At-large City Councilor David Flaherty
First, Merry Christmas, Happy (belated) Chanukah, and Happy New Year to everyone. May you and your families be blessed with health, wealth, and happiness.
This week the City Council wrapped up their last meeting of the year. It was also the last meeting (for now) for Councilors Agma Sweeney, Ann Callahan, Kevin Harraghy, Brian Winters, John Beltrandi, and Rick Onofrey. Each of them brought unique perspectives and talents to the City Council and I’d like to thank all of them for their efforts to make Westfield a better place to live, work, and play. In January, returning councilors will be joined by councilors-elect Ralph Figy, Brian Hoose, Bob Paul, Cindy Harris, Matt VanHeynigen, and Dan Allie. I’d like to congratulate them all and welcome them to the City Council. The new council will be made up of a rather eclectic mix of talents, interests, and personalities. Though I’ll miss some of my old colleagues, and we have some big shoes to fill, these new councilors will bring new perspectives and vibrant participation that will be good for the City of Westfield.
Most of this week’s meeting was spent discussing the taxes and votes related to the setting of those taxes. As you may recall, at our meeting earlier in December, the council voted 9-3 to reduce the tax burden. Even councilors who voted against the particular motion, talked about their desire to reduce the tax burden. However, due to the last minute receipt of information we needed to set the taxes, and the “have to vote it tonight” pressure from the administration, a few mistakes were made along the way (charter and council rules were not followed exactly). The council had no time to negotiate our desires with the mayor. The administration challenged our method of trying to lower the taxes, and they got the DOR to agree with them. The City Council was not involved in framing the questions to DOR, nor in discussing options that could have led to a resolution that would have lowered your taxes. As I’ll discuss later in this article, this led to vigorous discussions in-person and via email.
The taxes could have been lowered quite easily by the mayor and the city council – but not by the city council alone. As mentioned in my last article, we could have temporarily cut an expense line item by $1.7 million, and then restored that line item after free cash was certified by the state. This is easy to do, quite legal, and it would have resulted in a dramatic reduction in taxes for you, your family, and your local businesses. The mayor was not interested in this. The tax rate you have is because of his prepared budget, and his unwillingness to reduce the rates by using free cash. As we learned this week the hard way (which was new news to many councilors who’ve served for years – me included), the city council does not set the level of taxes in November (though we’ve seemingly voted for this for many years) – we only set the shift factor.
For the record, moving the shift factor by 1 click, changes the average homeowner’s taxes by less than $10 per year. So, the argument that the city council’s selection of shift makes a dramatic change in tax bills received is erroneous. Spending drives the taxes. Setting an appropriate firm budget in June is one of the most important things the city council does. Last June, even though the Finance Committee requested about $1.2 million in cuts (1.25 percent or so), massive pressure from certain groups caused the council to ignore these requests and pass the mayor’s budget as presented. By the time we got ready to set the tax rates last meeting, this budget ended up needing $940,000 in withdrawals from stabilization in order to balance. It was also short hundreds of thousands of dollars in projects that the mayor intends to pay for with free cash – items that come as no surprise, yet we’re intentionally not included in the budget presented in May. Hopefully, this coming budget season will see renewed interest in the May and June budget process, and the new city council will vigorously participate in the process and make the hard choices necessary to approve a realistic conservative budget that delivers the services expected by citizens while living within the financial constraints of our times.
As mentioned earlier, there was vigorous discussion about the tax setting votes between the two December meetings. The city charter and rules were not following for some of the votes. This was certainly not intentional; it was the result of extreme time pressure and the introduction of a tax reduction concept that had never been done before. I believe that the will of the council was to reduce the taxes by $2 million. To me, it was pretty clear. After the council voted, and before the tax rates were set, the administration independently received a ruling saying that one of our votes shouldn’t count. We received an email from the City Solicitor advising us of an opinion developed in consultation with DOR. This opinion letter was addressed to the mayor. We hadn’t asked for this opinion, and it was delivered to us via email outside of the city council meeting schedule. I replied to this email explaining my interpretation of the will of the council at the prior meeting, and I inquired if a different question was asked of the DOR, if we’d get a different answer that was more in line with what I considered the clear intent of the city council at that prior meeting. Nothing devious here – just a statements about a prior act (the December 5 meeting), and a clarifying question for the city solicitor. Someone forwarded this particular email to Mr. Dondley – someone who seems to have a strange fixation on me and the things I do or say. He has since filed another Open Meeting Law complaint. Looking back, I probably should have hit “reply” instead of “reply-all”. But, there was clearly no intent to hide anything
from the public nor to try to persuade councilors to vote or not vote a certain way on an issue that was before us. The majority of the email was about a prior meeting that was public, broadcast on TV, and posted on the Internet. I wrote a very long article about that meeting that was posted
publicly in the Westfield News and online on my website and a popular local Internet forum. This article was posted well before the email was sent. The sentiments expressed in the email were similar to those expressed in the very public article.
I have prepared a copy of about 30 pages of emails exchanged last week, and had the package included in the public record during this week’s meeting. Everything’s public. Upon review, and in my opinion only, I found several potential violations of the Open Meeting Law in this very small sample of communications. More than half of the city councilors expressed an opinion such as “great!”, “send an affirmative reply”, “lets confirm all votes before setting the residential factor”, “the only one done correctly”, etc. I also discussed other possible technical violations that happen on a regular basis related to meeting minutes, record keeping, conversations outside of meeting, etc. These issues are not unique to Westfield. I don’t think anyone intended to break the Open Meeting Law in this case nor to hide anything from the public. However, technically these probably are OML violations and we’ll follow the law and prepare a response for Mr. Dondley. I’ve also asked for, and council has approved, in-person training for councilors on the topics of Massachusetts Open Meeting Law and Massachusetts Public Records Law.
Hopefully, the council and the law department will make arrangements for this early in 2014.
Hopefully, Mr. Dondley will find a new exciting hobby or interest.
Have a wonderful holiday season!
Dave Flaherty,
City Councilor
[email protected]
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not the staff, editor, or publisher of the Westfield News.
