The Springfield city council meets for the first time in 2025 on Monday for its organizational session, featuring formal elections to pick its president and vice president.
Ward 2 Councilor Mike Fenton appears set to lead the council once again, after being unanimously nominated during an informal caucus at the final meeting of 2024.
WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief James Paleologopoulos spoke with Fenton about the role, council priorities this year, and his 15 years of council work so far.
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WAMC: Mike, we're talking a few days ahead of the council's first meeting of 2025, an organizational one, on Monday morning. We're also talking a couple weeks after, unanimously, you got the nomination to lead the council once again. How does it feel to get picked for another year in leadership?
Mike Fenton: Being on the city council and elected to represent the residents, not just in my district, but of the entire city, is a huge honor, and something that I know that all members of the council, past, present and future, take very seriously.
Being council president, to lead the body, is also something that I'm humbled to have been chosen and trusted with again, and it's a role that I take seriously and execute the duties of it in a way that benefits the members of the city council and the residents at large, making sure that we have fair, open and transparent government, and doing it in a way that is representative and respectful of the 155,000+ residents that we have that call Springfield home.
WAMC: I want to ask, what did the unanimity communicate to you? I understand last year there were councilors who threw their hats in, but this time, it was a pretty direct process for both you and council vice president [nominee] Tracye Whitfield.
Mike Fenton: The council's process for electing council president … it's a process whereby councilors caucus amongst themselves, and usually those conversations start a little bit earlier in the year so, I was honored to have the unanimous support of my colleagues, and hope that that's a reflection of the efforts to maintain a robust but fair debate during our council meetings, and to do it in a way that's respectful of councilors as well as people that might be petitioning before the council, or interested parties and community advocates that are seeking to see one type of action taken over another.
Balancing that and doing it in a way that's fair and leaves all sides feeling like they had a chance to voice their concerns, irrespective of the ultimate outcome, is really the job of the council president and I hope that I've done a good job with that and look forward to being entrusted with that position for another year.
WAMC: How do you feel this last year as president went?
We've talked a little bit about some big ticket items being passed. Waters were a little choppy at times during the items concerning Police Superintendent Akers, but [were] passed, and issues didn't appear to linger outside of those sessions. What say you?
Mike Fenton: Well, I mean, serving in elected government, in this generation - it's something that is a service, something that requires a lot of diligence and hard work, but it certainly doesn't enamor the respect of the public that it once did, and by that I mean elected and public service.
My hope is that, on a local, community basis, starting in my hometown, in Springfield and other places that are executing their local government duties at the early stages of this 2025, we can, through conversation and action, change that perception: show people in the public that, for the most part, elected leaders are humble servants, or people who are there that are trying to do the best that they can to better their community, and to do it in a quiet and efficient fashion.
It's not always grandiose: our ideas are not always going to change the world, but slowly but surely, I think through appropriate and respectful dialogue and actions on local government levels, we can restore public confidence in government.
And so, I like to think in Springfield, we play one small piece in that discussion that continues on a more national basis and on the city council, that's what I and the other 12 members try to do, we try to have thoughtful and certainly, at times, strenuous debate, but we do it in a way that can leave all parties at the end of the conversation feeling like they were heard by their government, irrespective of the ultimate outcome.
So, the measure of my success as council president, the measure of the council’s success, will be how well we score in terms of restoring public confidence to government and doing it in a way that respects all voices.
WAMC: Looking at the year ahead, what are some priorities you expect the council to address? I know there was a temporary change to the residency requirement that got teed up - I think there's some subcommittee stuff that needs to happen first before it appears again, but what has your attention going into 2025?
Mike Fenton: The looming issues that I see, that the city council is going to have to focus on, are housing - we have a housing crisis, [a] unit shortage - we have to address that.
We also have - it’s a pro and a con - we've got a very strong and robust housing market, recently reported as one of the strongest in the country, believe it or not, and we need to keep a close watch on what that means for us as a city, in terms of the benefits - added equity for homeowners, recoupment of their investment and their ability to invest in their property and do so securely and knowing that they'll be able to recoup a lot of those investments, but also watching what it does with property taxes, what it does with affordability and what it does with the overall availability of units.
So, housing is definitely a big focus of 2025 for the city council.
Public safety remains at the top of everyone's agenda. In an urban city like Springfield, we, you know, have our challenges that are not faced by other suburban and less urban counterparts, but we've done a great job at tackling those issues inside the department and outside the department and under the leadership of Superintendent Akers, I think we're heading absolutely in the right direction with that, and should continue to see progress and innovative thoughts and walking patrols and C3 Policing: all these things that keep our community and our police safe.
And then, I think the third major component that we should expect to continue to see as a theme for the city council this year is economic development. We've approved a variety of tax incentives, agreements over the course last decade to attract businesses to our office, commercial and industrial base in Springfield.
We've seen a variety of expansion of housing and other opportunities in the downtown, some of which has been spurred by the MGM development and others, and I expect that to continue to be a focus, especially as we see some of the long-anticipated and awaited housing and economic development projects - market rate, upscale housing in and around the casino starting to come online later in this calendar year. I think that that's also going to be a major theme for us.
