In 2024, both Springfield's city council and school committee saw high-stakes debates and votes early on. How they navigated them, plus primary challenges and a drunk driving incident involving the Hampden County Sheriff, were some of the city's top political stories of the year. WAMC's Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief James Paleologopoulos spoke with Matt Szafranski, Editor-in-Chief of Western Mass. Politics & Insight, about how it all played out.
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WAMC: Matt, I want to start things off with the biggest municipality in the valley - both the Springfield City Council and its school committee had a fairly loaded first half of the year.
I want to start with the council - it started the year with having to vote on a new police superintendent and a bit of baggage that came with it.
They made headway with other matters - a draft of a community choice power supply program got approval, tree and solid waste ordinances got big rewrites, but before all of that, there was a showdown over Larry Akers and the powers he would be allowed, and the powers apparently given up by the Board of Police Commissioners earlier.
How would you describe the anatomy of that situation?
Matt Szafranski: It was bizarre in one sense, because everybody wanted Larry Akers to be police commissioner. I'm sorry, police superintendent, and I made that mistake intentionally, because the title has been renamed several times, sometimes by fiat, sometimes by legislation, and in this particular circumstance, there was a desire to make sure that he had the powers that previous police Superintendent Cheryl Clapprood had, which begs the question, why did she have these powers and he would not under the law?
And the reason was because the mayor had been, in effect, ignoring part of the police commission ordinance after he had lost in the Supreme Judicial Court.
Nevertheless, Mayor Sarno had appointed now-Superintendent Larry Akers to lead the police department and had requested that the city council basically gut the police commission ordinance as a means of ensuring that he would have these powers.
This created an uproar - an unusual uproar - in that it actually prompted the legislators to get involved in it, and the reason why they are important is because Superintendent Akers, this month, is turning or has turned 65, which is normally the mandatory retirement age for police officers in Massachusetts. They needed the legislature to waive that for an additional five years.
So, led by Senator Adam Gomez, there was a push to give these powers to Akers temporarily, so that, hopefully, the next time around, the police commission ordinance works correctly, and they're the ones that would choose a leader, or they come to some other kind of decision that keeps those powers with the commission, however the leader of the police department is chosen.
WAMC: One of the larger points that emerged during this entire debate was the memorandum of understanding that the Board of Police Commissioners apparently agreed to at one point in time, [apparently signing away various powers].
Councilor at Large Tracye Whitfield certainly put a spotlight on that during discussions over the ordinances. What did you make of that methodology?
Matt Szafranski: I would argue, and I'm … sort of putting my legal hat on when I say this - that those memoranda were a dead letter, I mean, it was essentially – “you had to sign this or you weren't going to get appointed to the Board of Police Commissioners.” That doesn't mean that it had any legal power. If they had chosen to ignore it and act without it, I don't think any judge would have overturned any decision that they would have made.
The SJC’s ruling against the mayor ... was a semi-landmark decision in a way, because, it may have been obvious – as somebody who has sat in that courtroom when the justices were looking at it, [it] seemed pretty obvious to them, the way the outcome was - but it was an important point, saying the council can reorganize city departments, and it clearly says that they can in the city charter, and this is a charter that's used by many municipalities, this is language that's used by a lot of municipalities. So, this is not something that's confined only to Springfield.
So - I know what that was going on with the MOUs, the mayor wanted to retain a degree of power over the police department that the ordinance did not actually give him. Nevertheless, it doesn't appear to have necessarily created a problem with Civil Service Commission rulings involving police officers, at least not yet.
It was interesting that the mayor had wanted to have this all changed so he wouldn't need the MOUs in the future and that ordinance … it was ultimately given a sunset clause so that it would be suspended upon the end of Superintendent Akers’s time as the leader of the police department.
I should mention, if I may, that the interesting thing was how, during the course of that debate, some of the councilors were asking about the home rule petition that would let him serve until age 70, and it includes language that actually would have … curtailed his contributions to his retirement, which is not unusual, but the effect would be … that his pay as superintendent would not factor in as much in what his retirement benefit would be, and he apparently didn't know this. He seemed surprised by it when councilors raised it to him.
What was weird was that - this was after the agreement had already been settled in terms of the ordinance - the mayor had described how there were discussions with the legislature and state retirement regulators saying that it would be fine if we just let him continue contributing, and that's not ultimately the law that was passed.
It took many months for that to pass, which surprised many people - normally, these things move pretty quickly, especially given the fact that Superintendent Akers was going to turn [65] this year, not next year, or two years down the road - this year.
In the end, it was passed as it was originally drafted, which means that his retirement will effectively be capped at what it would have been as of the month he turned 65.
WAMC: Matt as the author of [the] “Take My Council [,Please” series] - I need to ask, how did the council's productivity strike you this year?
