total time: 7.98 minutes
total words: 92
[Anna Callahan]: Hi there is Anna Callahan, I'm one of your city Councilors and today I want to talk a little bit about why we have these prop two and a half overrides on the ballot in November and why you should vote yes. So a lot of people may feel that they already pay a lot in taxes, and they want to know where that money is going. I think that is a fair question. I think, first, it's important to understand that it costs money to run a city. So the question is, are we spending just as much as other cities but getting less in services? Are we spending more money than other cities and somehow wasting it? Are we spending less money and not able to meet our expenses? So in fiscal year 2024, Medford ranks 320th out of 351 municipalities in our operating budget per capita. Of all of the other 58 cities in Massachusetts, Medford spends less per person than every single one of those. Our budget is smaller per person than every other city in Massachusetts. Our budget is also smaller than 90% of all towns in Massachusetts. 90% of towns spend more per person than we do. They have a larger budget than we do. The few that spend less than we do are much smaller than we are. So we really do not have a budget that is large enough to properly fund our city. Our budget is too small. I wanna get into a little bit of a detailed discussion of our budget. And this idea, I've heard a lot of people talk about the idea that we should be able to like scrimp and save our way out of this budget crisis, right? So let's go ahead and show you a graph that I made. So this is our budget. And I want you to just look at the largest expense we have. This is our schools. And I think everyone agrees, no matter what side of this issue of the Prop 2.5 issue you're on, everyone agrees that we need to fund our schools and properly fund them. There was a crisis this year that we did not have enough in the operating budget to properly fund the schools now that the ARPA funds, the city, or sorry, the federal funds that were there for COVID, now that those funds have ended. So we were looking for how to find at least three million, maybe five million more dollars to fund the schools. So we're not taking money out of the school budget, that's for sure. The second largest one is insurance. Now, insurance is required by law. Unfortunately, it goes up as well. It's not something that stays fixed. It's something that goes up, it increases every year just due to normal inflation and everything else. And it's uncontrollable. There's nothing we can do. We cannot cut out of the insurance budget. This next one is pensions. Now, pensions, our contracts, we are required to fulfill by law. They also are not staying the same or going down. There is an uncontrollable expense. We cannot take money out of the pensions budget. Next is the fire department. And after that is the police department. I suspect that no one, no matter what side of the prop two and a half override question you are on, wants us to drastically cut our police and fire departments. After police and fire, the next one is highway, right? That's DBW highway. That means our roads. And I do want to get a little bit into roads because I think talking about roads can help people understand why we are in the situation that we are in. We had a roads assessment done for the first time in 2019. And that assessment rated our roads one, two, three, four, and five. And with one being the best and five being the worst. A full 49% of our roads rated four or five. They're the worst two categories of roads. Now, you can tell, right? You know that. I know that. We drive on the roads. I bike on the roads. We walked on the sidewalks. And we can all basically, we didn't need an assessment to tell us that. But what the assessment can tell us is that it costs between 30 and 50 times as much to repair a category 5 road as it does to repair a category 2 road. Now, if we just always fixed the Category 2 roads to Category 1 roads, if we just always fixed our roads every year, the state Chapter 90 funding, it would cover everything, right? But when you allow your roads to fall into such disrepair, You balloon this road debt, right? You balloon the amount of money that's called a backlog, the amount of money it will take to repair your roads, because it costs so much more to repair dilapidated roads. It's as if you have a house, and you allow a leak in your roof to continue. You don't fix it, and you keep letting it get worse and worse. That's going to destroy your ceiling. It's going to destroy your hardwood floors. It's going to destroy the ceiling on the next floor. It costs more and more money. by not repairing. Now, we have underfunded our city for so long. that we are ballooning these kinds of debt, the amount of capital projects, buildings, fire trucks that need to be replaced, that are long overdue for being replaced. We have many tens of millions of dollars, $67 million in road debt and many tens of millions of dollars in capital improvement debt because we have underfunded our city, chronically. So going back to this, this is roads right there. And we do not want to underfund our roads because it just makes the problem so much worse. After roads is bonds. That is debt that we must repay. And again, we can't cut that. It continues to increase, like not increase, but it continues to be something that we have to pay. And then you get to the library facilities. And there are other much, much, much smaller amounts in here. But none of these are going to cover the $3 million that we need to give to the schools. So there is literally nowhere, unless you're willing to cut police and fire, there is nowhere to scrimp and save and find the money that we need to fund our schools. The only way that we are going to get a budget that appropriately funds our schools and our roads is by doing what almost every other city and town in Massachusetts has done, which is to pass a Prop 2.5 override. And I will also say that the proponents of Prop 2.5 in 1980, they didn't pass it to make it wrong or bad or illegal. to increase taxes more than two and a half, not increase taxes by two and a half percent, but to increase the total amount, the total tax levy, the total amount of taxes that a city brings in more than two and a half percent. They wanted cities to put them on the ballot so that when it was necessary and appropriate, those taxes would in fact go up. So I hope that this has been informative. I look forward to any kinds of questions that you have and do reach out. And I hope that everyone will vote yes on six, seven, and eight. Thank you.
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total time: 7.98 minutes total words: 92 |
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