Expanding Framingham City Council Strategy Beyond Minimizing Taxes

This is the first of two articles examining outcomes of the FY24 city budget process. This first one focuses on the lack of strategic vision in the way the City Council functions and ways to remedy that. The second strongly cautions against the King/Cannon/Stefanini plan to disrupt our well-run school district by attempting to force an ill-advised reorganization on its administration. ____________________________________

In the final City Council meeting on June 20, 2023, where the city FY24 budget was approved, the community may not have noticed a document listed as: “Provisos to the FY24 Operating Budget”, which may be found at:

https://legistarweb-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/attachment/pdf/1982429/Provisos_to_FY24_Operating_Budget_Vote.pdf

This document lists action items which the City Council distilled from its FY24 city budget review process. All the action items place demands on the Mayor, except for one which requires the City Council to attend to some minor housekeeping on the “auditor” position.

One item called for the Mayor to develop a strategic plan, which is long overdue, as without that guidance, the entire FY24 budget process played out in a planning vacuum. It is very hard to tell what the City Council review of the FY24 budget achieved, except an acceleration of the erosion of the city’s financial position by reducing the property tax revenue stream further than the Mayor had done in his budget submission. That action explicitly ignored Moody’s Investor Service bond rating downgrade warning, which was triggered by the city’s declining financial position due to persistent, throttled back tax revenue increases and the chronic use of cash reserves to fund the operating budget.

Another item called for the Mayor to figure out a way to consolidate city and school services. That is completely alarming, as it could entirely disrupt an efficiently run school district. That item will be examined in the second article in this series.

What is missing from this list of action items is any evidence that the City Council considers it necessary or important to improve the way it functions. It has plenty of advice for everyone, except itself.

In its 6 years of operation, the City Council has never really met basic expectations of a City Council. It has no goals, its has no strategic objectives and it has been responsible for major failures in the areas of finance, infrastructure, education, and climate change action, which would spur any self-aware City Council into immediate action. With its single-minded focus on minimizing taxes, it has weakened the city financial position, expanded infrastructure maintenance backlogs, helped remove vital funding from education and done almost nothing to combat climate change.

The City Council has ordinance power but has done little to use that to achieve much needed change in the city. It can implement major policies through ordinances and if the Mayor does not agree, it can override a Mayoral veto with a 2/3 majority. The City Council can do a lot, but they have been operating in a very narrowly focused mode.

In addition, the whole direction of the city is largely determined by the King/Cannon/Stefanini (KCS) faction on the City Council Finance Subcommittee. All major decision paths runs through that subcommittee. They virtually ‘control’ financial policy, infrastructure investment, education funding and climate change action.

Let me expand on the four major failures of the City Council and then suggest a number of simple ways to remedy the situation:

1. FINANCIAL FAILURE: Minimizing the property tax revenue stream has been such a high priority for the City Council that major opportunities have been lost to build cash reserves, pay down debt and reduce the city infrastructure maintenance backlog. If a city has good cash reserves, has reduced its debt and is ahead on maintenance, in tough times it can draw on reserves, borrow to fill financial gaps and lower recurring expenses by slowing down maintenance. These are the buffers a city can use to mitigate revenue downturns. Instead, the KCS approach leaves the city without those buffers. The stated KCS remedy is to increase property taxes in those tough times, right when the community is least able to afford it. Yes, you read that correctly. When in tough times, state revenues drop, then “of course, we’d have to raise taxes” is the KCS position. It is a recipe for making downturns much more difficult to navigate. It is hard to imagine a worse approach.
2. INFRASTRUCTURE FAILURE: The reduced property tax revenue stream has had a number of consequences. One is a lack of funds to maintain infrastructure: roads, buildings, water & sewer system, etc. The city has a maintenance backlog which has grown to $400 million and is still rising. Remarkably, the City Council has no subcommittee on Public Facilities which other cities commonly have. There is no regular reporting to the City Council on the state of billions of dollars of city infrastructure. The only infrastructure which has current information is school buildings and that is because the School Committee has a Buildings & Grounds subcommittee which stays on top of school system infrastructure. Further, the only time city infrastructure rises into the City Council view is when the capital budget is considered by the Finance Subcommittee. Then we have the unwise situation where the KCF cost cutters are in charge of capital investments. Talk about the fox guarding the hen house!
3. EDUCATION FAILURE: Here the City Council, in its first 4 years, first lowered the annual city funding increase for the school district budget to about $1 million/year, down from $3 million/year in the last 5 years as a town, then proceeded to implement funding decreases (!) of $5 million/year in FY23 and another $5 million/year in FY24. This has disrupted planning by the Framingham Public Schools to soundly integrate the rising, non-English speaking student population into its educational framework by deploying free full-time pre-K instruction for all 4-year-olds in the city and addressing the chronic shortage of English language support classroom aides. This promises to develop into a permanently damaging impact on the most vulnerable children in the city.
4. CLIMATE CHANGE INACTION: Here there has been almost complete cityside inertia, with 3 out of 4 solar installations at schools: Fuller, Farley and Brophy. Only the McAuliffe library solar roof accrues to the City Council’s credit. There has been persistent opposition coming from Mike Cannon on the major tool which enables solar installations: Power Purchase Agreements or PPAs. These work best for organizations which have no taxable income and cannot take the standard solar tax credits which lower the cost of solar panels by 30%. So, a company like Ameresco or Solect, which has income does the installation, takes the tax credit, and passes the benefits on to the customer. FPS will already get $184,000 in FY24 from utility savings from the Brophy/Fuller/Farley installations we have. However, due to City Council opposition the entire solar buildout effort is stalled. We have at least 27 other solar roof and canopy locations begging for installations, which could boost utility savings to $2 million/year. Further, curbside composting with Black Earth Compost (BAC) is being pushed by the community but has drawn a ho-hum from the Mayor and City Council, even though scaling it up would reduce methane emissions and lower city trash stream costs. Only the school district seems to get the picture, as they have a pilot starting with BAC at Dunning Elementary School.