So I would say that the three big things that I expect to spend the most time working on in 2025 are housing, economic development and public safety.
WAMC: You have been serving on the council for around 15 years. Is that correct?
Mike Fenton: That's right, yes.
WAMC: You've been council president a couple of times now, and in the time that's passed - what are some big lessons, takeaways - just stuff that you've gathered, that you bring into this role now - stuff that you would impart on your students at Western New England.
What has come with this experience? This is a wide net I'm casting, I'm well aware of that, but I wanted to ask.
Mike Fenton: I love that question, it's almost like a capstone question. Well, I've been in government for 15 years now, and when I started - this is probably about 13 years longer than I would have anticipated, when I first started. I didn't expect to do multiple terms, I was a law student when I started.
A lot has changed for the better in our city since then. I think, if you look around, we're a safer city, we're a more prosperous city. We have more economic development, not just in the downtown, but across all of our different neighborhoods.
We've got a more stable housing market, we've got a lot of attractions and things that put Springfield on the map in terms of a marketability perspective, that just weren’t there in 2010 and in the years before.
I think a lot of credit is due to the administration and others and the downtown business community and across the city for working on that and we've come a long way.
In terms government and governance, some of the lessons that that I've learned along the way are really about being fair to people and to constituents.
I mean, I've dealt with a lot of constituents, both angry and happy, over the course of my 15 years and the one thing that I would take away from my service, more than anything else so far, is that people want to hear the truth.
If you're going to fix a pothole or put in a crosswalk for them or a speed bump or get their recycling barrel replaced, they want accurate information from you. They want to know “Is that something you can really do," when can they expect to get it done, and a part of that, being honest with people, is telling them when you can't do something, too - telling them when it wouldn't be fair to get that recycling barrel replaced before the next person who's in line or there's a waiting list to get your sidewalk replaced, and here's the form, and here's how it works and, you're not going to like my first answer, that it's going to take a few years, but that's the answer.
And sort of living up to your best, to your level-best, and keeping your promises and making good faith representations about what the city can and can't do. That applies to constituents as well as other elected officials, so in my services as city council president, I try to keep the promises that I make to my colleagues.
If I say we're going to end the meeting by ten o'clock, we make every effort to do that, and if we can't, then we have a discussion about it, why it happened, and what adjustments can be made.
If people want to know that they're going to be heard, especially in elected office - if you're raising your hand in the electronic queue or in person, and we're a representative democracy, and people, elected officials want to be able to speak on behalf of their constituents, they need to know that that the person who's calling on them is going to do so in a fair and impartial way.
Not a perfect way. I make mistakes all the time. Sometimes, I don't see somebody's hand, or I inadvertently call on somebody more times than was permitted, but as long as you're doing your best and you're showing people that you're working in good faith to take on the responsibilities that you've agreed to take on and execute them dutifully and professionally, then people will give you the benefit of the doubt, and I would say that's the biggest thing that I've taken away from my 15 years - that constituents and elected officials alike are reasonable people, and they just want to be treated like human beings who are deserving of dignity and respect and honesty, and when you give them that, they're willing to give you a lot of leeway.
And maybe in my case, I need it more than most.
WAMC: Last council meeting, we saw council Vice President Melvin Edwards turning down [a] nomination [to be VP again], and we saw a unanimous nomination of Councilor [at Large] Tracye Whitfield.
I wanted to get your take on Councilor Edwards’s time as VP, his departure from that role - he's still serving [as a councilor], obviously - and Tracye Whitfield, once again, being VP of the council.
Mike Fenton: Well, I welcome Tracye to the role, and she's done it once before. She's a welcomed addition to council leadership and to Councilor Edwards - he and I have served together for 15 years. Certainly did a great job as council vice president and you know, I look forward to many more years of service together with him.
I think that the unanimous nature of the vote was great, and was a testament to Councilor Edwards and his professionalism and respect for the city council as an institution and I think that looking forward to a year of 2025 with some of my colleagues, both new and old, to continue to move the city of Springfield in the right direction, which is our shared goal.
WAMC: In fall 2024 Mayor Dominic Sarno announced that he had been diagnosed with a form of cancer and would be undergoing treatment as soon as possible.
I feel like I see him more than I did before the diagnosis but, either way, I'm looking to see - as council president, sometimes the role might fall into you to fill in in the event the mayor is not available - have you been temporarily mayor at any point in time so far and if so, how did it go?
Mike Fenton: Well, that is the charter and state statute role of the council president, to sub in for the mayor if he or she is unable to serve for a period of time.
But, this mayor is tough as nails, and as you intimated, he's been out and about, more so really than ever. He hasn't shown any signs of taking his foot off the pedal, and he's got 156,000 people in Springfield rooting for him and rooting him on and got every reason and expectation that he is in this fight for a positive future Springfield, and I look forward to continuing to work with him on that vision to move us forward in the right direction.
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Council President Mike Fenton is also an adjunct faculty member at Western New England University, which hosts WAMC’s Pioneer Valley News Bureau.
