Mayoral candidates won’t run for council
If they lose race for mayor, will also lose council spots
One campaign is good enough, according to the four Boston city councilors running for mayor — they all say they aren’t going to take advantage of the opening in the city charter to also run for their current seats as a fallback plan.
Spokeswomen for City Councilors Andrea Campbell, Annissa Essaibi-George and Michelle Wu and Acting Mayor Kim Janey all said they’re just running for mayor.
Under Boston’s governing charter, candidates are allowed two bites at the apple — and sometimes they have taken advantage of it.
The main example of this is Charles Yancey, the former district councilor from Mattapan, who took this tack in 2013, running both for mayor and for re-election to the council seat he’d held for decades. When the mayoral contest didn’t pan out — he finished with just 2% of the mayoral vote, 10th in the 12-person field — he won re-election to council.
After 32 years in the seat, Yancey lost in the next election to Campbell — who later proposed a law change that would forbid people from running for two different seats at the same time. The proposal passed the council, but didn’t get the approval it needed from state lawmakers in order to become law.
The four councilors’ assured departures mean significant turnover for the 13-member council. Wu and Essaibi-George are two of the city’s four at-large city councilors, which are elected in one race for the four seats. That unusually wideopen race has already drawn more than a dozen hopefuls.
Several different people
have each thrown their hats into the ring for Campbell and Janey’s district council seats.
Janey technically is a city councilor still, representing the Roxbury-based district she’s held for the past three years. Janey’s title of “acting mayor,” conferred by the city’s governing charter, is an extension of her duties as City Council president in the absence of an elected
mayor.
She remains City Council president, though she’s now a nonparticipating member and President Pro Tempore Matt O’Malley is presiding over the council as she handles the duties of the chief executive.
State Rep. Jon Santiago and former city economic development director John Barros also are running for mayor. A recent poll taken five months out from the preliminary election had Wu and Janey in front.
Candidates are able to apply to pull papers to run for city offices from now through May 11, and are able to submit papers with signatures through May 18.