Politics & Government
City of Framingham Contract Fumbles Make the School Bus Problem Worse
The city procurement process wasted millions of dollars by forcing a bus contract rebid which failed to solve the bus driver pay problem.
It's not often that the City of Framingham is featured on NBC news, but the local school bus driver shortage was featured on a recent newscast. It is worth watching the clip as the basic problem is well described by a Framingham school bus driver and the local union representative:
“It would be hard for NRT to recruit people to come to a yard that’s the lowest paid in the area. That I believe is one of the highest reasons why we have not been able to fill the positions” – Joe Fonseca, Framingham School Bus Driver
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“If they can get a job that’s closer, that’s comparable, they are going to do that. Surrounding communities are about $2-3 more than what Framingham is paying right now. – James Marks, Teamsters Union Local 170
The fundamental problem, which has been apparent for almost 9 months, is that Framingham school bus drivers are significantly underpaid compared to those in surrounding districts. Marlborough recognized the problem and increased their school bus driver pay from $26/hour to $34/hour back in February this year. They do not have a school bus driver shortage going into their new school year.
Find out what's happening in Framinghamfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
Framingham’s school bus driver pay was $29/hour for the prior school year and it was obvious that a pay increase to $34/hour matching Marlborough’s would go a long way to solving the bus driver shortage.
Yet, we have made no progress in a year of humming and hawing about bus transportation. As a city we look inept at best.
We should take to heart the simple ground truth offered by Joe Fonseca and James Marks and press the Mayor to do an immediate intervention on this new contract. It must be amended to change the FY24 school bus driver pay rate to $34/hour. If they can do it in the City of Marlborough, we can do it in Framingham. No state law or regulation prevents this.
That is the immediate, necessary action. The further action is to examine why the city procurement process is blocking the school district from achieving a key educational goal: getting students to class on time and getting back home in a timely manner.
The remainder of this piece examines exactly how we ended in such a mess and highlights the dysfunctionality in the city’s procurement process.
Earlier this year, there was a remarkable opportunity to solve the driver shortage by incrementing their pay to $34/hour.
NRT, the Framingham bus company, submitted a report to the Framingham School Committee at their meeting on March 15, 2023, which offered an opportunity to increase school bus driver compensation to $34/hour at an added annual contract cost of about $400,000. See:
This was a very appealing offer, as just the driver pay would increase, and NRT would hold the rest of the contract at the same cost level. Remember since that contract was bid and signed two years ago, rising inflation boosted the cost of bus fuel and maintenance costs, so NRT was holding that part level. It was a real bargain.
But the Mayor ducked that opportunity to simply amend the existing contract without a complete, and likely expensive, rebid process.
Fast forward to today and the Mayor decided to pursue exactly that rebid process which promised to be the most expensive option. The School Committee advocated with all the energy they had to set the school bus driver pay rate to $34/hour. The bid came back from NRT with the FY24 pay rate set to $32.42/hour for FY24 and $34.04/hour for FY25. That was progress. All that was needed was for the Mayor to bump that FY24 rate to $34/hour.
But no.
He sat on the sidelines as the Framingham procurement department swung into action and contested the $32.42/hour rate as being above the ‘prevailing’ rate of $31/hour. The department insisted that the new contract driver pay be set at that $31/hour ‘prevailing rate’. Further, they set the FY25 rate at $31.07/hour and the FY26 rate at $32.50/hour. You can see the new NRT contract and supporting data at:
Further, the increased cost of the new contract was not the $400,000/year we could have gotten back in March, but $1.4 million/year. We lost at least a million dollars/year, because now NRT was including current increased costs for fuel, maintenance etc.
The contract procurement process cost Framingham taxpayers at least $3 million more than it should have over the 3 years of the new contract and failed to hit the $34/hour rate needed to attract more bus drivers and solve our shortage problem. Even worse is the fact that we are locked into this for the next 3 years!
Either we have to get a more intelligent, agile procurement process, backed up by more sophisticated legal advice, and have the Mayor intervene in this current situation to amend the contract to add $3/hour to the prevailing wage clause of the contract, or we will have busing chaos for the next 3 years.
There it is.
This experience makes one wonder whether the inflexibility and lack of creativity in the procurement process could also explain why back in 2015 we never could get Ameresco to install solar roofs and solar canopies when surrounding towns and cities had a flexible procurement process which got the job done. It makes one wonder why when we finally got Solect in to do the two solar roofs and two canopies that we have, why we could not successfully work with them to expand that effort to the other 14 school roofs and 13 parking lots. It makes one wonder why we cannot get to a deal on the Bethany property, so vital for the planned southside school project.
Framingham seems to have a systemic problem with its contract negotiation process and seems unable to handle situations which are non-standard and need real mental agility and creative legal advice to solve. If we are going to succeed as a city, we need to do much better.
