Offices up for election are mayor for two years; nine City Council seats, also for two-year terms; three School Committee seats for four-year terms and one for three years; and two McCann School Committee seats for four years. This will only be the second time in 36 years that the mayoral race will not have an incumbent on the ballot and both of those elections were in the past four years. Mayor Thomas Bernard announced the day after his state of the city address in February that he would not be seeking a third term and would instead be focusing his efforts on the agenda he d been re-elected on in 2019 that had been disrupted by the novel coronavirus.