Failure of Leadership

Salem has always been a working-class city. A city of immigrants. A city where neighbors show up for each other. That is not nostalgia, it is who we are, and it is worth protecting.

This process has tested that. The debate over the high school has been painful and divisive in ways that didn’t have to happen, and that pain has a source. It came from a process that asked Salem residents to trust numbers that didn’t hold up, claims that weren’t supported by the evidence, and assurances that required no one to verify them. Citizens should not have to fact-check their own government. That we did, and what we found mattered; it is an indictment of the leadership that drove this project from start to finish.

The City Council voted unanimously to approve a $447 million bond order without once seriously challenging the cost assumptions, the enrollment projections, the unverified CTE outcomes, or the reimbursement rate that was presented one way to voters and calculated another way in the actual documents. The School Committee, with the mayor as its chair, amplified claims about accreditation loss that the accrediting body’s own reports did not support. The Building Committee oversaw a process in which the Guaranteed Maximum Price remains unset, the methodology for calculating eligible CTE costs seems to be unresolved, and the interest rate assumptions built into the city’s own tax calculator were below market. None of them said so publicly.

The people who will carry this debt for the next thirty years, the renters, the low-income homeowners, the immigrant families that make Salem what it is, were told the calculator was on the website. Fifty-seven percent of Salem students are low-income. The city has never modeled what this 30-year tax increase actually costs, with year-to-year property assessment increases and debt servicing costs.

That is not leadership. Leadership would have meant asking the hard questions before the vote, not leaving residents to find the answers themselves. Leadership would have meant saying out loud that the reimbursement rate advertised to voters applied only to eligible costs, not the full project. Leadership would have meant producing an analysis of what this debt exclusion actually costs a family renting in the Point or a senior on a fixed income in the Willows before asking them to approve it.

Salem is resilient. It will absorb this, as it has absorbed harder things. But resilience in a community should not exist to compensate for the absence of courage in its leadership. The people of this city deserved better than they got from the officials elected and appointed to represent them.