Matt Szafranski: I think the city council did do some interesting things. They updated the tree ordinance, they updated the solid waste ordinance: these things need to get done.
They were not necessarily initiatives from within the council itself, though. There are a number of, what I would say, "committed bureaucrats" within the city that know some things need to be updated. People don't agree with them all the time on everything, but I think most of them mean well, and this was an example of it, whether it was the tree ordinance, which I don't recall, if that might have already been moving in gear before [Parks, Buildings & Recreation Management Executive Director] Pat Sullivan retired.
That was in the spring, so this was probably already in gear, but I don't think it was presented until after his retirement. And the solid waste ordinance … just reflected a lot of changes and reactions to the changes in disposal - and some of it is state law as well.
I mean, part of the solid waste ordinance is including a higher fee on mattress disposal, because that was apparently- it's been a problem in Springfield, because Springfield charges very little to dispose of mattresses. Other communities charge more, and it costs more to dispose of them, because they can't be just thrown in a landfill anymore.
These were important things that were changed, but it was not an initiative from within the council itself, and that is something of a break [from] over the last ten years or so.
I'd say, a few years after ward representation began, there was much more initiative to legislate from within the council, and that has tapered off over the last one to two years, depending on where you're counting and what that reason may be.
WAMC: On that note, Matt, I want to go ahead and zip over to the school committee, which also had a very busy first half of the year.
I will say currently, the temperature is much, much [cooler] - a lot of collegial exchanges as the school committee [continues] approving field trips and whatnot. And of course, they have a new superintendent joining them now, and Dr. Sonia Dinnall.
But before we got to this point – [there was] quite a bit of a stir going on … following the announcement of then-Superintendent Daniel Warwick retiring, setting off a application process that was the subject of much debate and quite a bit of factionalism, as well.
Getting there was tough, whether it was the community hearings, whether it was walkouts. What is the state of things, and how did that shake out in your view?
Matt Szafranski: There was a split on the school committee and what was interesting about it was, it was – [there’s] no way to sugarcoat this, it did split along racial lines, which is actually somewhat unusual in Springfield - there is, traditionally, much more of an establishment/non-establishment split in a lot of boards and commissions, particularly the elected ones in the city, that does not follow racial lines always.
It can, but it rarely does, and it did in this case, and it resulted in the school committee, basically choosing to go with Dr. Sonia Dinnall … as the [Superintendent of Springfield Public Schools], to succeed Daniel Warwick, but it was a very testy and contested process.
There were questions about how that list [of applicants] was narrowed down, and it resulted in, as you mentioned, walkouts by some members of the school committee, because this school committee was a majority, so, if they did not have four members out of seven there, they could not do anything. The mayor, who is formally the chair of the school committee, could just gavel in a session and wait a little while and gavel it out, they could not advance, and that's essentially what ended up happening, until they decided to ultimately go with Dr. Dinnall as the new superintendent.
It was led by Vice Chair Josiah Gonzalez, along with school committee members, LaTonia Monroe Naylor, Denise Hurst and Barbara Gresham.
Of course, [Dinnall's selection] did not end the drama - somehow a recording - what appears to be a recording, I should say - of outgoing Superintendent Daniel Warwick, ostensibly speaking to the unsuccessful candidate, Kimberly Wells, complaining about the process [surfaced].
Now, we don't have a full clip of it, but we have enough of it that it's clear that he was badmouthing a school committee member, LaTonia Naylor, and it ultimately resulted in Warwick leaving office early by about three or four weeks.
An unfortunate thing is, even though I think most people would think that Warwick preferred Wells as his successor, he did have a very, I think a generally positive reputation - there's some nitpicking you could have about some of the stats from Springfield schools, but they are not in receivership: their middle schools are in a type of receivership, but it's not what Holyoke went through.
There have been advancements, he was well-liked by most people across the political spectrum in the city and across the school department, and it was an ignominious end to - I don't want to use the word storied career, but a respected career.
And it kind of put an exclamation point on this very emotional at times and sometimes even angry selection process that, ultimately also kind of was a reminder that this is not the way things were before, where you could just barrel your way through whoever you wanted to be your nominee.
I'm not necessarily alleging that of the mayor and the other two school committee members, but that charge was leveled against them, and that's not the world we live in anymore in the city.
WAMC: [We had] a lot to talk about earlier this year when we saw [Hampden] State Senator Adam Gomez get a challenge from [Springfield] City Councilor Malo Brown and incumbent [11th Hampden State] Representative Budd Williams getting a challenge from Johnnie Ray McKnight.
[The races] played out the way that [they] did - rather one sided in the case of the state senate race. Having said that, Bud Williams got a bit of a run of it for his money when it came down to the final vote count.
Ultimately, how did that strike you? Was it a shot across the bow? Was it indicative of maybe rough waters in the future for the incumbents, or was it a one-time thing?
