Framingham City Councilor Stefanini's Fund-Raising Machine Rolls On

In 20 years of watching the run up to a vote in municipal elections, I have never before seen a candidate hold a fundraiser posing as a campaign rally 6 days before an election, with the inner circle faithful invited with no intention to boost the vote, simply an intention to boost an already bulging war chest.

John Stefanini has just such a fundraiser planned for Thursday, November 2, with the November 7 vote days away. Further, although he is running for District 8 City Councilor, the invited faithful are not 100% District 8 residents. See:

https://www.facebook.com/events/108782535662685/?ref=newsfeed

[The link content is also included as an image at the end of this piece.]

30% of the invitees come from other districts in Framingham, including a majority of the City Council. This 'campaign rally' looks more like a kickoff fundraiser for a citywide Stefanini Mayoral campaign in 2025. At the beginning of the summer, Stefanini already had more than $8,000 on hand, but in a series of fundraisers focused mainly on real estate developers and folks outside of Framingham, that total got boosted to $20,000. Now he aims to rake in even more. Given that running a district race can be done very well with $5,000, it is clear that something is up.

Stefanini's focus is surely shifting from the City Council to the Mayor's office. That means looking beyond the immediate needs of District 8 residents, to craft a message which will appeal citywide while assembling a team which has a citywide focus rather than a District 8 focus.

Further, even the fundraiser invitation's description of the issues shows how disconnected Stefanini is from the major problems District 8 residents have. From the invitation:

"We need him to continue the work on expanding high quality early education, cleaning Lake Waushakum and environmental justice sites, installing new traffic calming measures, building trails and a new southside elementary school."

Here are the real problems which make life difficult for District 8 residents, but which are largely absent from Stefanini's view of the future:

1. Property taxes: Lower income homeowners on the south side find these much more of a burden than their north side counterparts. The City Council solution, promoted energetically by King, Cannon and Stefanini, has been to lower property tax increases well below inflation for the last 6 years which has choked off city property tax revenue and caused a severe shortage of money for infrastructure maintenance, education, and other city operations. Plus, most of the tax relief went to the north side. The simple tool to provide targeted property tax relief is the Residential Exemption which allows homeowners to exclude a portion of their home's assessed value from being taxed. This provides the most relief to lower income homeowners and is the best way to bring real property tax relief to the south side, while ensuring that the property tax revenue stream keeps pace with inflation. Boston does this, and last year the annual savings for low income homeowners in Boston was as much as $3,456.50! See: https://www.boston.gov/departments/assessing/residential-exemption. But the City Council, with John Stefanini, as one of its principal property tax policy architects, refuses each year to support the Residential Exemption. They would rather see most of the property tax relief flow to the north side and give peanuts to the south side.

2. High water bills: Because the city property tax revenue stream has been choked off by the City Council tax approach, the burden of paying for maintaining the water & sewer infrastructure has fallen on the water & sewer fees which homeowners pay each year. Everyone knows these bills have been going through the roof, and that especially impacts south side lower income homeowners much more that their higher income north side counterparts. If the City Council property tax approach embraced the Residential Exemption, we could be paying for a good portion of the water & sewer maintenance from city property tax revenue, not water & sewer fees, and we would certainly see water & sewer bills start dropping. But again, the Stefanini et. al. approach is to ignore the problem entirely. They are completely unaware of the south side pain being caused by their policies.

3. Late school buses: Everyone knows we have a chronic late bus problem, which is causing substantial education loss mostly to south side students and disrupting south side families waiting for buses to arrive. It is a disgrace. The solution, which has been obvious for almost a year now, was to pay school bus drivers more than the $29/hour they were getting. The School Committee argued for $34/hour to match the raised rate Marlborough was paying their drivers, but even when NRT, the bus company submitted a rate of $32.42/hour in their contract rebid, the tone-deaf city procurement process knocked that down to $31.00/hour. It was an obvious place for the City Council to intervene and demand we pay Framingham bus drivers enough to solve the problem. But silence. As Adam Freudberg noted recently, it would cost the city $550,000/year to raise school bus driver pay by a further $5/hour to $36/hour. That is a tiny amount in a $160 million annual school district budget. The City Council and specifically King, Cannon and Stefanini control the city purse strings, but they won't lift a finger to solve the problem. They are too focused on making sure the north side gets bigger property tax breaks.

4. Lack of access to quality pre-K education for 4-year-olds: This is a giant south side issue. It is also a real Stefanini doozy. John makes a big deal of the need to expand high quality early education and I am with him on that. With 60% of the incoming kindergartners coming from homes on the south side where English is not the first language, and 40% of them having no pre-K experience, up from 25% last year, if we want to get these kids to be proficient readers by grade 3, we have to immediately expand pre-K to include all Framingham 4-year-olds with no fees. The remarkable thing is that with rising state Chapter 70 education aid, aimed at exactly these kids, we had the extra $10 million/year which could have funded the entire pre-K expansion we needed, from a 300-student capacity to a 900-student capacity. But just when we got that added boost, the city, with full City Council approval, lowered the city funded portion of the school district budget by $10 million/year, shifting it to pay for new school roofs and other city infrastructure projects. The state giveth the pre-K money and Stefanini et.al. taketh it away. The Stefanini claim to support expanded early education is pure fiction.

5. Horrendously hot summers: It is well known that the southside has almost no tree canopy compared to the northside. This is a clear environmental justice issue. An established solution is to plant a whole lot more trees on the south side. If 8,500 trees were planted on the southside, the summer temperature could be reduced by as much as 10 degrees. That would bring the southside tree canopy more in line with the north side tree canopy. However, all of this brings a big ho-hum from Stefanini et. al. See for more details: https://www.treeequityscore.org/reports/place/framingham-ma

I shall pause here.

It amazes me that District 8 residents could possibly put up with the pitiful lack of progress on issues which matter dearly to them. No District 8 homeowner should be supporting a District 8 Councilor who denies them easily deployed property tax relief and makes their water & sewer bills break their budgets. No District 8 family with children in the school system should be supporting a City Councilor who defunds their children's education, seems immune to the damage done to them by constantly getting to school late, and takes no action to protect them against climate change which threatens their future.

THE SOLUTION:

Vote Leslie White Harvey for District 8 Councilor on November 7 and give fresh ideas and energy a shot. John Stefanini has had 6 years on the City Council and has shown no ability to solve the financial problems, the educational problems or the climate change problems which face District 8.

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Here is the Stefanini Facebook 'campaign rally' invite: