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May 26, 2005

Jeremy Schwab

Mary Wright decided to actively support community activist Gibran Rivera in his bid to win election to the sixth city council district after a frustrating encounter with the incumbent, John Tobin.

Wright says Tobin met with her after her landlord jacked up the rent on her 2 Miles Street apartment in Roxbury last year.

She said Tobin, who with a majority of his colleagues voted down a proposal to limit rent increases in the city last year, told her there was nothing he could do to stop the increase.

“He said, ‘You know, the landlord can go up on rent as much as he wants to, because there is no rent control,’” said Wright. “So I decided to work to help whoever runs kick him out of office.”

Tobin notes that he helped Wright and her neighbors initiate discussions with the landlord, and attended a rally on their behalf, but Wright’s beef with Tobin was his opposition to the Community Stabilization Act, which would have protected her from rent hikes in the first place.

Wright’s mention of Tobin’s vote against the Community Stabilization Act elicited a chorus of boos from around 100 Rivera supporters at the challenger’s campaign kickoff event last week.

Rivera’s campaign already boasts a large network of active volunteer supporters, energized in part by anger at Tobin’s vote against the CSA and his advocacy for neighborhood schools.

Rivera, a native of Puerto Rico and longtime progressive activist, is running a decidedly grassroots campaign to energize fellow progressives and other voters in the district, which encompasses Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury and parts of Roslindale and Roxbury.

Rivera plans to establish committees of voters to advise him on policies ranging from housing to transportation to public safety.

“You have to involve the people you talk to, the non-frequent voters, people feeling the pain,” Rivera told the crowd at his kickoff, which was held at American Legion Post 76 in Jamaica Plain. “I am not standing here because I have all the answers for you. If you want a say in what your community looks like, you gotta do it for yourself. Do not let it be done for you.”

Tobin plans to run a more traditional campaign focusing on door-to-door campaigning and making himself visible at community gatherings.

“I love to campaign,” he said. “I like the door-to-door stuff. I’ve been doing it 10 years as a candidate and 20 years as a worker on campaigns.”

Tobin’s greater political experience, his fundraising advantage and his higher name recognition due to incumbency all present major challenges to Rivera.

But the former executive director of the education group Iniciativa and founding chairman of the board of voting rights group MassVOTE appeared in his element as he delivered an impassioned speech to his supporters.

“We have an immediate education crisis in our city,” he said. “If you want to build a community, the last thing you need to do is build fences around our communities. That is not helping schools.”

Rivera was referring to the push by Tobin and other activists, particularly in West Roxbury and parts of Dorchester, for a reduction in busing and a return to neighborhood-based schools where most children would walk to school.

So far, neighborhood schools advocates have had limited success, although Tobin was able to convince the School Committee to allow children to walk to schools near them even if the schools were in a different assignment zone.

But Tobin’s advocacy for neighborhood schools as the head of the council’s Education Committee has earned him enemies among those who argue that creating smaller zones would mean children in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan would still have to be bused because those neighborhoods have fewer school seats per child than other areas.

Tobin said neighborhood schools would be in the best interest of children across the city.

“I just think it makes sense that people who live in a neighborhood, whether it’s Roxbury or West Roxbury, should have the first opportunity to attend school in their neighborhood,” he told the Banner.

Tobin also defended his vote against the CSA, which would have limited annual rent increases.

“I did it along with a majority of the city council because we didn’t feel it offered the protections people were seeking,” he said. “I thought it would actually work against them, and I think at the end of the day it is about housing production. That is something our office does on a day-to-day basis, supporting our community development corporations like Urban Edge, working with developers to ensure there are more than enough in terms of affordable components.”

But Rivera said the city must go beyond simply building more affordable housing on the few plots of land still undeveloped or open for redevelopment.

“I am all for building mixed-income [housing], but what happens to the people who are about to lose their housing today?” he told the crowd of supporters last week. “I can’t figure out how our city council says that because it is a supply issue, [renters] are just going to have to suffer, that we are just going to have to leave the communities we built.”

Tobin says that providing constituent services is his main goal as a councilor.

“We work hard every day to deliver top-notch constituent services on the bread and butter issues,” he said.

Tobin listed support for the Main Streets business-district improvement program, crime watch initiatives and affordable housing developments such as one proposed by Urban Edge and the JPNDC in Jackson Square, as examples of the type of advocacy he does.

But Rivera argued that a councilor’s job should extend beyond constituent services.

“Constituent services and filling potholes — we are going to do that. You know what, I like wi-fi,” he said, referring to Tobin’s proposal to expand use of wireless internet in Boston. “But I want to get to the hard stuff. I want to get to the people’s stuff.”

While the high turnout at his kickoff event and the large number of volunteers he has attracted — his campaign lists 14 positions filled from political director to field coordinator — give Rivera a base to build from, he still faces an uphill battle to unseat Tobin, according to some observers.

Some political observers foresee a split between liberal Jamaica Plain and more conservative West Roxbury.

“It’s obviously going to be difficult to overcome just the pure numerical advantage West Roxbury has in terms of active, frequent voters,” said Pat Keaney, the campaign manager for at-large City Councilor Felix Arroyo. “He has to have a clear message and strategy for going after liberal votes in that community.”

But George Pillsbury, director of the Center for Nonprofits in Voting, a project of MassVOTE, argued that in 2003 and 2004 Jamaica Plain voters turned out in numbers roughly equivalent to West Roxbury.

“West Roxbury used to dominate that district, but it no longer does,” said Pillsbury, whose organization works on analyzing voting patterns. “The numbers in Jamaica Plain precincts equaled West Roxbury in the November, 2004 election. To win, [Rivera] has to get a very strong turnout in Jamaica Plain and hold his own in a number of West Roxbury precincts.”

Rivera’s campaign manager, Mark Pedulla, said he plans an aggressive ground campaign drawing on the strength of volunteers and already has precinct captains signed up in 10 precincts — roughly a third of the precincts in the district.

“There is just going to be a tremendous amount of contact with people in the next few months,” he said. “A lot of candidates rely on monied interests. You can mail people hundreds of times, but if we have people talking to those people, that is going to mean more.”

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