Everett City Councilor Robert Van Campen, who has been an outspoken critic of embattled incumbent Mayor Carlo DeMaria, plans to pull papers Thursday afternoon to formally run for the city’s top office.
“The people of Everett are hungry for honest, accountable leadership and they’re ready for change,” Van Campen told GBH News.
“We’ve seen a lack of transparency in a number of areas,” Van Campen added. “Number 1 would be the proposal to build a stadium [for the New England Revolution] on lower Broadway. I am not against that project, by any means, but there has been almost nonexistent engagement by the administration other than one or two token community meetings.”
In March, the Everett City Council voted “no confidence” in DeMaria after the state inspector general found that DeMaria had improperly received $180,000 in longevity bonuses and DeMaria balked at paying them back. At the time, Van Campen said his confidence in DeMaria’s administration was “beyond shaken.”
“You have to protect the public trust ... and once it’s violated, hold those who violated it accountable,” he said.
On Thursday, though, Van Campen sent mixed signals about how much he plans to emphasize that controversy as he campaigns.
At one point, Van Campen downplayed the controversy’s significance to his own candidacy, saying: “Those issues are frankly the mayor’s issues. I’m not focusing this campaign on those issues. My focus is on the people of Everett’s issues, and what they care about, and their priorities. You know, school overcrowding, making sure development is responsible and reasonable, making sure our neighborhoods are safe and clean and our children are getting the type of education they deserve.”
But Van Campen also called the bonus payments “a symptom of a dysfunctional system that lacks transparency, lacks accountability and in some instances is dishonest.” Later, describing his own approach to politics, he stated: “I value ethics above all else, and there is no circumstance under which I would compromise my ethics.”
DeMaria has vigorously disputed the inspector general’s findings, saying he played no part in creating the bonus-payment system and that the payments he received were meted out according to language created by the Everett City Council in 2016.
Van Campen, a municipal and labor attorney, served on what used to be Everett’s board of alderman for more than a decade in the early 2000s, then unsuccessfully ran against DeMaria for mayor in 2013. After taking a hiatus from electoral politics, he was recently reelected to what’s now the Everett City Council after the city changed its form of governance.
Asked why he thinks he’ll fare better against DeMaria this year than in 2013, when the mayor easily won reelection, Van Campen suggested that DeMaria had been buoyed by an accompanying vote on Everett’s host community agreement with the Encore casino in that election cycle.
He also said that, as he makes the rounds of the city today, a craving for change is palpable.
“I hear it at the doors, I hear it at the square [in downtown Everett], I hear it throughout the community,” Van Campen said.
Everett’s general election takes place on November 4. If DeMaria has more than one challenger, there will also be a preliminary election on September 16 to winnow the field down to two finalists. Another city councilor, Peter Pietrantonio, has pulled papers to run for both mayor and Everett City Council.
DeMaria did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Van Campen’s bid.
The city councilor may also benefit from an ongoing political shift in Everett. Sharp criticism of and opposition to DeMaria and his policies is now far more common than it used to be.
Everett has also become far more diverse in recent years, and racial issues were at the fore of the 2021 tensions between DeMaria and then-City Councilors Gerly Adrien and Fred Capone, who both lost to DeMaria in that year’s mayoral race.
