Mayor Spicer Obtained The Primary Math Improper on Sustainability & Did Not Correctly Fund Schooling – Framingham SOURCE
By Geoffrey Epstein
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FRAMINGHAM – A recent Boston Globe article covered the race for Framingham Mayor, with an emphasis on the mayor’s underdog status and factors related to it: city-to-city transition, the pandemic, old guard opposition “, Council / mayoral rubbish, racial concerns, neglect of the legislature and so on.
The main failures of the Spicer administration to adequately finance education, to take care of important municipal infrastructure problems or to promote climate protection were missing in this reporting. Water and sewer fee increases have been mentioned, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The goal here is to fill in those missing details and provide important information to voters to help them decide who should be our next mayor in Framingham.
When the mayor took office on January 1, 2018, it was expected that she would face real challenges as she made a career stretch to become the top manager of a newly founded metropolis. She came to the job with a kindergarten teacher training and with modest administrative experience at the department head level, so it was clear that she had to overcome a steep learning curve to master the details of a wide range of community tasks and the finances that fuel their execution . Unfortunately, the mayor never took up this challenge.
Despite her strong education, she failed to understand the fundamentals of planning and finances that govern the school district, and this resulted in her disapproving of natural constituencies, not just all students, but one of her in particular: low income and limited English language skills .
This became apparent for the first time in the budget cycle of FY20 in spring 2019. She opened her attack on the school district by complaining that the school district’s budget had increased by $ 50 million in 10 years and stated in no uncertain terms that she believed it was unsustainable. While the budget had increased by $ 45.7 million, $ 32.3 million was Chapter 70 state aid aimed at improving educational opportunities for less affluent communities and providing better educational support to low-income students with limited English proficiency to offer. The other part, the local city-funded contribution, had increased $ 13.4 million, from $ 72 million in 2009, at a rate of 1.7% annually, less than inflation and completely sustainable.
So the mayor got the basic math related to sustainability wrong and seemed to totally overlook the fact that the state had gotten through our most disadvantaged students with well-deserved support.
The mayor exacerbated this mistake by further complaining that the school district ended the year with a “surplus” of several million dollars last fiscal year. As an educator, she should have known that the year-end balance is largely a reserve that is carried over to the next budget year to support out-of-school tuition expenses for our most severely disabled children with special needs.
Both the state’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Division of Local Services, which promotes sound community financial management practices, recommend that school districts maintain a healthy carry-over reserve to protect themselves from fluctuations in spending due to unforeseen high-need student moves. Framingham’s practice, dating back to the “city” years, has been to bring forward millions of dollars at the end of each fiscal year. All well-run school districts do this.
The mayor misunderstood that too. It would have gutted the reserve that protects our weakest students.
The final nightmare of the fiscal year came in the final of the budget process, when our state delegation secured an additional $ 700,000 in groundbreaking Chapter 70 state aid. Instead of using this state aid to supplement the school district’s budget as intended, the mayor tried to redirect it for use in the city. It took city council action to prevent this egregious attempt to deprive some of our neediest students from the government support they deserved.
No wonder the state delegation is angry with the mayor. To this day, the mayor is of the opinion that the school district is in the money and needs to be cut fiscally. It is all based on a complete misunderstanding of the school district finances. And pruning is what she did.
She has so far managed to reduce the average increase in local school district contributions from $ 3.6 million per year in the past 4 years as a city to $ 1.1 million per year in her 4 years as mayor. As a result, the school district’s current operating budget will be topped up by one-time reserves of $ 4.4 million, which will create a huge problem in FY 23, next year’s budget. Only noteworthy efficiency measures by the school district have kept the funding gap at $ 4.4 million instead of $ 10 million.
On the capital budget side, too, the picture is bleak. This includes the maintenance and repair of school buildings. When he took office in 2018, a simple assessment of the school building needs by the mayor would have shown that roofs are a major problem, as 14 out of 15 school roofs will end their lives in the next 5 years. In 2018, the warranties for many school roofs were extended by 5 years to gain time for replacement. That gave the new mayor plenty of time to work out a solution.
But in all four years nothing has been done by the mayor. No planning. No budgeting. Nothing.
And the impending cost is around $ 60 million. Only Fuller will not be affected by this infrastructure tsunami.
Aside from the double catastrophe of mismanagement of the operating and capital budgets, important opportunities to advance the interests of the school district were wasted.
A new Southside school is a key strategic goal for the school committee as it addresses the imbalance in elementary school distribution in Framingham and builds a new school right where most of the low-income students with limited English skills live. But the mayor never got warm to the obvious benefits of acquiring the Bethany property to take at least the first step toward that goal.
She was much more interested in buying the Perini property, which did not make sense for the schools or the city, neither from the point of view of land management nor from an environmental point of view due to the site contamination.
Indeed, the environmental sector poses a major challenge for the mayor because, although she claims to be a MINT supporter, she seems to have missed the science (S) and math (M) that the community has embraced, especially in the solar installations.
By early 2018, Framingham residents and businesses had installed more than a thousand solar systems across town. Other communities like Wayland, Ashland, and Newton were in full swing, installing tons of solar panels in their schools and libraries. She could have brought Ameresco in like her and installed solar roofs and solar parking spaces in our 15 schools. Thirty potential solar panels with the promise of $ 500,000 in annual utility savings. We could have gone big and combined this with roof replacement. But no.
Today, 4 years later, we don’t have a single operational solar panel on any church building in Framingham. In the McAuliffe library, a small 70 kW installation will go online by the end of the year, and 2 solar parking spaces (Fuller, Brophy) and a solar roof (Fuller) will come in 2022
online, but chances are 90% of our solar opportunities will be lost to the snail’s pace of Mayor Spicer’s solar power as government incentives push that sunset in 2023.
So what can be done to get out of this quagmire of fiscal and operational mismanagement?
Education funding, capital infrastructure, climate action – Charlie has the big picture and experience and knows how to get the job done.
Elect Charlie Sisitsky on November 2nd. Especially parents and grandparents who know that we have to invest in the future of our children.
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Geoffrey Epstein is a member of the Framingham School Committee, representing District 6, and has been Chair of the Finance and Operations Subcommittee since 2018 and Chair of the Climate Change, Environment and Sustainability Subcommittee since 2020.
