This Post Has Been Brought To You By The Number 2 1/2...

I made a 2019 New Years resolution to stop spending so much time going down the rabbit hole of Prop 2 1/2 override debates on the community Facebook page, and instead turn my convictions into actions. I’ve mostly kept to this, but occasionally I lapse, and those occasions are when I see numbers and interpretations of numbers that are either oversimplifications, gross distortions, or just plain wrong. (Anyone who knows me should not be surprised by this). And thus, you will now be subjected to my final lapse from my New Years resolution, because it’s easy to make numbers tell stories, and two of Arnie Cave’s number-filled pieces in this space, dated March 15h and 22nd and entitled “Mayor’s Interim Budget Projections for FY20 = Fake Math” and “What OneMelrose Failed to Mention”, respectively, tell lots of stories with numbers. Stories that Arnie Cave likes. Stories he thinks will make people believe the city and/or OneMelrose are lying and thus will make these people vote no.

For instance, the story about kindergarten enrollment. It’s been essentially flat in the past four years (320 in FY16, 321 in FY19). A-ha! OneMelrose is lying about increasing school enrollment!

Not so fast: While it’s true that Kindergarten enrollment has been essentially flat in the past four years (320 in FY16, 321 in FY19), this is a classic case of cherry-picking. Why pick FY16 to start with? Simple. It supports the argument that enrollment is not increasing. But go back a little further, and you’ll find that Kindergarten enrollment from fiscal years 2013-15 hovered around 275. From 2006-12 it was about 250. From 2016-19 it’s been between 310 and 320. Kind of tells a different story, no? And of course that’s just kindergarten. There are 12 other grades to consider. Overall student enrollment has been increasing steadily, and has in fact accelerated considerably since 2016, growing from about 3700 to 3900.

That is easy information to find. And yet Arnie Cave, who wrote an entire piece accusing OneMelrose of failing to mention things, fails to mention any of it.

Let’s try another one: Arnie notes that the teacher retention rate is 87%, “above the state average.” A-ha! Teachers aren’t leaving! OneMelrose is lying!

Weeeellll…. first of all, the state average is... drumroll, please... 86.9%! And yes, 87% is technically “above” that but let’s be real here. It’s average. Secondly, he fails to mention that this comparison was for 2018 only. That hardly indicates any sort of trend. The state department of education, the very website Arnie cites as his source of data on this, has 10 years of data on retention. In 7 of the last 10 years, including every year from 2012-17, Melrose has had a lower retention rate than the state average, including by more than 3% in 2014-16. The average difference over those 10 years is about -1.8%. And while 1.8% less retention than average doesn’t sound all that horrible, thinking over the long haul, that means every year on average, that translates to about 5 additional Melrose teachers leaving every single year, or 50 over those 10 years that would’ve stayed if our retention rates were even at the state average. That’s 20% of the staff. Is it wrong to want to do better than that? I should hope not.

Now on to teacher salaries: Arnie explains Melrose’s low teacher salaries by saying that the teachers have less experience compared to other districts.

A-ha! That explains it! Teacher salaries are just fine!

This requires a little more digging. Now of course we know that retention is below state average, so it’s no surprise our teachers have less experience on average than other districts. So the big chicken-and-egg-like question is which came first? Are teachers leaving (resulting in less experienced teachers) because salaries are low, or are salaries low because teachers are leaving (for other reasons)? Well, nobody knows for sure exactly why all the teachers leave, I’m sure there are many reasons, but I can at least state for certain that Melrose has been ranked in the bottom 50 out of 316 Massachusetts school districts in terms of average teacher salary for slightly over a decade, going back to the 2008-09 school year. Quite often in the bottom 30. And that ranking is particularly abysmal when one realizes that nearly every town ranked anywhere near Melrose is in western MA where the cost of living is substantially lower. It wasn’t always this way though – go back to 2003-04, and we’re still in the bottom half, but much closer to the middle. What happened between 2003 and 2008, when our average salary plummeted from close to the middle to the bottom 50, from which it has never recovered? Was there a virtual tsunami of retirement between 2003-08, as Arnie has tried to make us believe on numerous Facebook threads? 11 years have gone by since then. Why are our salaries still this low compared to other districts? Shouldn’t they have gradually crept back up since 2008, now that the teachers who came in during those five years have 10-15 years of experience? And yet we’re still in the bottom 50, and have been for 11 years.

