It’s been about a month since my last article in The Westfield News. The City Council has been working on several issues that will impact folks in Westfield. One that has gotten some attention, even though the financial impact is rather small compared to other issues, is the adjustments to compensation for future City Councilors – an increase of $3,000 per year after 16 years without an adjustment. I’ll discuss this and other issues below. I thought I’d write the article in a “Week in the Life” style so that residents, business owners, and future candidates have a sense of what a typical week is like for many of us.
LAST THURSDAY
I started the morning on the radio with The Westfield News President Patrick Berry from 6AM to 8AM (you can watch it online at https://vimeo.com/201148493). We had a great discussion about salaries, budget issues, property tax calculations, the Westfield Fiber Bond, and a Boy Scout adventure.
From there I went to a Westfield Chamber of Commerce Business & Community Affairs Committee meeting. We discussed business development initiatives in Westfield; the Westfield Business & Education Alliance (a program that is connecting local businesses with the Westfield Public Schools); and plans for the upcoming Legislative Luncheon (a lunch meeting between business owners and the elected representatives from the cities and towns served by the Chamber).
After that meeting, I went to work for the day (for those of you who don’t know, I’ve been a small business owner for a little over 20 years, and my company designs, builds, and maintains software and all kinds of internet websites and services).
At 5:30 it was off to a Finance Committee meeting. The agenda had about 10 items on it, but due to circumstances beyond our control, we really only spent time on the transfer of $250,000 to cover some prior-year Engineering work (road projects), the $15 million bond for Westfield Gas & Electric’s Whip City Fiber expansion, and a $5000 appropriation for building security. Engineering was up first, and we spent time reviewing the request for funding. We had talked about this at a couple of previous meetings so there were no surprises and no need for further inquiries. We voted to recommend approval of the fund transfer, and discussed proactive steps being taken by Engineering, Purchasing, Treasury, Law and Audit departments to alleviate these types of “after the fact” transfers in the future.
Next up was the $15 million G&E Bond request. We spent almost an hour reviewing the plans and finances for this project. In my opinion, it’s a great project for Westfield, and it will help both residents and businesses. The $15 million will cover the G&E’s cost to deploy a fiber optic network to approximately 70% of the city over the next two years (the rest of the city will be addressed sometime after that two year deployment). This fiber optic network delivers Gigabit per second Ethernet (1000 Megabits per second) – for the non-geeks out there, this is really really fast. It allows homes and businesses to handle huge volumes of data in fractions of a second. I have the service at my home and office. The speed and service are fantastic and the price is very competitive. At home, we were able to reduce our monthly internet, TV, and phone bill from Comcast’s $250 average bill to about $110. We watch TV a little differently than before, but it’s really not all that complicated or burdensome. When using appropriate routers, firewall, and switches, Gigabit Ethernet allows you to run many streaming devices, computers, tablets, and cell phone devices simultaneously while maintaining very good performance.
The $15 million bond will be paid for with revenues from the monthly service fees charge by Whip City Fiber – not with tax revenues. The Treasurer confirmed that this bond will not be “inside the city’s debt limit”. So, it will not impact our ability to borrow for future roads, school, technology, or other important projects.
Prior to this meeting, the Finance Committee and the City Council discussed one potential downside to this service, and that is that the City receives funding from Comcast Local Franchise fees that help pay for local access TV, internet for schools, and other IT needs. If a lot of people disconnect from Comcast when they sign-up for Whip City Fiber, the funding for those services would be in jeopardy. Therefore, the Finance Committee recommended that the G&E and the City investigate a plan to offer comparable funding to the City in the future. The Mayor, G&E, and the City Council agree that this is important, and have pledged to work together towards a solution.
After a great discussion, the Finance Committee voted unanimously to recommend the approval of the $15 million bond.
The $5,000 appropriation was also approved unanimously with little discussion.
FRIDAY
I didn’t have any meetings on Friday, but I did have several calls, email and social media exchanges about topics before the City Council. The State salary raises were getting a ton of press and lots of negative feedback from citizens on social media. This really isn’t good timing for the City Council who is looking to modestly adjust compensation after 16 years without an adjustment. I spent time talking with other councilors and taxpayers about this. In my opinion, it’s never a good time for City Council to vote on its own raises, but unfortunately that’s the way the system works. The compensation is actually part of a City Ordinance, and the only way to change Ordinances is to run them through the City Council. There is no Human Resources Department or other management group that adjusts pay for elected officials like there is in most private businesses. Some people just assume that we get automatic cost of living raises, or other adjustments like regular employees, but that’s not the case. The compensation for City Councilors has been $10,000 for the last 16 years. The proposed increase of $3,000 does represent an attention-getting 30% from this year to next year, but that’s really only about 1.65% per year when you look back over 16 years, and it’s nowhere near an impactful number in the City Budget. The total cost for the entire City Council will increase $39,000 per year as part of a $125+ million annual City Budget. I voted against City Council raises the last couple of times because I didn’t think the City Council was working hard enough to control growth in expenses, to reduce taxes, or to address the massive snowballing debts and obligations. However, this time I’m OK with it. The City Council didn’t do much at budget time last June, but we did agree to a rather spectacular “no increase in property tax” deal in December. This one decision saved taxpayers over $2.3 million this year. Going forward, I hope this will also help delay the collision with the Property Tax Levy Ceiling. If we hit that ceiling, we wouldn’t be able to increase property taxes more than for New Growth and increases in total market values.
