Election season seems to have started early this year, judging from the salacious headline and some of the quotes in today's Daily News: "Councilors Reject $250K for Schools".
Indeed, Councilors Scorzoni, Lavoie, Stanganelli, and I did in fact vote against a request from Mayor Gray to fund $250,000 in various 'capital/non-recurring' expenses out of the City's special Smart Growth Stabilization Fund.
Let us be clear, however. As indicated in our comments at this vote, we were NOT opposed to the costs themselves NOR were we adverse to considering alternative means of funding them. We WERE concerned with the means by which the Mayor proposed to fund these costs.
Taken in the entire context of over $1.5M in year-end outside-the-budget appropriation requests (including covering $830,000 in current year budget deficits), the four of us had reservations about how the Mayor was approaching a variety of costs, including these school related requests.
We summarized our concerns in a letter to the Mayor that we sent in May, shortly after receiving the raft of year-end requests. We also suggested how we might collaborate on some alternative strategies. You can read the letter HERE.
To be brief (never easy), our objections to this particular set of bundled costs were:
- 90% of the costs in this request (except for athletic uniforms) are capital costs - it is standard best practice to amortize capital costs across multiple years. For a municipality, this means bonding them. The City has long been addicted to funding all capital costs - save for costs in excess of $1M - out of Free Cash and other reserve and one-time sources. This is a fundamentally unsound and unsustainable approach, both short and long term.
- The Mayor proposed using $250,000 from the Smart-Growth Stabilization Fund for these expenses. This Fund, as established and authorized by the City Council in 2007, has a very narrow range of purposes for which it can be spent, to wit: The purpose of the Fund will be to offset the impacts, additional costs and expenses of Low and Moderate Income Housing Projects applied for under Chapter 40B, 40R, or 40s, and projects applied for under Chapter 43D 'Expedited Permitting.' It stretched the imagination to see how known school capital costs (and athletic uniforms) might fit into this Fund authorization.
The City Council HAS approved spending out of this account in the past, including for OTHER requests on Tuesday night (6/13/17, Lake Gardner Beach Improvements, Quality of Life Committee, DPW Sign Boards) and THIS $250,000 request in 2015. So, we aren't adverse to using the Smart Growth Fund for eligible costs.
This might all seem like insider baseball but the fact remains that one of the reasons that Amesbury struggles with its tax rate is its haphazard and undirected approach to capital planning.
This has long been a concern of mine. In 2015 and at the Mayor's request, I sent him THIS MEMO detailing how I thought we could improve our capital planning and spending. We have made some modest improvements to our planning since then but we still have a long ways to go.
As a group, we look forward to working with the Mayor to identify more stable and sound means of taking care of these very real needs at our schools. With three of us who opposed this request with children in Amesbury Schools and with our long track records, our support of the Amesbury Public Schools and its mission remains solid.
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