BAXTER

PAWTUCKET –– In 1997, the last time there was a contest for City Council at large, the race was a free-for-all: A dozen candidates ran in the nonpartisan primary and few, if any, were political allies.

This time, the battle lines are drawn more clearly: Of the five candidates for City Council at large running in the Democratic primary, two, Raymond J. Spooner and Albert J. Vitali Jr., are aligned with City Councilor Donald R. Grebien, who is challenging Mayor James E. Doyle’s bid for reelection.

The other three –– endorsed Democrats Thomas E. Hodge, Lorenzo C. “Larry” Tetreault and John S. Baxter Jr. –– are supporting Doyle.

The top three vote getters will be on the November ballot.

“There’s no major reason from my viewpoint to change the leadership,” said Hodge, an independent-minded city councilor who has sometimes clashed with the Doyle administration. “I haven’t seen a great deal of voter dissatisfaction,” while campaigning door-to-door.

Spooner, a former School Committee chairman, disagreed. People are fed up, he said. The city seems to be going nowhere. The Doyle administration has put obstacles in the path of developers, he said, while other communities have opened the door.

“You look at what they’ve done in Woonsocket,” Spooner said. “You look at what they’ve done in Providence. Everything goes up around us. Nobody wants to deal with Pawtucket. They say there’s too much red tape.”

Spooner harks back to what happened in 2005, when Memphis, Tenn.-based developer Oscar W. Seelbinder bought the Pawtucket Central-Falls train station for $1.4 million to build a CVS drugstore on the site.

Doyle, backed by historic preservationists and the Pawtucket Foundation, opposed the move because it would have involved demolishing the 90-year-old station building, or depot. The City Council, which was headed at the time by Grebien, tried to give the green light to the development. It failed, splitting 4-to-4 on several occasions, because a company controlled by Vitali’s mother had sold Seelbinder the property and Vitali, who was then on the council, had to recuse himself from any vote.

Now the drugstore is being built on the Central Falls side of the property. The depot is still standing on the Pawtucket side of the property, but it’s a derelict building, Spooner said, with little or no taxable value.

Vitali, who said little about the depot dispute when Doyle and Grebien were duking it out publicly, now says he regards it as a missed opportunity. “The depot is another boat that went down the Blackstone River without us. A gentleman wanted to invest $60 million in the city and the administration stopped him,” he said.

Vitali is one of three sons of the late Albert J. “Albo” Vitali Sr., who amassed extensive real estate holdings in the city and left them to his wife, Jean.

Vitali manages the properties for his mother, who just turned 80. In an interview, he denied that the family’s real-estate holdings would present him with the kind of conflict of interest that the train station property did three years ago, when he was city councilor from Ward 3.

“We’ve divested ourselves of many properties,” Vitali said. The family no longer owns prime downtown real estate. Most of its holdings are residential, he said.

Vitali lost the Ward 3 City Council race to Henry S. Kinch Jr. two years ago. Poised for a rematch, he dropped out of the Ward 3 City Council race when Grebien threw his hat into the ring of the mayor’s race, deciding not to seek reelection to the City Council at large.

Vitali said he felt free to declare his candidacy for City Council at large at that point because there was no danger of edging out Grebien. He said was being wooed to run against Grebien by the Doyle organization, which recruited Tetreault after he demurred.

“Larry Tetreault is a handpicked candidate. Same thing with Baxter, another handpicked candidate that’s part of the machine. I think we need to break away from that,” Vitali said.

Baxter, still a member of the Pawtucket School Committee, was chairman until December, when he stepped down to focus on the City Council race.

“I’ve been asked a number of times why did John Baxter step down as president of the School Committee when he knew there was going to be a deficit,” Vitali said.

Baxter said the innuendo that he stepped down to avoid being tarnished by the deficit is untrue.

He didn’t deny knowing there would be a school deficit. But he said that that had nothing to do with his decision to relinquish the School Committee chairmanship. And he said that, since stepping down, he has moved aggressively to reduce the deficit’s size.

In June, for example, he and School Committee member David A. Coughlin got the committee to rescind a controversial vote to establish all-day kindergartens in every elementary school. That slashed $612,962 from the budget, Baxter said, lowering the deficit to $4.7 million.

On June 27, as a result of an aggressive lobbying effort he helped to initiate, Baxter said, the Northern Rhode Island Collaborative agreed to liquidate the $3.4 million it had accumulated and distribute the money among 11 member school districts.

Pawtucket’s share of the proceeds, approximately $930,000, will be used to reduce the deficit, Baxter said.

Tetreault didn’t deny that he and Doyle are close. Chairman of the Democratic City Committee, Tetreault has consistently supported Doyle and backed his policies.

He and his wife, Diane Landry, recently vacationed with Doyle and his family in the Canadian Rockies. Tetreault’s son Brian, now dean of attendance and discipline at the Chariho Regional High School, attended school with Doyle’s son, state Sen. James E. Doyle II.

But Tetreault adamantly denied that he agreed to run after Doyle tried without success to recruit Vitali. “That’s what they say. This was my decision,” he said.

Tetreault said he expects to draw votes citywide because he affected many students during the 30 years he spent teaching in the city’s public school system, and because he has lived in every part of Pawtucket: first, in Pinecrest, where he was born and lived on Arland Drive until his father, Lorenzo A. Tetreault, died at age 31 in 1952; then in Pleasant View, where the family moved to live with his maternal grandmother; then Woodlawn, where he bought his first house; now in Darlington, where he moved during the Blizzard of 1978.

jcastell@projo.com