So much for the failures, here’s what can be done to turn things around:

1. The City Council should take seriously the Moody’s Investor Service city bond rating downgrade and push to hire an outside consultant to look into the Framingham structural financial imbalance which Moody’s identified. Ordinance power!
2. The City Council should create a subcommittee on Public Facilities and use it to immediately get full reporting on the state of the roads, buildings, and water & sewer system and require such reporting on a regular basis. That subcommittee can then make recommendations to the full City Council on the level of investment needed to properly maintain city infrastructure. It is likely that some kind of short-term intervention will be needed to get the rising maintenance backlog under control. Further, as things settle down, that infrastructure information can then be fed into the annual budget cycle. Ordinance power!
3. The City Council should work with the Mayor and CFO to reform the annual city budgeting process and get its budget book to the level that the School Committee has achieved in a fruitful collaboration with the Superintendent and the Executive Director of Finance & Operations. The organization and content of the city budget book can be specified by ordinance. Ordinance power!
4. The City Council Subcommittee on Education, Library, Arts & Culture, Elder & Veteran Services should be split into two subcommittees, with one totally focused on Education. That Education subcommittee should work to ensure that the City Council financial strategy is completely aligned with and supportive of the school district educational goals. Never again should we see a City Councilor from the KCS faction complaining that the schools district budget increases are ‘unsustainable’ when all of the increases are driven by inflation, rising student numbers and a rapidly shifting student demographic. Never again should we hear a KCS faction Councilor say that that the city is “swimming in money” when state Chapter 70 education aid is boosted to support a rising immigrant student population. The “swimming in money” description reflects an opinion that the state has dumped too much education money into Framingham and explains why the KCS Councilors were quite happy that $10 million/year was shifted from education to replace school roofs. These KCS Councilors simply don’t “see” the population of 4-year-old immigrant children who need our full support. That has to end, with either a 180 by Councilors, or by new faces on the City Council.
5. The City Council subcommittee on Environment and Sustainability should change its name to Climate Change, Environment and Sustainability to show its commitment to substantive climate change action. Then it should start drafting ordinances requiring that every city owned parking lot and every city owned building should be upgraded with solar installations on a post haste timeline. It should also draft an ordinance to align the city with a curbside composting vendor like Black Earth Compost and push the expansion of curbside composting throughout the city. Draft the ordinances, have the full City Council consider them, adjust them, and approve them. Ordinance power!
6. Make sure every subcommittee has at least 4 Councilors, so any two of them can meet and chat about their subcommittee subject matter without violating the Open Meeting Law (OML). Currently 6 City Council subcommittees have just 3 members, so any two of them are a quorum and cannot informally chat about their subcommittee business without violating the OML.

There are many more suggestions to get the City Council off the bench and onto the policy making playing field. For too long it has been sitting on the sidelines, only intervening to ensure every play “keeps taxes low”. That is a terrible game plan for a city which wants to go places.