The retirement of Speaker Finneran will create a vacancy in the House seat described as the 12th Suffolk District, an area that reaches from Mattapan Square through Lower Mills to Neponset. It is expected that a special election will be called sometime early in 2005 to fill that seat.

A member of our family is likely to be a candidate for that office, and it creates a situation where our readers might ask about the fairness of our coverage of that campaign.

You should know there is no question about how I will cast my vote when that time comes. You should also know that we have initiated a number of steps to insure that this newspaper publishes, and that we intend to offer, no editorial endorsement in that election.

The political vacancy affords the community a wonderful opportunity to discuss a wide range of political visions for the future. Speaker Finneran was elected 13 times over 26 years, and his departure affords voters an opportunity to examine the views and plans of any and all candidates, and to make an informed choice. Our pledge to the community is that we will help facilitate that discussion, without bias and without reservation.

To that end, we initiate this week a series of changes in our newsroom, and have retained an independent journalist to serve as an ombudsman throughout the coming campaign season. (See page 2 for details.)

Readers deserve to know they will receive accurate and unbiased news reporting, and we pledge that such coverage will be transparent.

For the Forry family, it is a matter of personal and professional integrity. For Dorchester, the people deserve no less.

- Ed Forry

Tommy Finneran announced this week that he will retire from office at the end of this year, signaling a final chapter in a glorious period of politics for Dorchester.

Tom Finneran is the last of that generation of pols who were adults during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, and who drew much of their inspiration from the public spirited example of John F. Kennedy. The Jack Kennedy era was a time when public service was considered an honorable and important pursuit, an avenue for improving the lives of neighbors by committing to a career in the public service.

Our community can boast of benefiting from the strong, unswerving advocacy of a host of politicians we sent to the State House over these years: from Bob Quinn, the Savin Hill rep who became Speaker in the 1960s, and later the state's attorney general, to Finneran who reached the summit as Speaker for eight years, Dorchester has benefited from having someone at the seat of power who watched out for our interests.

It really has been Dorchester's "golden era," considering the high quality of our state legislators over these years: The articulate Paul Murphy, the thoughtful John Finnegan, the gregarious Paul White and the many others- from school teacher Fred MacDonald, St. William's Dick Finnigan, Lower Mills' Brian Donnelly to Pleasant Street's Richard Rouse and Meetinghouse Hill's Dan Pokaski and WWII's veteran Joseph Walsh. It truly has been a remarkable run, topped by the way the now-outgoing Speaker Finneran has delivered for the district.

One important legacy that Finneran and the others leave is a strong sense of collegiality and mutual respect, one for the other. Our Dorchester delegation has worked together, in concert for the community's greater good, and it's a value that is shared with current incumbents Martin Walsh and Marie St. Fleur, neither of whom were alive when John Kennedy brought such glory to Democratic politics.

But although the era had come to a close, the tradition should continue. There was a time when Dorchester could claim as many as eight Representatives serving together in the House of Representatives. Today, our political clout has been reduced to just four, and after year's end, one of them, the most influential, will begin a new life, outside of politics.

It has been a great 26-year run for Tommy Finneran, and our community on balance has been served very well by him. As he begins his new career, we wish him "ad multos annos" - and great thanks to him, and to his wife, Donna, and their two children, for all his good public service.

-Ed Forry