Some folks say “you shouldn’t even get paid” or “you knew it was $10,000 when you ran for office”, or other such sentiments. First, let me say that this adjustment is not for us, it’s for the next set of Councilors who will be elected in November. Second, I can say when I first pulled papers for City Council I had no idea it was a paid position. I was just looking to help serve my community and wanted to get involved with the City Council. For the first many years I donated at least half of my gross monthly checks to worthy causes such as schools, parks, scouts, Boys & Girls Club, and other similar causes. I’ll still donate a lot, but not as much as before (because we’re lucky enough to have a college student). This year I donated a bunch of computers and technology equipment to the Technical Academy, I’ve pledged a month’s pay to the Athenaeum project, I’ll be donating about 2 ½ months to Boy Scout projects and activities, and I’m sure later in the year, I’ll be spending thousands of dollars on campaign expenses. Over time I realized the $833 per month really isn’t even close to matching our value to the city, and most of us end up earning less than $20 per hour – before counting the investments we make in campaigning and serving constituents. FYI, I’ve spend over $14,000 in campaign expenses alone. After discussing this with people, most people say “what are you – crazy?” or “no way I’d spend that much money campaigning to spend all the time, and get all that grief, that you guys get – it isn’t worth it”. Most people come away agreeing that the adjustment in compensation is quite fair and overdue. I still do it out of a sense of duty to serve my community and be an active participant in government (remember “of the people, for the people”?).
For some councilors, the G&E In Lieu of Tax Payment (ILOT) to the city was a hot issue. For years, the G&E has paid below market rate in property taxes under a formula agreed to many years ago. Many councilors want to see this change, so that the G&E is paying taxes just like Comcast, Verizon, Eversource, and other businesses would pay. Some wanted to delay discussions about the bond until negotiations on these taxes were going in the right direction. From early last week through early this week, several councilors indicated that they wanted to work out a deal on the ILOT before finalizing the $15 million bond approval. This was troubling because a bond requires a super-majority vote of the City Council (9 votes) and we knew that one councilor would be absent this Thursday. That meant 4 “no” votes could have killed the bond. After lots of discussion between councilors, the mayor, the G&E team, and outside advisors, by Thursday night this week, the general consensus seemed to be that we’d work on the ILOT in the coming weeks and months (NOTE: nobody knew for sure because we really can’t take a pole of members or discuss such issues with a majority of the Council or any Council Committee outside of public meetings).
SATURDAY
I volunteered for about 5 hours with the Boy Scouts to help setup, run, and take down the Penguin Plunge fundraiser for the Children’s Museum. Kudos to everyone who plunged, donated, and volunteered! Then it was in to the office to get some work done. I was behind due to all the time spent on city stuff Thursday and Friday.
SUNDAY
A day of rest – except for a bunch of emails. We watched a bunch of episodes of “West Wing”. I’ve found that I really like that show much more than the live politics and news in Washington. One thing I realized was that the problems we have today are sadly not much different than the problems that were contemporary when this show first aired over 17 years ago. Budget, abortion, women’s rights, terrorists, natural disasters, partisan politics, horse-trading, Supreme Court appointments, etc… If you haven’t seen the show, or haven’t watched it in a while, I’d highly recommend it.
MONDAY
More email and phone conversations. I’ve been a Boy Scout leader on Mondays for about 10 years. This Monday, I put my City Council hat on and worked with a group of scouts on their Citizenship in the Community Merit Badge. One of the requirements is that they discuss rights, duties, and obligations of citizenship and explain how they can demonstrate good citizenship in our community. They need to mark up a map with all of the important city facilities and historic places, and draw an org chart of our City government. And finally for me, they needed to pick an issue and interview a city official about the issue, and discuss ways in which young people can help.
I’m not sure how much civics is being taught in school these days, but I believe every person in the Country should have at least the same level of understanding and commitment to participating citizenship as the young men in the Boy Scouts.
There are quite a variety of thoughts around rights, duties, and obligations. For example, there were many misconceptions about rights. First Amendment? Second Amendment? Fourth Amendment? Wow, the kids really only seemed to hear from the extreme edges of society. On the discrimination and equal rights topic many had a “rainbows and unicorns” viewpoint, but in reality we talked about silly things like whether or not it was OK for Hooters to refuse to hire fat, hairy, old men as servers.
