total time: 14.29 minutes
total words: 2123
[Matt Leming]: Hello, City Councilor Matt Leming here. I just got back from a run so my face is a little bit redder than usual, but in this recap I'm going to go over a couple of very important events that just happened at the past City Council meeting and sort of get into some initial thoughts, nitty gritties on that and try to answer a couple of the more common questions that I hear about these issues. So at the last city council meeting, the work of a lot of colleagues of mine really came to fruition when we voted on three ballot measures that will appear on the ballot this November. The first of these is a $3.5 million Prop 2.0 override, which would, if passed, give $3 million to level fund the Medford Public Schools and basically make it so that they can continue operating at capacity. as well as $500,000 to the Department of Public Works, which would go towards road and sidewalk improvements, let them hire inside more staff members to more actively maintain and repair the roads and sidewalks in Medford. The second is a $4 million Prop 2.0 override, which would invest in Medford Public Schools, in particular into their arts and vocational programs, and let them address salary issues with teachers and paraprofessionals. So the first one just would make it so that the Medford Public Schools can just stop treading water. And the second lets us really invest in our kids' education. and the third is a debt exclusion which is a temporary tax increase to build a new firefighter headquarters on 120 Main Street. So there's a lot that can be said about about these overrides. I'm just going to try to use this video to just offer some answers to a lot of questions and sentiments that I hear a lot about these measures. A lot of this is just going to be information that I've already gone over in previous posts. on my website, but I'm trying to make this kind of a go-to simple page for some of the most obvious top-level stuff to be answered for people who are just trying to learn more information about this. So, first off, Proposition 2.5. That is a 1980 ballot measure. that essentially prevents cities from increasing the amount of money they take from property taxes by 2.5% in any given year, barring new growth. So, in other words, if you took in $100 million from property taxes one year, you're not allowed to take in more than $102.5 million in property taxes the next year. The problem with that is that inflation between 1980 and today averaged out to 3.08%, so that means that effectively the budget of a given city goes down, the value of it goes down over time. And what that means is that cities can do basically one of three things. The first is they do an override, which over 300 of the 350 municipalities in Massachusetts have done so far. of the cities, I think Medford is one of like three or four that haven't so far. Or if you're like Cambridge or Somerville, you can invest in these massive commercial projects, which end up growing your commercial tax base a massive amount over a 20 year period. The third option is to do nothing and continue to cut costs and just sort of watch the infrastructure of a city. city deteriorate, which in many ways is kind of what Medford's done over the last couple of decades, which is sort of what's led us here. So the Prop 2.5 override is a ballot measure that allows us to, for one year, ignore that 2.5% rule and raise the amount that we're allowed to take in more than 2.5% in a given year. A debt exclusion is the same thing, except it's temporary. It's typically used for one-time capital projects. After that capital project is paid off, then it goes down. So that's what that is. The school budget, as we've seen this past year, there's really not enough money to go around. Some people were saying why can't we just pay for it out of something like free cash. This year we are taking money out of ARPA in order to meet some of the costs for that, but of course that can't sustain us over a long period of time because then we just run out of free cash. So we really need to have a permanent way to sustain continuing costs of our school system, given the fact that the way Prop 2.5 is set up and the fact that Medford hasn't had any of these substantial development projects over the past 20 years, it's really necessary to do that at this point. If we don't pass the 2.5 override, we will be basically at the same point next year, as we are right now and we'll have to just have massive layoffs in the schools. It won't be good. I've heard people talk about different points of opposition to this. People are trying to ask are there any alternatives to doing this. Some folks have said, have brought up, you know, okay, well, why can't Medford do more to develop businesses? City Council is working on that very actively right now. We are essentially laying the foundation so that Medford will be much more business friendly in the future. The most important thing that we're doing right now is the zoning overhaul, which we've had many very boring meetings about. And this will make it a lot easier and a lot clearer for businesses to know where they can open and the process for doing that in the future. It's just that that can't get us money over a 2-3 year period that we would need to fund our schools. That can get us money over the next 5-10 years. and that's just where we're at. If we had had this override 20 years ago, we'd be in a much better position today, but my job is to focus on where we're at right now. The other thing that I frequently hear in response to this is, well, why can't Medford do more with less? Why can't we cut more costs than we have before? And the answer to that, of course, is that we are already very much at the bone in terms of money, so in this blog post that I'm pairing this video with, I lay