By JIM BARON

CENTRAL FALLS – A federal judge forced Central Falls to put Hipolito Fontes on the ballot in its mayoral election, but that did not convince city voters to cast ballots for him as incumbent Mayor Charles Moreau romped to a fourth term with 78 percent of the vote.

Moreau trounced Fontes at every polling place in the city, garnering 1,495 votes to Fontes’ 426 and said he expects to extend his lead a bit more when mail ballots are counted. According to Registrar Gertrude Chartier, 30.6 of the city’s registered voters turned out to the polls.
“The people of Central Falls spoke,” Moreau said at his victory party at the Madeira Club, which was attended by such top state Democrats as Attorney General Patrick Lynch and Secretary of State Ralph Mollis, as well as several members of the General Assembly. “They are happy with the leadership of Central Falls and they are happy with the progress the city has made.”
Moreau told The Times he intends to continue that progress in his new term, pointing to house sales he says are up by 600 percent and there is an increased police presence in the city. He wants to bring new business to the city and ratchet up the fight on crime.
“We have been very effective in our government,” Moreau said, noting his close relationship with the City Council which saw four of its five incumbents returned to office Tuesday.
Lynch, who said he has known Moreau since they were in the CYO basketball league together, said the mayor “fought hard” for re-election and “got a tremendous result. He said Central Falls is “an important town with a lot of vitality” even during times of economic downturn, which he credited to “the driven leadership and focus of the mayor.”
Mollis, who said he knows Moreau from the time they were both mayors, said he is “doing a good job in a very important community in Rhode Island.

One telling indicator of the formidable battle Fontes faced is that the El Paisa restaurant, where he and his supporters held their post-election get together, had a Moreau sign in the window and a Moreau bumper sticker on the glass door where they entered.

Fontes had originally been disqualified by the city’s Board of Canvassers after they determined he fell three names short of the 200 qualified voters on his nomination papers. Fontes submitted 333 signatures, of which 133 were rejected for various reasons. Moreau submitted approximately 1,500 names. Of the 133 Fontes signatures that were rejected, 65 were thrown out because they duplicated signatures on Moreau’s nomination papers. Because Moreau submitted his papers minutes before Fontes did, the canvassers ruled that the duplicated nomination signatures belonged to the mayor.
U.S. District Court Judge William Smith tossed out the city ordinance that allowed voters to sign only one candidate’s nominating papers and he also set aside the first-to-file-wins rule after the ACLU filed a challenge on Fontes’ behalf.
 Besides the nominating signatures dustup, Moreau successfully dealt with several controversies in the past year.
The mayor was accused of funneling the jobs of boarding up abandoned houses in the city to a company owned by his childhood friend and campaign contributor, Michael Bouthillette, who received $12,000 to $16,000 for each job. Moreau noted that the city has the authority to designated a company to board up the structures on an emergency basis and that the cost was paid by those who held the liens on the properties, not the city or taxpayers.
Moreau was also forced to rein in upheaval at the Wyatt Detention Center after the death of an inmate there prompted the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to pull its detainees from the facility. The board that runs the private detention center fired director Anthony Ventetuolo and his management company Avcorr Management LLC, and Moreau later ousted the board’s chairman, Daniel Cooney.
Moreau brushed aside those controversies as “nonsense.”