We picked a couple of issues to discuss that were attractive for the scouts: school redistricting and changes to the Dog & Cat ordinances in Westfield. Many of the scouts and/or their family attended the School Budget Committee’s meeting a couple of weeks ago. Many of them have been in several schools by now, and several have younger brothers or sisters that would be affected by redistricting. Many were surprised to hear that the City was considering changing the rules about the number of pets allowed in homes and the sizes of certain pets (yes, this is really an issue in Westfield).Overall, a good (sometimes chaotic, noisy) meeting.
TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY
A few phone calls, emails, and social networking interactions related to City business. I try to keep Tuesday night meeting free since I play racquetball in a league in West Springfield.
The agenda is released for Thursday’s City Council meeting on Tuesday. The backup documents are posted to a private server that City Councilors can see. We typically spend a bit of time reviewing all these documents and making phone calls or sending emails to clarify anything that needs it, or we do our own due diligence on matters that are coming before us.
This week, I reviewed the Comcast revenues to the City and the reports detailing how the money was spent. I also exchanged emails and did research on the issue of the G&E ILOT payment arrangement.
I sent the scouts the documents about the Dog & Cat issue since some of them thought I was joking on Monday.
THURSDAY
Into work early so that I could get work done (for my real job), and have a little time to prepare for Thursday night’s meeting.
On many City Council meeting nights the Finance Committee meets early to review items that are in that committee and to vote on recommendations to the full City Council. This week we didn’t do that because we had met the previous week and one of our members was travelling for business.
We started at 6:30 with a presentation by the Mayor. He typically comes in a half hour before our City Council meeting to discuss the items he has placed on our agenda for that night. This helps City Councilors get a brief understanding of the issues and gives us a chance to ask him a couple of questions before we vote to send items to various committees or take votes to do anything.
The regular meeting started at 7:00. The meeting always starts with public participation. This week we heard from people who were in favor of the $15 million bond for G&E; the Executive Director of the Senior Center who had kind words and best wishes for Councilor Knapik; and a very smart person who gave us a lot to think about in regards to the aquifer and water supply pollution issues.
The next part of the meeting are requests from the mayor. We voted to send most of the items into appropriate committees.
There was a Public Hearing about a zone change at the airport. Nobody from the public showed up. The item was sent to the Zoning, Planning, and Development Committee for further action.
Next up were Committee reports. The Finance Committee gave its positive recommendations for the bond, the $250,000 for Engineering, and the $5000 for Buildings. Councilor Van Heynigan and I introduced all of the items and gave brief overviews. The council spent quite a bit of time discussing the bond, but in the end it passed unanimously. The Engineering and Buildings appropriations were also approved.
The Legislative and Ordinance Committee gave positive recommendations of a few issues related to roads. They all passed “first reading” unanimously and were scheduled for “final passage” at the next meeting.
The Zoning, Planning, and Development Committee recommended a zone change at 710 Southampton Road to allow the owner of the land to develop a business there. There was a prior public hearing and a good discussion of this matter at previous City Council meetings. Councilor Babinski was instrumental in getting the proponent to change his zone change application so that it would satisfy the desires of the neighbors. The item passed unanimously.
Next up was the City Councilor’s salary item. We had discussed this at a previous meeting and many of us had discussed this with the public or written articles or social media posts about it. The item passed 7 to 5 and will be scheduled for “final passage” at the next City Council meeting.
Finally, Councilor Knapik resigned, and John Beltrandi was declared his replacement based upon the results of the last election.
Best wishes to Councilor Knapik and his family. Congratulations and welcome back Councilor Beltrandi!
CLOSING
This was a long article, but I hope it gave you a good feel for what a typical week is like for many City Councilors. As you can see, the range of topics can vary a lot: from a limit on how heavy your dog can be, to the approval to spend $15 million. City Councilors really need to be involved, committed, and have a broad range of education and real world experiences to do the best they can to serve the city.
We all serve with the hope of doing our best to make Westfield a great place to live, work, play, and raise a family.
If you would like to help make your community a better place, I’d encourage you to show up and participate at public meetings or to run for an elected office such as a City Councilor, School Committee member, Electric Light Board member, or maybe even Mayor. If you don’t want to serve in one of the elected roles, you could also serve on one of the dozens of committees or boards in the city (contact the Mayor’s office to discuss an appointment).
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to give me a call or blast me an email.
Dave Flaherty
City Councilor
[email protected]
- One last thing… the St. Mary’s Boy Scout Troop 109 is holding a Bottle and Can Drive on March 4th at Super Phipps. Please save up your holiday and Super Bowl cans and bottles and donate them to this very worth group on Marth 4th. Thanks!!