Matt Szafranski: Well, just full disclosure, I have served on boards and committees with Johnnie Ray McKnight, but that being said, I mean, it depends on who you ask.
From Bud Williams's camp, my understanding is that they acknowledge they didn't campaign very much, and, you know, as somebody who lives in that district, I can tell you: that's true. Certainly, he didn't campaign in my precinct! And so, there was an opening that McKnight was able to take advantage of.
I mean, McKnight was not a wholly unknown quantity - he had run for office in Springfield a couple times before. He came much closer to winning this time than he had for anything else he ran for before and I think … most people wrote him off as not having a hope in hell of winning.
He didn't- I mean the percentage, it doesn't look very close, because it's about only 6 percent, but if you look at the raw votes, it's like, what, 200 or so that separated him from Bud Williams? That would have been a thunderclap here and in Boston if McKnight had won, and you only need to win by one vote to prevail!
I don't know if he's going to run again, but certainly, there are people who would be interested in supporting him [who] maybe stood on the sidelines this time - now that they see that there's a vulnerability there.
This actually, though, directly connects with the senate race, of course, because Councilor Malo Brown is not just a city councilor, he's also a top aide to Representative Bud Williams, and when the door closes on his day job, as an aide, he certainly would have been working to help his boss run for re-election. Instead, Councilor Brown was running against Senator Adam Gomez.
That wasn’t a strange election in a lot of ways, because there wasn't really a clear argument for why Senator Gomez shouldn't win renomination. Senator Gomez, like a number of people in politics across the spectrum in the city, took the race very seriously from the beginning and tooled up right away - got all of his people together, got support from across the ideological, racial, community spectrums.
Senator Gomez's district also includes a little bit of Chicopee, as well - he completely dominated in that part when the primary results came in.
Senator Gomez completely nuked Councilor Brown in the results, and especially outside of the ward that Councilor Brown represents in the city council, although Senator Gomez won many of the precincts in that ward, as well.
That was, I think, a validation of Senator Gomez's work as a senator, but it was also, I think, a very clear example that campaigns really do matter. I think that's true of both races, both the house race and the senate race, and it was interesting, because even though there might not have always been a lot of substance in some of the moments of these races, [it] really did clarify where the coalitions were.
Mayor Sarno endorsed Councilor Brown, and that's why I think it kind of brings us back a little bit to the the Akers story. Senator Gomez [was] one of the people leading against gutting the police commission, and I have argued in my own blog that that was a factor in Councilor Brown's decision to run and in Mayor Sarno’s decision to endorse him against Senator Gomez.
I think that, in the end, it probably says more about the mayor - because why would you endorse somebody if you can't bring anything to the table for them? I mean, I'm not going to stand here and say that Mayor Sarno has not withstood hard challenges in his own races, but what can he bring to somebody else's race that would not necessarily question what his juice is outside of his own elections?
You know, politics is about the artful use of power many times, and I'm not sure that the mayor necessarily achieved that by endorsing somebody who was completely flattened by his opponent, as many people expected.
Meanwhile, his own boss, Representative Williams, barely scrapes by for reelection, so, you know, there's a lot of lessons to be had in this election, even if it just resulted in the incumbents getting renominated.
WAMC: I want to get your reaction to another big political story that happened this year, and that is the drunken driving incident involving Hampden County Sheriff Nick Cocchi.
Cocchi has effectively owned up to the [September] incident at MGM Springfield - we're still awaiting bodycam footage from the state police involved to see how that played out.
A very damaged state vehicle [driven by Cocchi was involved] - not exactly clear what was hit and when and where, but all the same - suspension of license, appearances in court [followed] - what was your reaction to that news? And how do you anticipate us encountering it again in the near future?
Matt Szafranski: I think unless the bodycam footage shows us something that's dramatically different from the police reports, it's probably over as a political story.
The police reports were not particularly kind to the sheriff. I don't want to say that we should be assured that police will… never try to protect fellow law enforcement, which the sheriff is, but they seemed to play [this] one fairly by the book and, and I imagine that's a big part of the reason why Sheriff Cocchi did come out and just said, “Yes, you're absolutely right, I messed up.”
[He threw] himself on the mercy of the court of public opinion, to say nothing of the court in Hampden County Hall of Justice.
He's not up for reelection until 2028 anyway, if I'm not mistaken. Now, could somebody make something out of this in 2028? I mean, an industrious person who wants to try to find everybody who's got a quibble with the sheriff, and the sheriff has an immense number of people working for him - not everybody’s going to be happy 100 percent of the time.
I'm not going to stand here and say that he has nothing to worry about, but again, unless we find out that maybe the state police were kinder than their report would suggest, and the video shows something far worse, then I would say this is probably over as a political story in western Massachusetts.
