Framingham Mayor Makes Big City Staff Cut But Buys Another Building

In the City Council meeting on Tuesday, May 21, 2024, the picture of the FY25 budget came into clearer focus. The Mayor provided a PowerPoint presentation of the financial elements of the budget, so the community finally got something of a message from the Mayor, even though it included none of the detailed content on what city departments will actually do with the funding in FY25.

So, it was progress towards fulfilling the City Charter requirements on the Mayor's budget submission, but fell far short of what the community needs to understand the goals of the budget, what progress was achieved last year, and what is planned for the upcoming year.

The Mayor's full budget submission also finally saw the light of day as the Mayor repaired another charter violation by posting the budget submission on the city website in the Budget Central area. That included:

• FY25 Budget Memo
• FY25 Budget Summary Sheet
• FY25 Munis Budget Report
• FY25 Classification Schedule
• FY25 Compensation Schedule
• FY25 Budget Presentation CC 4-30-24

Anyone who can look through this information and tell what the city government is going to do with $359,040,477 in the next year is welcome to write a guest article on the matter, which I would be happy to publish. I have no idea what the plan is.

What stood out from the materials now posted on the city website is something which was not included in the FY25 Budget Memo, which is that 17 positions are being cut from Inspectional Services, the Department of Public Works, Police and Fire. Here is the key slide from the Mayor’s presentation:

These are currently vacant positions which would have been funded in the budget in prior years. However, in a new financial maneuver to prevent the tax levy increase going over 2.5%, the Mayor has entirely defunded these positions, which means they will not be advertised, and they will not be filled. The Mayor claims that they have not been eliminated, but for all intents and purposes, they have been. And they will not come back in the FY26 budget, as that promises to be much worse than for FY25.

The general staffing approach taken by the city is to throttle back increases in compensation for staff positions, causing a growing number of staff vacancies, due to staff leaving for better pay elsewhere. Then those vacant positions are slightly underfunded by 2-3% using what City Council Finance Subcommittee leadership calls the ‘vacancy factor’ approach, which discourages any inclination to hire, as it requires City Council action to fully fund any vacant position being filled. The use of ‘vacancy factors’ was a practice explicitly condemned by the prior Chief Financial Officer, Louise Miller, in her farewell memo.

In most cases, once a position has become vacant due to its compensation being below market, it persists in staying vacant because of that, and the additional negative effect of ‘vacancy factor’ underfunding. Then comes the argument from the city administration that the entire funding for the position can be eliminated, as hiring does not seem to be having any positive results.

Those jobs with their funding eliminated are gone and will not come back during this Mayor’s term.

Further, with close to 90 cityside job vacancies, this cut of 17 positions is likely just the first wave, and in the FY26 budget, when financial stress will be much greater, the Mayor could take out another 17 or maybe more to meet the 2.5% limit on tax levy increases, imposed by the City Council Finance Subcommittee leadership.

That is the sad story of the Mayor’s approach to his workforce.

The kicker is that having just wrung $1.4 million out of the FY25 budget by cutting important staff, in the very same City Council meeting the Mayor disclosed his plan to spend $1.5 million of precious city funds on a property at 196-200 Concord St next to City Hall. See:

https://legistarweb-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/attachment/pdf/2621952/2024-035_Rescindment_of_Bond_Authorization_and_Approval_of_New_Projects_Funding_CC_5-21.24.pdf

The Mayor is shifting $2 million in funding from the Joint Dispatch project to fund this purchase. He threw in $500,000 for the Farley solar roof design as a sweetener, but that is not enough to actually complete the solar roof project, so an operational Farley solar roof is still a distant goal.

It turns out to be even more puzzling, as the Mayor wants to immediately demolish part of the building he aims to buy, to accommodate an expanded downtown parking garage footprint. That adds another $250,000 to the 196-200 Concord St project cost to cover demolition and rebuilding the back of the building.

What is even more puzzling, is the RFP process for the design of the parking garage, which had Arrowstreet as the bid winner, ran aground in October 2023 and got cancelled last December.

There were 4 bidders and the firm which lost out to Arrowstreet, as its design was considered too utilitarian, was Desman. Desman works with Beta Group as its construction partner, and Beta Group has done lot of work for the city in the past, and its principals have supported the Mayor in his political campaigns.

The October disruption of a smooth ride for Arrowstreet to be awarded the downtown parking garage design contract was coincident with the time when the Chief Financial Officer, Louise Miller, fell out of favor with the Mayor. I am informed by two independent sources that she was promoting a normal outcome for the RFP process, but ran into a political buzz saw.

The fundamental questions are:

• What is going on with the downtown parking garage project?
• Who is producing new design specifications which call for an enlarged footprint due to a need for 200 more parking spaces?
• The RFP process to choose the design architect failed, so how can anyone be working on the design?

It was disturbing to see the Mayor cancel the 5 year capital improvement plan, in violation of the City Charter, but now it seems that all kinds of unauthorized work is being done on the downtown parking garage project.

That comes on top of the recent disclosure that the Community Center Advisory Committee, created on January 24, 2024, met for the first time in the last week or so, and nobody knows what happened at that meeting, as it had no Zoom access, no video was recorded, and no outcomes have been disclosed by the city administration.

An architect for the Community Center project has been hired, but nobody knows what is going on with that as well.

The community has been very patient with the Mayor thus far.

It has tolerated an information trickle on the FY25 budget and cancellation of the FY25 capital plan. It has seen staffing cuts in the FY25 budget, while money has been instantly found for pursuing the Mayor’s pet projects, including the Community Center and the downtown parking garage.

At some point, patience will run out.

It would be wise for the Mayor to provide a full disclosure of what his plans are for the Community Center and the downtown parking garage, including answering key questions including:

• Who has been hired to do what?
• What is the initial funding for the projects?
• Where are the project plans?
• What will be the ultimate cost of these projects and where is the funding coming from?

At present, we have a Mayor spending most of his attention on getting these projects moving, with the community completely in the dark.

Forgive me if I have a bit of PTSD, as it reminds me of the Mayor in Newton, more than 20 years ago, who had a pot of $25 million to get the Newton North High School project going with no voter approval, and an $86 million project with state reimbursement of $46 million, became a $200 million project with a $46 million state reimbursement, complete with Graham Gund as architect, with no track record of designing schools.

All of the information hiding and bad practices in that project forced the Massachusetts State Building Authority to completely change the way it handled all school building projects to require full transparency, including a debt exclusion approval from the community.

A similar sea change is needed in the way the Mayor is handling his projects.

The community deserves full disclosure and full transparency, and must clearly give its approval for the plans for these major projects before they get out of hand.