I’ve got a different theory: the last override was in 1992. Most cities and towns in greater Boston pass overrides about every 10 years, because that’s about the time they start feeling the pain of Proposition 2 ½ not keeping up with inflation. The mid-2000s was right about when Melrose had to start getting stingy with teacher raises to prevent expenses from outpacing revenue.

Doesn’t seem so hard to believe, does it?

And when cherry-picking numbers isn’t quite enough, sometimes misinterpreting them works too. How about:

“The mayor stated the city will only be able to contribute 2% to the schools in FY20 despite contributing twice this amount in both FY19 and FY18…”

A-ha! They’re holding back! He's on to them!

Welll…

First of all, and I can’t help but wonder why Arnie doesn’t make this clearer, this does not refer to the overall school budget. This only refers to the money that the city budget (covering all other departments) supplements the schools with, fairly small potatoes compared to the overall school budget. Now that that’s cleared up, I’m going to clear something else up. This supplement was not twice as much in FY19 and FY18. The percent increase to this supplement was twice as much from FY18 to FY19 (and the year before) as the city thinks they can do from FY19 to FY20. Very different. The actual contribution is still projected to be higher next year than this year, just not higher by as much. For the same reason everything else is tightening and has been tightening for years. Not enough revenue.

How about “The mayor stated… that state aid in FY20 is half of what it currently was this year.”

A-ha! That can’t be true! State aid doesn’t just get sliced in half! The mayor must be deceiving us!

Too bad you went and got all those pretty charts, Arnie, because while that’s right, state aid doesn’t just get sliced in half, that’s not what the mayor meant to say.

What she meant to say was this: State aid is only going to be increasing by half as much as it has in the recent past (sensing a pattern here?). 5 minutes of research (in which I found an earlier mayor’s blog from January that stated it correctly) and having someone at the city confirm that it was the increase she was talking about, not the total amount, and it became clear that the statement in the mayor’s February 15th blog was just a slip-up.

Or... was it? The suspense builds. Was the mayor’s slip-up in fact part of a grand scare-tactic-filled deception? Arnie seems to think so. If so, it’s the most ineffective deception of all time, given they didn’t try to deceive me when I asked, and given they stated it correctly in an earlier blog. What’s more likely, (a) the mayor and the city are deviously trying to mislead us all, but decided to do so after they had already communicated the information correctly, and selectively decided only to deceive us some of the time? Or (b) the mayor just worded something wrong?

OK, I confess, they pulled me into a dark alley and say “listen, dude, we’ll tell you the truth, if you can handle it, but mum's the word, after all we have this here conspiracy going…”

(Oh bloody 'ell, who could that be at this time of night... YIKES, THEY'RE COMING FOR ME!!!! I'm so sorry Gail, I'll be quiet as a mouse next time, I swear! Would I lie to you?)

Let’s finish up with the biggest story of all: “City Hall has not remotely substantiated the calculations and assumptions behind its so-called projected $3 million deficit in FY20” he claims.

What he… wait for it… fails to mention is… they have. In fact they are so transparent that an employee of the city even responded in great detail to my own inquiry about this, in spite of the fact that I’m sure she has more pressing needs than to explain this to someone who didn’t attend any of the numerous public meetings during which they have also substantiated it. Everything was outlined and explained, and I will summarize the three biggest contributors here:

• About $1 million comes from no longer being able to use the mortgage account surplus like last year;
• About $900,000 comes from higher than anticipated city budget costs, such as increase in health insurance premiums; and
• About $500,000 comes from a substantial increase in the number of students requiring out of district special education placements

And of course the very $3 million figure he keeps citing is yet more cherry-picking; every communication from the city has stated the actual amount of the shortfall as a range between $2.2 million and $3 million, due to several items which are still in flux, such as the higher cost of health insurance (needs to wait for open enrollment), and the amount of state aid (needs to wait for the state budget to be finalized), things over which Melrose has no control.

So the three figures above sum to $2.4 million, right in the range the city has been communicating. Arnie’s entire premise of the “fake math” article, that there is no shortfall, breaks down.

But wait, you say, $5.18 million is still not enough to cover this $2.4 million shortfall AND cover the $4.43 million of “new spending” that all but $750,000 of the override has been earmarked for! (Arnie arrives at that figure merely by subtracting a $750,000 budget stabilization amount from the $5.18 million).

A-ha, there must be a conspiracy!

