Fresh face at City Hall

LYNN – It’s been a long time since Patrick Cogan was the new kid on the block, but it hasn’t taken him long at all to settle into his new job in the mayor’s office on the third floor of City Hall.”I was really nervous,” he admitted. “I’d been at my other job for six years, and I hadn’t been the new guy for a long time.”Cogan met Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy prior to her re-election, and Kennedy’s Chief of Staff Jamie Cerulli said they hit it off.”She thought he had a great sense of humor and that he would be a good fit for the office,” she said. “She really wanted to bring him in.””I bumped into Judy one day and we chatted,” Cogan said. “A while later Jamie emailed me and asked if I’d be interested in working in her office.”Cogan said it wasn’t a hard choice to leave his other job, which was an overnight shift in Boston, for a chance to work in City Hall.”I live right around the corner, too,” he added. “So this is so much easier than driving into Boston every night.”Cerulli said Kennedy’s prediction that Cogan would be a good fit has proven true. He smiles readily, laughs easily and works hard, she said.Seated in the corner, the lanky 29-year-old is easy to spot. His desk is about six inches higher than anyone else’s to accommodate his wheelchair, which he maneuvers through the office with ease.Diagnosed with Friedreich’s ataxia in his early 20s, Cogan is now mostly confined to a wheelchair. FA, as it is called, is a degenerative neuromuscular disorder often described as “an evil cousin” of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerois or Lou Gehrig’s disease).Coogan’s job is general office work, and Cerulli called him a quick learner.”As they say, ?you don’t know what you don’t know,’ so I’m perfectly fine doing busy work,” he said. “I will learn as I go.”Cogan said he was a bit unnerved on his first day because the foundation he and his family have started, Project Wheels, has garnered some attention.”I thought that they knew everything about me, and I didn’t know anything about them,” he said.But it turns out they didn’t.Cerulli said she was surprised to learn Cogan is one of a set of triplets that includes a brother and a sister, and that he is training to participate in not one but three triathlons.”I like to challenge myself,” he said.He joked that working with three women, Kennedy, Cerulli and mayoral aide Mary Fountain, could be a challenge, too, but he’s ready for it.”I love it here,” he said. “I emailed Jamie after my first day and told her I’ve not been excited to go back to work in years. I love coming to work here.”