“I thank God every day I didn’t die.”

 

Gratitude was in the back of ex-Fall River mayor Will Flanagan’s mind as he slowly built up to a decision: to try again for the city’s top job. He announced his campaign on social media earlier this month. For him, it was inseparable from his brush with death in a violent stabbing almost exactly one year prior.

 

“Prior to the stabbing, if you had asked me if I was going to run any time in the immediate future, the answer would be no,” he said in an interview with The Herald News.

 

Since that Oct. 20, 2025 stabbing, Flanagan said, he’s become closer with his family and his faith. He also found he missed the job of mayor, which he had from 2010 until he was recalled by voters in 2014.

 

“Being mayor has so much responsibility, so much power and you can use that responsibility and power to help people,” he said.

 

Rising to the sixth floor of Government Center on a promise of change, 29-year-old Flanagan inherited a city in a serious fiscal bind after the Great Recession. City employees were forced to take pay cuts and while federal grants propped up the police and fire departments. Accusations of cronyism in his appointments sparked an unsuccessful first recall effort in 2011.

 

But Flanagan bounced back and displayed a marketing flair, courting several casino developers and attracting an Amazon distribution facility. He publicly cracked down on absentee landlords. His downfall came when federal public safety money dried up. Pay-as-you-throw trash pickup was his prescription for funding the fire department; anger over the purple bags crested in the recall that ousted him from office in late 2014.

 

Now, over a decade later, asked by The Herald News if he’d consider bringing back pay-as-you-throw if elected once more, he quickly answered: “No.”

 

The 46-year-old said his years out of office have changed him, made him “older, wiser, not as thin-skinned, more of an adult, more invested.”

 

Meanwhile, he said, people have been asking him if he would run for mayor again. He decided to jump in early, with more than a year left until the 2027 mayoral election.

 

“Elections are won now, not in November,” he said.

 

Asked why voters should choose him after booting him from the mayoralty once before, he pointed to the experience he’s gained inside and outside the office.

 

“When you’re building the prefect mayor, I have a lot of characteristics that people would be looking for in their mayor. And I would put my resume, and my life experiences, pound for pound with anybody else’s and I would find me coming out on top,” he said.

 

Read more at heraldnews.com.