Framingham City Council Guts Key Protection For Special Needs Students

On May 24th, 2023, the City Council Finance Subcommittee met to complete its final FY24 budget review and send its recommendations to the full City Council for its consideration. In a meeting lasting almost 2 ½ hours, the entire budget was re-examined with a fine-tooth comb, searching for cuts which would bring the property tax levy increase as close as possible to the arbitrary 0.9% increase put forward by George King and Mike Cannon.

As specified in the City Charter the detailed budget review is done by the City Council Finance Subcommittee, which has 5 Councilor members, so that 6 Councilors sit on the sidelines, excluded by a process which has to be one of the major mistakes of the Charter. Departments come to the review meetings to provide details of their individual budgets and answer questions relevant to their finances and operations, but a majority of the City Council is entirely disengaged from the process.

The Mayor had proposed a budget built on a 1.9% property tax levy increase, hoping to appease the King/Cannon leadership of the Finance Subcommittee which mandated 0% property tax levy increases for the first 4 city years. King/Cannon had knocked the Mayor’s proposed 2.5% tax increase last year down to 2.0%, and now, encouraged by that success, sought an even bigger reduction for FY24, from 1.9% to 0.9%.

The Mayor has no strategic plan (truly!), and the City Council has no goals (truly!), so the City Council Finance Subcommittee, unconstrained by strategy or objectives, had no plan to improve city services or the educational system, nor did it consider it worthwhile to spend time addressing serious threats to the city such as the Moody’s city bond rating downgrade, which warned the city to improve tax revenue and build reserves. Also, not a moment was spent worrying about the deteriorating roads and how the $8.5 million/year needed to maintain them could be found, when the city only spent a little over $2 million/year.

The focus was totally on how to cut the Mayor’s budget, in an approach which seemed entirely seated in keeping taxes as low as possible and lowering funding for city staffing in the process. As we shall see, a key protection for our highest needs students was also a casualty in this process, which has to be one of the most egregious mistakes made by the City Council in recent years.

George King and Mike Cannon were the dominant forces in the effort.

The Mike Cannon approach can be summarized in short form as:

“In any $330 million budget you can always find $2 million in cuts”

And in the long form as an ingenious variant of the Catch 22 argument which goes something like this:

“in good times, you have to be very careful because bad times are ahead. So, you have to spend as little money as possible, keeping the government as small as possible, so you have to keep taxes as low as possible. When the bad times come, no one will want to raise taxes, because times are too tough, and taxpayers cannot afford it.”

The Mike Cannon approach means taxing as little as possible all the time. Low taxes cannot be avoided in Framingham, just like in ‘Catch 22’ Yossarian could not avoid combat, whether he was sane or insane.

The George King approach drapes itself in 'affordability', but George’s affordability applies to the well off as well as those who really need assistance. This is shown quite clearly in George’s opposition to the Residential Exemption which is employed by Boston, Brookline and other municipalities to protect their lower end homeowners, by allowing them to exempt a substantial amount of their home value from property taxes.

In good times, competent government raises taxes by 2.5% annually, builds reserves, pays off debt, and gets ahead of infrastructure maintenance. Then in poor times, the tax increases might be lower, reserves drawn on, more debt incurred, and some infrastructure maintenance deferred.

But none of those best practices works for the King/Cannon faction.

Thus, the tax cutting and staff reduction efforts of the King/Cannon faction on the City Council are much more a political position than an enterprise aimed at improving and protecting city finances and operations.

In the search to reduce the Mayor’s 1.9% levy increase to 0.9%, the Mayor came up with $880,000 in further cuts, mostly by gutting the cemetery revolving account, and defunding a portion of vacant staff positions. As part of that, the School Committee voted to cut the school district budget by $250,000. The Finance Subcommittee pushed harder and cut a further $937,000 by cutting more reserves and defunding more staff positions. That got the tax levy increase down to 1% and the Finance Subcommittee called it a day.

The cut of $250,000 to the school district budget may seem small, but it should be viewed in context, as it actually reduces the Framingham Public Schools Special Education Reserve to zero. That is the reserve which protects the school district against unexpected move ins of students with high disabilities, which can require as much as $200,000/year for a student.

Earlier this year, Lincoln Lynch, the Executive Director for Finance & Operations, projected the Special Education Reserve for FY24 would be $600,000, but since then more special needs students needed support and the most recent projection dwindled to $200,000. The $250,000 the City Council has cut from the school district will explicitly come from that reserve, so a critical reserve has gone to zero. That reserve is specifically called out by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education as a vital reserve each school district should build up, to as much as $6 million in Framingham’s case, exactly because of high needs move in volatility. For the past 8 years that reserve has been well maintained at around $1.5-2.0 million. It is so important, and yet has been under constant attack by George King, since he became a Councilor. George quest to gut that reserve account posed such a financial threat to high needs special education students, that the School Committee created a special policy to protect it. See:

http://z2policy.ctspublish.com/masc/browse/framinghamset/framingham/DIBA

But now George has finally achieved his goal. Another reserve account has been transformed into tax breaks. Only this time there could be real pain for the school district with such a high-risk City Council maneuver. And the School Committee gutted its own policy.

The City Council Finance Subcommittee has completed its budget review and now its recommendations will be moved to the full City Council for final approval in the next few weeks.

The only question that remains is:

“Will the full City Council confirm the low taxes, small government values which dominate the Finance Subcommittee thinking, weaken the school district, reduce staffing, neglect infrastructure and completely ignore the red flag Moody’s is waving to let us know that we should be building reserves and substantially increasing property tax revenue?”