SOMERVILLE — The city is at a “tipping point,” Mayor Katjana Ballantyne said last week.
On that, the city’s chief executive and her two challengers can agree, just as they do on broad political strokes in this longtime progressive stronghold of 82,000 people.
But in Tuesday’s preliminary election for mayor, voters will have a say on whether a new executive is needed to steer a city with a sky-high cost of living, new developments reshaping tightly packed streets’ look and feel, and new threats from a federal government bent on making an example of places that lean as far left as Somerville. The contest will narrow the field to a head-to-head race and measure the appetite of voters to do something extraordinary in Massachusetts: unseat a sitting mayor.
The first to announce a campaign was Jake Wilson, an at-large councilor with a background in sports journalism and communications who is known among parents for having run the city’s youth soccer league, and who has emphasized his management experience.
“The big, overarching thing I want to do is get our city services up to the level that the City of Somerville should be providing,” the 48-year-old said. “That will allow us to achieve policy gains where we are facing multiple crises: Our housing crisis, the crisis of street safety, and the rodent issues we have in the city that really impact people’s lives.”
The other is fellow at-large Councilor Willie Burnley Jr., the youngest candidate in the race, who is aligned with the left-wing group Democratic Socialists of America and has a long track record of leading the charge in the council on issues as varied as surveillance, broker fees, and polyamory. He has said he has sometimes had to work two jobs to make ends meet while serving as a public official, and has noted while campaigning that he is the only candidate in the race who, like most people in Somerville, rents.
“I have friends who moved to Boston because it’s cheaper than Somerville, which is unprecedented,” Burnley, 31, said. “So for me, this race is about: How do we build that community that we all know Somerville can be and historically has been, and what are the tools that we’re going to implement to do that?”
The two winners on Tuesday will face off in November.
Ballantyne, 63, has been mayor since 2022 and will benefit from the advantage of being an incumbent. Mayors in Massachusetts tend to stick around, and Somerville is no exception. The city’s last mayor, Joe Curtatone, held the office for nine terms.
And there is good reason to keep the same leadership for the long haul, Ballantyne argued as she seeks her third term.
She pointed to the city’s AAA bond rating for three years running thanks, she said, to a focus on “fiscal responsibility.” And she highlighted her role in shepherding in new “tough-tech” development at the city’s Somernova business park that she said “sets a new standard for economic development.”
“I’ve negotiated big plans to chart our future going forward. These investments in Somerville are happening because of my leadership, because of my proven experience,” Ballantyne said. “If we change that continuity now, that’s all at risk. We don’t need on-the-job-training to keep moving Somerville forward.”
There have been other high-profile moments of what she celebrates as leadership, including new contracts with city worker labor unions, and a lawsuit she filed along with the city of Chelsea against the Trump administration over its targeting of so-called sanctuary cities.
Ballantyne’s tenure has also had its rougher patches, including uproar from parents and students last year over a drawn-out staffing dispute that saw a local library temporarily shutting its doors to everyone during some afternoon hours to keep out rowdy school kids. The library reopened full time a few weeks later.
The debacle fueled criticism of Ballantyne’s slower, more methodical leadership style. And it amplified complaints that her office was not as adept at being communicative and accessible as the team led by her predecessor, a textbook retail politician with a pugnacious energy supporters loved.
Ballantyne disputes that communication has been an issue, and said her administration’s regular community meetings and civics meet-and-greets show she is interfacing plenty with the city’s residents.
“I believe in inclusive leadership, and I’ve invited in thousands of people to be at the table,” she said. “I have been out there. I’ve been engaged.”
Supporters say her leadership style has simply taken some getting used to in a city accustomed to a harder-charging executive.
“Katjana is a very deliberative person and decision-maker who takes a while to make decisions because she’s collecting a lot of information to make the right decision,” said Fred Berman, a longtime ally who worked in her Office of Housing Stability before retiring this year. “People are used to a different mode of decision-making.”
But for her challengers, communication shortcomings have been a common refrain.
“I think the people of Somerville feel very closed off from their mayor,“ Wilson said. ”The people need a mayor who is available to them and who welcomes public interaction.”
Wilson has pledged to hold Thursday night office hours. Burnley has promised to spend a lot more time “in community with folks” than the incumbent.
That the race is happening at all, and with two candidates who are considered far more serious than Ballantyne’s 2023 challenger, Billy Tauro, has fueled significantly more interest in the preliminary than in past years.
Wilson has made an appeal to improve day-to-day services in the city, which he said have slipped in recent years as a result of “dysfunction” at City Hall.
“We have city departments in open conflict with each other. We have basic city services that continue to decline in quality despite a budget that has more than doubled over the last 12 years,” he said, “and we have a very frustrated population that loves our city but comes away from interactions with the government here feeling not heard and not helped.”
Burnley, in an interview, touted what he said was his impressive history of legislative victories as a councilor, and his outside-the-box thinking. He has pitched, for example, creating an “Office of Social Housing,” which he said would be among the first of its kind in the country. His “full-throated support for allowing more homes to be built citywide” earned him the endorsement of Somerville YIMBY, the housing advocacy group’s cofounder Jeff Byrnes said this week.
Burnley also said he would draw on his experiences as a Black, queer, polyamorous person who has at times struggled to pay the bills. That would make him the kind of mayor who is uniquely qualified to relate to the full sweep of Somerville’s residents, particularly its younger and less advantaged ones, he said.
“My candidacy means a lot to people in a way that, frankly, the other campaigns just can’t relate to,” Burnley said.
Whether either of them can convince voters, who tend to prize stability in the mayor’s office, to change things up remains to be seen.
“I think the fact that two sitting councilors-at-large are running against the incumbent mayor is evidence of the dissatisfaction with her tenure,” said Mark Niedergang, a Somerville politico who is backing Wilson.
He said Ballantyne “has moved forward on some important issues,” and that she still has a strong base of supporters he respects, but he expects the result Tuesday to be close given what he has found to be a surprising openness to a shift in leadership.
“The wheels have not come off the bus. There’s no corruption,” Niedergang said. “I just think we can do a lot better.”
Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.