WESTFIELD — Michael McCabe hardly slept the night after Westfield’s mayoral election. Keeping him up were the several cups of coffee needed for the final push, and the knowledge that the transition period for the mayor-elect began in just a few hours.

“I got up at quarter of five and answered eight bazillion texts and emails. Then I went to teach a class,” said McCabe, a retired police captain who now works as a criminal justice professor at Westfield State.

Two years after losing the mayoral election to Donald Humason Jr., McCabe won the rematch on Nov. 2, with 4,714 votes to the incumbent’s 3,846. The 868-vote majority for McCabe was a huge change from the very close margin, 90 votes, that decided the 2019 election.

By noon the next day, the big win still hadn’t sunk in with McCabe. He figured the impact would hit him fully in just one hour, when he would have his first meeting at City Hall as the next mayor.

McCabe was eager to begin working with city personnel. His first step, even before he officially becomes mayor on Jan. 3, is to get a better sense of the makeup of each city department, how they are run, and how they interact with each other. On that day, he said, he plans to literally be holding the doors of City Hall open for everybody.

“I am not sure how things have been done in the past. What is clear to me is that there have been people who have felt ignored,” said McCabe about people in the city government.

One of his chief concerns going into his administration is that many city boards and commissions, as well as some full-time city personnel positions, have vacancies that make it difficult to operate efficiently.

“I want to get a pretty good sense of who is where,” said McCabe. “One of the things I am going to ask [Personnel Director] Robert Bishop is if there is an organizational chart of City Hall.”
When McCabe does take office in January, he will have to contend with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the local response to which he believes could have been handled more effectively.

Westfield’s vaccination rate continues to lag behind the rest of the state. Just 54 percent of Westfield residents had been fully vaccinated as of Nov. 4.

McCabe said he thinks a contributing factor to the low vaccination rate is the lack of social media use by city officials and Mayor Donald Humason Jr. to advertise and encourage COVID-19 vaccinations.

“If you’re not on Instagram and Twitter as a city in this age, you should be,” said McCabe, “because you are missing almost all of the 30 and under groups.”

In Westfield, and largely across the board, the least vaccinated age groups are people under the age of 30. McCabe also noted that some ethnic populations, like Hispanic people, have vaccination rates as low as 25 percent. He said he is unsure if these groups have not been properly educated on the need for the vaccine, or if there has not been enough outreach on the part of the city to show the vaccine’s availability.

McCabe said he reached out to St. Mary’s deacon Pedro Rivera-Moran, and asked him if he would be interested in helping to increase vaccination rates among Hispanic people. With Rivera-Moran, he organized an event to bring a mobile vaccine clinic to show up after a Sunday Mass at St. Mary’s in December. McCabe organized this, he said, without publicizing it, and kept it separate from his campaign for mayor.

Aside from COVID-19, McCabe plans to prioritize a common complaint among Westfield residents: the traffic around the Massachusetts Turnpike in the morning and in the evening rush hours. McCabe said he has largely been in favor of the plan put forward by City Engineer Mark Cressotti, including the installation of a rotary and the additional on-ramp for the highway, though he would make some additions to the overall plan, including a change to Servistar Industrial Way.

“I would propose to create a commercial truck prohibition from going north from Campanelli Drive to Southampton Road,” said McCabe.

Commercial trucks would instead need to travel south to Arch Road, which would draw traffic away from the north side, dispersing some of the heavier traffic. The overall project, by its very nature, will take longer than a single mayoral term to fix.

“To say that I will be a little focused on the pandemic and traffic might be an understatement,” said McCabe.

Of arguably greater importance than traffic and equal importance to the pandemic is the opioid epidemic, which has affected Westfield about as much as it has impacted any other community of similar size in the country.

“We seem to have forgotten opioids, but they sure haven’t forgotten us,” said McCabe.

He said that from his knowledge, opioid overdose and death rates have largely been “sustained,” which is better than a rapid spike in usage, but not the solution he would prefer.

He said one solution to a dangerous drug plaguing the community may be the taxation of a legal drug, to fund substance abuse recovery programs. When marijuana was made legal by Massachusetts voters, it included a total tax rate of 20 percent of each recreational purchase. Some of those tax dollars go to the community in which the dispensary is located. Westfield so far has two marijuana retailers, Cannabis Connection and the recently opened Heka.

The local tax money from those two stores, McCabe said, should be dedicated to substance abuse recovery, which was the original intent of the state law, though that has not yet been done by Westfield, according to McCabe.

“Really there should be a dedicated stream for folks who are truly in need and can’t get the services,” said McCabe.

Another ambition of McCabe for his upcoming term as mayor is to put together a local arts council of some sort, consisting of people representing groups like Artworks and Westfield on Weekends. He said he wants to have some sort of community calendar listing community events in Westfield outside of typical municipal meetings.

If he could get the funding, he would hire a part-time social media professional who would advertise community events like Pumpkinfest and Artoberfest, as well as COVID-19 reporting.

“There is an unbelievable disconnect between the offerings that are out there, and there is no financial support,” said McCabe.

The ideal result for McCabe would be to see more well-attended but small-scale events on the Park Square Green, where a small amphitheater exists to have such events.