out some comparative statistics. There's a lot of ways that you can throw around different comparisons of Medford's property tax rates, our operating budget. Our total budget, our total spending for this year, according to the budget that we approved at this past meeting, is $218,000. million dollars which is attached in a memo that we approved and in this blog post I also just give a very top-level overview of the line items of that budget as well which is literally just copy and pasted from the agenda. There's a lot of things there like Medford Public Schools is of course the biggest line item there. The second biggest is insurance which The city has to pay off, you know and different there's a lot of complications behind all these things So for instance health insurance rates spiked pretty substantially due to lingering after-effects of kovat which Took up more of the city's budget than usual, which is one of the many reasons that we're facing this shortfall with the schools today But you know, this is I frequently hear people say well I pay my taxes. Where does my money go? and This budget right here that we approved is where, you know, where your money went. There's also many meetings, which we've uploaded to YouTube, which shows all of the individual meetings we've had with the individual departments over these different budget line items, in which each department head specifies why they need what they need in very great detail. We're really at the point where if we try to cut any more than we already have it will be detrimental financially in the future and this man if like At some like if there's a huge Administrative bloat then that's one thing and you could you know make things more efficient that way but eventually the system becomes brittle if you just keep doing that and it breaks apart very easily there is a instance where that made the news last week where City of Arlington lost $445,000 to a phishing scam because they refused to put any sort of investment into their IT department. So pennies smart, dollars stupid, it's important to avoid that. My colleague Councilor Callaghan, the Chair of the Public Works Committee, she gave a very nice spiel at the last City Council meeting that detailed how if we keep letting our roads in Medford get worse than they are today, then it will be exponentially more costly to repair them than if we did this debt exclusion for $500,000 right now. So people say, you know, our taxes, our property taxes are very high, and of course, you know, they are, but they are lower than the vast majority of municipalities in Massachusetts, even accounting for the very high property assessed prices in this city. I mean, our $8.65 per $1,000 of assessed value is lower than 7 out of every 8 cities in the Commonwealth. when you're accounting for cities with a population above 20,000, then Medford is in, which there's like 96 cities, 96 municipalities in the Commonwealth with a population above that. Then in terms of per capita operating budget, I think Medford is in, usually it's like the bottom five cities. So the point of this being that when there's people that are saying, oh, we need to save money, we need to, you know, et cetera, et cetera, Um, there's really not a whole lot more we can save in the few, uh, suggestions I have heard around that, you know, some, I, somebody was saying like, oh, we should fire the superintendent. Like that, that's literally illegal. Like you can't do things like that under state law. Um, no, we're, we're about like, there's no $2.7 million that's being spent elsewhere. There's no $6 million line item that we can just cut without having massive consequences. So this is all a way of saying that, uh, this override is, very necessary at this point. It's essentially the only choice we have. The work that City Council is doing right now in the zoning overall is going to have more substantial effects in Medford's long-term development. That will really allow more businesses to come in. It'll make the process a lot clearer and easier for outside parties to set up shop here. It's just we're not, it's just this is where we are now and we're trying to get the firefighters a station that they've been promised for over a decade now. We're trying to get the DDPW internal staff so that they can actually repair the massive backlog of roads that we have. And we're trying to make it so that the teachers in the Medford public school system will not have to be laid off next year. And there's actually, we can actually promise them that they'll be able to keep their jobs. And we are trying to invest in arts and vocational programs so that the kids who are right now being educated in the Medford public school system will have a good and enriching education because they don't have another 10 to 12 years to wait. So this is all just a kind of a high-level initial overview of what this is all about, why this is, you know, our only option At the moment and why I would strongly encourage everybody to talk to your neighbors about why they need to vote on this on all three of these ballot measures, why that's just really what the city needs right now. And I'd like to thank you so much for listening. If there's any other questions that you do have about the overrides, I would encourage you to email me on the contact form on my website. I generally only like to talk about the things where I have a clear, definite answer. I will try to be So I can't promise you the timeliness of all of those responses. But I will be trying to update this page, this blog post on my website with common questions as I hear them. So thank you very much for listening. And have a wonderful summer. Thank you.
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total time: 14.29 minutes total words: 2123 |
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