The Mayor’s Critic Versus the Mayor’s Wife

If the voters of Concord thought that there wasn't a reason to go to the polls on Sept. 9, they thought wrong.

While there are only a handful of primaries this year there’s at least one that is going to get interesting: The race for the District 1 Merrimack County Commissioner.

The seat covers Concord, Boscawen, and Webster, and current Commissioner, Elizabeth Blanchard, decided not to run for re-election.

So state Rep. Rick Watrous, D-Concord, decided that instead of running for the District 16/Ward 7 seat again, he would run for commissioner, and was the first one to jump into the race.

Earlier this week, Republican Ken Georgevits, who unsuccessfully sought the District 19/Ward 10 state representative seat in 2012, also filed for the seat. 

Although Georgevits was unsuccessful, he cobbled together a bipartisan collection of support, including Concord Mayor Jim Bouley, a Democrat, due mostly to his heavy involvement in the community for so many years.

As Concord Patch readers know, Watrous has targeted Bouley in the past with ethics violation complaints and written blog posts and columns in the Concord Monitor on a myriad of topics, including some of the mayor’s more interesting past financial connections.

Georgevits has been thinking about running for the seat for months, so the suggestion raised by some politicos this week that maybe Bouley encouraged him to run again to keep Watrous from winning is completely unfounded.

But then, on Friday, things got even more interesting.

Former Concord School Board member and at-large City Councilor Tara Reardon, Bouley’s wife, filed to run for the seat on Friday.

While Reardon has quite the political background, she also has time on her hands, since resigning from her position with the Department of Employment Security after reportedly ordering a subordinate to lay off her daughter who was on a summer internship so she could collect unemployment.

But this political coincidence isn’t lost on anyone.

With a hat tip to James Pindell's Political Standing, the big questions are the following: 

• Did the mayor ask his wife to run to keep Watrous from winning the $10,000 a year, one day a week job, or does Reardon need the money? 
• Will an organization like the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce, or any other, host a debate between the three candidates or would it be too worried about the almost guaranteed tension in the air that such an event would cause? 
• And what does the Monitor do when it comes time to endorse in this race? While its editorial board has changed a bit in the last year, it’s never liked Watrous. It has had a habit of protecting Democratic pols or even ignoring big scandals against people it likes. But would it really endorse Reardon after what supposedly happened at the NH DES? Could it give the nod to Georgevits and help push him over the top in November? 
• If Reardon loses, does Bouley again abandon his party’s nominee and back Georgevits over Watrous like he did in 2012 for Georgevits against Christy Bartlett or does the mayor just sit the race out?

Inquiring minds want to know. Grab the popcorn, voters. This primary election season is going to be fun.

Follow all the Patch campaign stories and post in our Elections section.