her aide told those standing near the out-of-town TV cameras that she would take some questions. But local print media had already left to go back to City Hall for the election of the new council president.
The governor’s visit seemed for all the world to be more about the photo-op than anything else. The governor said absolutely nothing of substance during her inauguration remarks on any major issue facing the community.
She offered bromides like the following: “Caring and concern for the people around you. That’s how we’re going to get things done.”
Well, we all agree with that madame governor. But please come back again when you have a plan to bring the College of Visual and Performing Arts back to center city New Bedford, or a way to solve the inability to build affordable housing in this part of the state, or an idea about a faster way to replace New Bedford’s 100-plus-year-old public school buildings that are among the oldest in the state.
Mayor Mitchell, though he seemed to beam at the prospect of the photo of the governor swearing him in, didn’t offer much more than Healey in the way of new ideas during what seemed a flat 20-minute speech ushering him into his 13th consecutive year in office.
Mitchell may have been a decent enough mayor as far as New Bedford mayors go these last 12 years. But he definitely has benefited from the growing lack of public interest in local politics, and the weakness of political opposition during his now more than decade in office. Ditto for our increasingly ineffective Greater New Bedford legislative delegation, which has mostly been around a lot longer.
Especially disappointing to me, and hopefully to the rest of the city, was the very vague statement that His Honor offered about the loss of the state university arts campus in downtown New Bedford last August. He squeezed it into a single paragraph toward the end of his speech.
“The recent saga concerning UMass-Dartmouth’s Star Store campus demonstrated the threat posed to a city’s economic well-being when an anchor institution is imperiled,” he said.
Well, that’s true enough.
But then the mayor went nowhere with the problem.
In fact, he seemed to unwittingly call attention to his inability to solve what has been a catastrophe for the downtown, and it will be increasingly moreso as the months and, God forbid, years go by with that massive building in the heart of the commercial district sitting empty.
No, the mayor has not had the ability to fix the catastrophe, either through discussions with Gov. Healey, state Sen. Mark Montigny or especially through the out-of-touch state university system.
“We will continue,” said the mayor, “to support our existing anchor institutions, including the Star Store, and pursue every opportunity to develop or recruit new ones, including research institutions and government agencies.”
In depth: Continuing Star Store coverage
Read all The Light’s coverage of the departure of UMass Dartmouth’s College of Visual and Performing Arts from the Star Store.
Well, hopefully that continued support can improve a little. Because it certainly wasn’t enough to protect the UMass Dartmouth arts college from leaving New Bedford. And this business that Mitchell made about recruiting “research institutions and government agencies” sounds like he is going to make another run at bringing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offices, currently happily located in Gloucester and Woods Hole, to New Bedford.
Good luck with that, your honor. You’ve been unsuccessful at it in the past. And Gloucester just signed another five-year lease with NOAA and the agency even did a survey of its scientists a few years ago showing they preferred Cape Cod to New Bedford.
The Ocean Cluster is out there talking about science and research. Maybe there’s something to all this blue economy talk, but it seems very fuzzy at the present juncture. Without the UMass Dartmouth campus, downtown New Bedford is left with the Whaling Museum, temporarily closed Zeiterion Theater, the courts and City Hall as the extent of its commercial core.
Which brings me to the local legislative delegation.
Montigny was not in attendance at the inauguration. Neither were state reps. Chris Markey, Bill Straus and Paul Schmid.
Their absence speaks volumes about their attitude toward the city. And no, they can’t chalk it up to their distaste for the mayor. Their commitment to New Bedford ought to be bigger than any challenges they face working with one individual. Good on Reps. Tony Cabral and Chris Hendricks for at least attending.
Montigny, Markey and Straus have terrible relationships with Mitchell, and that’s one of the issues that is making everything involving state government harder in New Bedford.
Who knows if Montigny is even in the state this time of year, or many other times for that matter? He has not attended many, if any, New Bedford mayoral inaugurations in years.
This inability of Montigny and Mitchell to work effectively together has hurt New Bedford deeply. The mayor himself has said point blank that the state senator never informed him that he was not funding the downtown campus in this year’s budget, or that the campus was in danger of leaving New Bedford. The state senator, for his part, has told local talk radio that he didn’t bring the mayor in because there was no role for him. It was a state issue between the Legislature and recalcitrant university and state agencies.