Hardly. Why not? Because that $4.43 million isn’t, in fact, entirely “new spending.”

$1.8 million of that $4.43 million is going towards salary increases. At least half of the $1.9 million that is going toward hiring teachers is likely due to restoring teacher positions that have been lost. (With the other half going towards adding teachers due to increasing enrollment). That’s nearly $3 million of the override that might be “new expenses”, but might not. Why might it not? Because some portion of restoring teacher positions goes towards meeting requirements for our *current* enrollment levels, and thus has to occur, override or no override. And some portion of salary increases goes towards a realistic prediction of where salaries will end up in the upcoming contract negotiations, and the only way that can be called “new expenses” is if the city agrees to give only the barest minimum raises, risking more teachers leaving and/or a strike. Sure, maybe it’s not as much as the city thinks it is. But the city prides itself on its conservative and financially safe budget estimates. That’s part of why we have a AA+ bond rating. The MTA paraded this high rating around on its flier to show that the city is in good shape after all. And yet they, and Arnie, want the city to do the very things that would jeopardize this rating; spend leftover cash, continue to be stingy with salaries and risk increased attrition and/or strikes, and forget about overrides and just assume everything will work out fine.

But I digress. Just how much of this $3 million can be called “new expenses”? Tough to say. I think you’d have to either work in the city’s accounting department or do hours and hours more research to know all the details. I do not know these details. Neither does Arnie Cave. But what I do know is that if just $1.65 million of this $3 million is related to covering expenses that aren’t related to increasing enrollment, and you add that to $750K, you get $2.4 million. Bingo. Maybe that’s not exact. In fact I’m sure it’s not. But it’s believable enough for any reasonable person not to immediately jump to the conclusion that the entire premise of a shortfall is made-up. To keep with our number theme, Mr. Cave is putting 2 and 2 together and getting 5.

The amount of information Arnie tries to present in his pieces to try and prove this is all a vast conspiracy to steal your tax dollars is mind-blowing, and I haven’t got the time to try and dig through every single piece of it, but so far, every single thing I have investigated has turned up the same conclusion: he uses numbers to tell the story he wants people to believe so they will vote no, but they do not tell the whole story, and sometimes tell completely the wrong story.

But let's be fair to the "no" side shall we? After all, Arnie is just a private citizen; surely the larger organized campaign against the Prop 2 1/2 override is above such numerical manipulations? Well, a recent MTA flier, although thankfully free of conspiracy theories, is chock-full of fail-to-mentions when it comes to numbers. The most egregious one is a little chart, showing how much your taxes will increase over the next 20 years if the override passes on April 2nd (I included the column for a $600K home - there are other columns with different home values, but the % increase over 2019 applies to all the columns the same):

Seems straight-forward enough, doesn't it? 82%! My $6,486 bill is going to skyrocket to $11,818! OK, it'll take 21 years for that to happen, by which time (unless I'm on fixed income, and that situation has been discussed elsewhere ad nauseum so I won't go into that here) my salary will be 86% higher than it is now, assuming 3% raises, but still... 82%!

How did they get the above numbers? They assumed the override would increase your taxes by 11% from 2019 to 2020, and then your taxes would increase 2.5% per year after that. All that is reasonable. However, what they failed to answer the more important question, which isn't "how high will my taxes be with an override", but "how much higher will my taxes be with an override than they would be without one?" Assuming the 11% from 2019 to 2020 is just 2.5%, here is the answer to that question, for the $600K house above (the other home values would tell the same story and the percentages would be the same). This is the chart that tells the full story.

In other words, although your annual tax bill will go up by about $5,300 from 2019 to 2040, it will still go up by about $4,400 without an override. The effect of the override is less than $600 per year ($50/month) in 2020, gradually increasing to about $900 per year ($75 / month) in 2040, 21 years from now.

(And even that is only if we go 21 more years without passing an override. Hard to imagine that being the case).

This is a classic example of leaving out important information to tell a specific story. The information they included is not wrong, but it is highly misleading.

For the record the MTA flier also touts the "above average" 87% retention rate too as its first 'fact'.

Enough. I’m tired. So please, if you’re still on the fence about the override, pick any one of Arnie's ‘facts’ from either article, or from the MTA flier, research them, go to independent sources that don’t have a vested interest in this election, and find out the whole truth for yourself. Won’t it feel better if you vote based on what you know to be the truth, rather than what someone who has already made up his mind tells you is the truth?