Heretical Thoughts on the Framingham City Council Races

Framingham city government is floundering.

1. It spent 18 months trying to buy a $9 million property (Bethany) for $6 million. This meant the property was not a secured asset for the new school project building project submission to the state, which was a totally avoidable mistake.
2. It cannot solve the school bus driver shortage because it has doggedly refused to increase driver pay to $34/hour or more to be competitive with adjacent school districts. It could raise the current $31/hour pay rate to $34/hour at a cost of $300,000/year or to $36/hour for $500,000/year, according to School Committee Member Adam Freudberg, commenting for the MetroWest Daily News: https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/story/news/education/2023/10/24/framingham-ma-public-schools-considers-in-house-busing-system/71252511007/. Then we would be swimming in drivers.
3. $10 million/year was shifted from local funding for the school district budget to pay for city infrastructure projects such as school roof replacements. Infrastructure trumps education for city leadership.
4. Road maintenance is funded at less than $2.5 million/year for the next 5 years, when at least $8.5 million/year is needed just to stop them getting worse. Potholes are popping up everywhere and will get worse.
5. Universal, free pre-K for all of our 4-year-olds has been moved out to 2030, so each year 300 entering kindergartners have no pre-K experience. By 2030, we’ll have 2,000 youngsters in the schools struggling to survive because of this, when we could guarantee they do well by shifting that $10 million/year back into education to fund pre-K for all.
6. Progress on solar panel roof and parking lot installations has stalled. We just have McAuliffe and Brophy locations generating power. Fuller and Farley should have come online a year ago but are still sitting there idle. A new roof was just put on Farley, with no solar installation. No new solar projects have been started in 2 years!
7. The city’s money shortage has impacted staff compensation, and because of that we have 80 vacant positions in the Department of Public Works. Same story for the school district, where there are 120 vacant positions. There are especially pressing shortfalls in classroom aides for special needs and English language support.

The community is being seriously let down by its cityside leadership. There is an obvious shortage of finances driving a lot of these problems, but it’s also a pure lack of initiative which leaves us taking no advantage of all the state and federal incentives which are designed to combat climate change and generate substantial income for the city through large utility savings.

We have George King, John Stefanini and Mike Cannon controlling city finances through their domination of the City Council Finance Subcommittee, which has a lock on the city operating budget and capital expenditures. Their impact in lowering the city property tax revenue stream has been substantial and the root cause of most of the problems above. Also, Mike Cannon has been probably the greatest impediment to solar installation build out. He remains fiercely opposed to Power Purchase Agreements, which have catalyzed all of the solar installations you see in surrounding towns and cities, such as Ashland, Wayland, Natick, and Sudbury.

Meanwhile, although this election cycle is quiescent, with so many City Councilor unopposed, there are two opportunities to break the log jam of inaction and mismanagement on the City Council.

Voters can force change by retiring two City Council incumbents, Stefanini in District 8, and Cannon in District 4, and trying on some new Councilors with different ideas. Certainly, the damage being done by Stefanini and Cannon could not possibly be matched by newcomers. Removing these two would bring much needed balance to the financial approach of the City Council.

But there is much more to this than throwing out the incumbents.

We have on the School Committee one of the major political talents in the city in Adam Freudberg. I know him well and back at the end of 2017, after the election in November, and having spent some time with him, it became crystal clear that he had such abundant talent that even though he had no experience as a School Committee member, he would make the perfect School Committee Chair. I proposed that to him, and after some persuasion, he made the jump. We needed to make a lot of improvements in the school district, and he was pivotal to making that happen. He killed it.

That was heretical thinking, but it worked out exceptionally well.

At present, it does not do us much good to keep his talent bottled up in the School Committee, when all the problems need cityside solutions. He works hard, internalizes new information rapidly and has a high tolerance for developing relationships with people who have opposite views, to get to solutions. He was School Committee Chair for 4 years, and in the past 2 years was Chair of the School Committee’s Finance & Operations Subcommittee. He would take to being a City Councilor like a duck to water, and start catalyzing a whole raft of necessary city side changes. He knows the ropes and will eat up all the details of City Council operations.

Mike Cannon, on the other hand, is a large part of the cityside problem and needs to spend much more time understanding the school district. The King/Cannon/Stefanini faction is responsible directly or indirectly for most of the 7 problems listed above, plus they wanted to reorganize the school district administration by consolidating its positions with those on the cityside – a completely crazy plan.

Turning to District 8 and John Stefanini, his 6 years on the City Council have seen problems simply accumulate. He has had a long run in government, with some obvious ups and downs, but it seems an opportune time for him to focus on his vocation and foster sound commercial developments in Framingham by advocating from a position outside the government.

Note in the following that both Adam Freudberg and Mike Cannon live in District 4 and are already both on the District 4 ballot, Adam for School Committee and Mike for City Council.

So, here’s the voter actions needed:

1. For District 4, simply write in Adam Freudberg for City Councilor on the ballot and vote for him in that role, then write in Mike Cannon for School Committee on the ballot and vote for him in that role. That puts Adam where he would accelerate critical change in the city and puts Mike in close contact with the schools and school administration from whom he would learn a huge amount and become a much more informed, effective public official who would no longer block much needed action on the City Council.
2. For District 8, simply vote for Leslie White Harvey instead of John Stefanini. She has a lot to learn but will never be nearly as adverse for the well-being of the city as Stefanini, on education, infrastructure, climate change action and finance.

By this simple means, we can send in Freudberg and bench Cannon and Stefanini, as far as the City Council is concerned.

Everyone knows that Adam Freudberg’s political career began in Framingham, but it sure is not going to end in Framingham. He is the best-connected person we have here with regard to state and federal governments.

If this move works out, and I am sure it could, Adam could be a strong candidate for Mayor in 2 years. Several terms there and he could move up the political ladder to the state or federal level. We all know he will end up there sooner or later.

Over the next few years, we’d see him work his relationships with Karen Spilka, Elizabeth Warren and Katherine Clark, and many others, for the greater good of Framingham.

There it is. If you want to get much better results, you have to make big changes.

When I came to Boston in 1978, I spent years watching the Patriots and the Red Sox show sporadic signs of life, but it was only when they made big changes and brought in new approaches, new leadership, and new talent, that they totally turned things around.

Much like those sports teams, Framingham is at point where the floundering has to stop, and a new direction charted.

DISCLAIMER:

I raised the possibility of running for City Councilor to Adam Freudberg a while ago, but he demurred. Since then, amongst other things, the busing situation got much worse. It also became clear that the election would likely bring no change and we would have two more years of government underperformance. That compelled me to write this piece, with no consultation with Adam. He may not be happy with me for doing this, but sometimes, when things are going downhill, candor has to become a priority and Framingham has to come first. No matter how Adam reacts to this, I am convinced that his presence on the City Council would be game-changing for Framingham.