And there you have it.
To be fair, I take Mitchell at his word that he has worked as hard as he possibly could since finding out, two weeks before classes were to begin, that Chancellor Mark Fuller was immediately skedaddling from the downtown with “his” university. Fuller is, of course, the other character who’s not communicating much with local officials.
But the fact is that no matter how hard Mitchell has worked to fix Montigny’s ill-conceived plan to defund the university in order to pay back it and Star Store owner Paul Downey, the mayor has not been able to do it.
Montigny may have legitimate concerns about whether Downey and/or the university failed to do adequate maintenance on the Star Store building but de-funding the New Bedford campus just allowed Fuller to scoot quickly.
So the biggest story of the year in New Bedford made no appearance at all in Healey’s remarks to the city, and only the briefest of ones in the mayor’s. That’s arrogant on her part and a failure to talk about the elephant in the room on his part.
Mitchell did have a few incremental ideas he put forth in this sixth inaugural. Without giving details, he resurfaced the idea of increasing penalties for absentee landlord violations. He said he wants to eliminate the residency requirement that he believes is inhibiting the city from hiring the best available managers; and he wants to reform the public safety dispatch system so it’s more efficient.
Otherwise, Mitchell once again took bows for long-standing declines in unemployment and crime that seem to me to have as much to do with macro trends as his own administration. He essentially gave the same speech at last March’s State of the City address, including the plaudits to the improvements to the parks and water walkways. But he didn’t unveil a single major new initiative, and one wonders what he has left after his long service in the job. I did like his repeating his calls for volunteerism and self-reliance, but is that message actually getting through in an era dominated by internet-driven social media that we don’t even totally understand yet.
The most remarkable comments of the night actually came from outgoing City Council President Linda Morad.
Morad, who has long had a reputation for going to war with her political adversaries, offered what seemed to me to be a genuine olive branch. She talked about New Bedford falling on occasion into the same type of “dishonorable political tone” that has plagued national politics.
I would say it’s more than “on occasion,” but I still thought it was a very positive gesture on the council president’s behalf.
“We must be willing to put aside our personal agendas, embrace each other’s differences, and work arm in arm for the betterment and future of the city,” she said.
Later, in the council chambers, after Councilor Naomi Carney had been unanimously elected council president amid a well of unanimous affection rarely seen for Morad or some other councilors, Morad approached New Bedford Light writers to tell us she will now be willing to return our phone calls. As the columnist who has been most critical of Morad, I thought it was a very fine gesture, and I hope we can both communicate positively going forward.
Though several folks I spoke with wondered how genuine it could be, given Morad’s past reputation, her comments seemed more than authentic to me. She is a person who cares deeply about her points of view and about the city itself.
Morad did something Monday night that you rarely see a politician do in New Bedford or anywhere else. She at least took partial responsibility.
“Having on occasion engaged in unsettling exchanges, I know that we must maintain respectful, thoughtful, logical reasoning to address our city’s issues,” she said.
And then later.
“I pledge to be at least one who shall offer and accept olive branches and proposals made in good faith.”
Perhaps coincidentally, Mitchell also nodded to the importance of politics at a local level involving people who know each other personally and having to live in the same place and directly interact with each other.
“You can be more confident about whom you can trust when you know their friends and family or their back story, or when you have the opportunity to look them straight in the eye,” he said.
Mitchell, indirectly at least, even acknowledged that he may not be right all the time, even with the strong opinions and self-confidence he possesses.
“These direct connections make it possible for a greater degree of government accountability, while allowing for government officials to make honest mistakes — as who after all, doesn’t make mistakes,” he said.
Well, that’s refreshing. I’d like a little more specificity about that going forward, Mr. Mayor.
As we’ve seen, no one — the mayor, the former council president, the media — has always been able to live up to that standard, in spite of our relative closeness to each other. But the mayor and Councilor Morad demonstrating some awareness that we can do better is a bit of a start for the new year, anyway.
Clarification: This story was amended on Jan. 3, 2024, to more fully explain Gov. Maura Healey’s limited interactions with the press at the inauguration of New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell and other city officials.
Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org
Will we be forced to amend T.S.Elliott’s, immortal lines:
“This is the way the Star Store ends,
not with a bang but with a whimper”
Really?