Council is cool to school board picks

Mayor’s choices to lead school dept. being held up

WOONSOCKET – For the second time in as many weeks, the controlling majority of the City Council has tabled Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt’s recommendation for an appointment to fill a vacancy on the School Committee – and he’s a guy they like.

The latest pick from the mayor for a seat on the board is Steve Lima, a former president of the Woonsocket Taxpayer Coalition and real estate developer who made an unsuccessful run for mayor in 2009.

“I think he’s an outstanding candidate to be on the School Committee and I’ll support him 110 percent,” Councilman James Cournoyer declared on Monday.

But Cournoyer voted with four other councilors to table the recommendation, resulting in a 5-2 vote overall. Why? Because the council is stumping for School Committeeman Donald Burke. His term is due to expire at the end of the month, along with that of Susan Pawlina, a member of the panel since 2013 who has indicated she no longer wants the position, councilors say.

What happens to Pawlina’s spot remains an open question, but the stance Cournoyer and his council allies have taken is that unless Burke gets the nod for reappointment from the mayor, Lima is a non-starter.

Two weeks ago, Baldelli-Hunt proposed seating Joyce Conti, a longtime educator, to replace Pawlina. The council tabled that appointment without explanation, but privately they emphasized her family connections to a simmering personnel dispute involving an elementary school principal who was let go.

The mayor has not resubmitted Conti’s name for appointment, but she asked them to approve Lima on Monday – apparently as a replacement for Burke.

Cournoyer instructed the mayor to submit a single resolution appointing both of them to the School Committee – Lima as the newcomer, and Burke for a new term.

“Don Burke has done a very good job,” said Council Vice President Jon Brien. “He’s very well thought of by the parents, the teachers and the school community in general. There’s no good reason for him not to be appointed.”

An longtime educator who teaches English at a private high school in Massachusetts, Burke wants to continue serving on the school committee, councilors say.

There was very little discussion on the tabling of Lima’s appointment at Monday’s meeting in Harris Hall, but one issue the council asked the mayor to clarify is whether Lima was supposed to be a replacement for Pawlina or Burke. The mayor indicated that the resolutions appointing Conti and Lima were unrelated, which councilors took to mean that she does not intend to reappoint Burke.

“This is a different resolution,” the mayor informed councilors.

Asked to elaborate in a phone conversation on Tuesday, Baldelli-Hunt said she wasn’t at liberty to discuss it because she was in a meeting and would call back.

School Committeman Paul Bourget still isn’t sure of the mayor’s intent, but he too endorses Burke for another term. The father-in-law of Council Vice President Brien, Bourget says it’s imperative that the mayor retain as much experience on the School Committee as possible at this time, because the city is about to enter contract negotiations with the Woonsocket Teachers Guild. The labor union’s collective bargaining agreement with the city is expiring at the end of the year.

Though Lima would be a newcomer, Bourget said he would be a welcome addition to the board. He expressed admiration for Lima’s ability to “think outside the box,” pointing to his plans to redevelop a mill on Singleton Street into an an “escape room” complex. A newfangled kind of entertainment experience, an escape room is a real-life game in which groups of participants are given a series of riddles, clues and puzzles in order to find a way out of an enclosed chamber that might be decked out in some sort of theatrical theme.

Bourget said that if the mayor sends the council a resolution appointing both Lima and Burke to the school committee, it would pass effortlessly.

“Those are the people that should be submitted,” he said. “That will pass faster than a bolt of lightning through butter.”

Bourget says he’s perplexed by the mayor’s apparent snub of Burke, particularly because he’s been an ardent supporter of Baldelli-Hunt. But he has a theory – namely, that the mayor is still smarting form the Barry Field fiasco and wants to reinvent the panel. The mayor initiated a Superior Court petition to abolish restrictions on the deed to the 22-acre par- cel, opening it up for use as something other than an athletic field – possibly private commercial use. The petition made representations that the School Committee no longer had any use for the parcel and had consented to the legal maneuver.

On the council, Brien, a lawyer, excoriated the petition as a fraud, eliciting a pledge from City Solicitor John DeSimone to withdraw the Superior Court action. Later, School Committee Chairman Soren Seale, also a lawyer, wrote a letter to the mayor indicating that the panel did not support the complaint and had never taken any votes to indicate that it had.

“She’s upset over the whole Barry Field issue,” said Bourget. “She wants to replace us all. Don is the first shot across the bow.”

Just like members of the City Council, members of the school committee used to run for election, answering to constituents. That all came to an end following a 2012 referendum in which voters approved switching to a system in which members are appointed. Although the prevailing law gives the mayor the authority to appoint members, they cannot be seated without majority approval of the council, meaning at least four of the panel’s seven members must support the mayor’s choice.

Voters approved changing to the appointive system after a series of unexpected deficits in the Woonsocket Education Department brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy, with a shortfall of more than $11 million. The fiscal hole ushered in the era of the Budget Commissoin in May 2012, a period that lasted for 33 months, during which the state-appointed panel took over all spending authority from elected officials and dictated the terms of a financial rehabilitation plan.