Dear Mayor Knapik,
I read your open letter to Finance Chairman Keefe and I feel that I must respond. This is my opinion – not necessarily the opinion of every member of the City Council.
You have completely ignored the will of the people and the very clear messages from the City Council. People want you to reduce government spending, develop honest realistic budgets, set appropriate spending priorities, and ultimately reduce everyone’s tax burdens.
Last December, the City Council tried to reduce the tax burden in December, and your office challenged the method we chose. You won that battle, and you raised the taxes. After that, I, and others, talked with the Massachusetts DOR and elected officials from other cities and towns to develop a strategy for FY15. This year, in May and June, the full City Council and the Finance Committee had over a dozen meetings to discuss the FY15 budget. You chose not to attend any of the meetings, nor to participate in any discussions in any meaningful way.
In fact, you mailed-in your budget instead of making the traditional in-person annual budget presentation where City Councilors can ask questions of you on the public record (don’t try to blame this on graduation schedules – you had plenty of time to get us the budget and schedule a public presentation). You did that again at the last City Council meeting on December 4th. You asked for immediate consideration on spending items knowing full well that the Mayor or Department head is supposed to appear in-person before the City Council to justify such requests. I’m sure there were lots of citizens and City Councilors who would have loved to hear directly from you, and have the chance to ask you some questions, prior to the tax shift discussions.
In June, the City Council voted to cut $3.6 million from that budget knowing that we had a one-time windfall Bond Premium coming – money that is comparable to a “cash back” car loan deal where the “cash back” has to be paid back over time with interest. This is not the “FREE MONEY” that you like to talk about. This is our future taxpayer money that you want to spend in the present. We knew you wanted to spend it, so we took steps to try to protect it.
We also knew that your budget, like previous budgets, intentionally did not include necessary annual operating expenses such as regular overtime for the Police and Fire Departments, severance owed to retirees, vehicles, and more. In fact, you just sent the City Council millions of dollars in new spending requests to cover many of these very same items. In my opinion, the annual budget presented in June should be THE annual budget. All known recurring items should be in there. The only time we should use Stabilization or Free Cash is for:
emergencies, very important unexpected items or opportunities that come up after the budget has been passed, or one-time investments.
In your recent communications you’ve also talked about the cuts at the state and local level. Your complaining about this reminds me of the scene in Oliver Twist when Oliver says “please sir, may I have some more?” The Federal Government has $18 Trillion dollars in debt. The Commonwealth has billions of dollars in debt (mostly related to benefits and infrastructure). Where do you think they are going to get additional money from? This should be no surprise. If you know all this, and you know that State and Federal aid revenue is going to be “flat” or “declining”, and you know that that revenue represents such a large portion of the City of Westfield’s annual budget, how can you justify increasing the annual budgets like you have for the last several years? How can you justify taking one-time “pork” and using it to increase recurring annual operating expenses? How can you justify agreeing to labor contracts that guarantee more in raises and benefits than is possible to pay given the constraints of Prop 2 ½ and the State and Federal funding discussed above? Why do you refuse to give City Council the estimated costs of the labor contracts before you expect the City Council to approve the funding for them?
I also notice that you completely ignore talking about the BIG ELEPHANT in the room – the snowballing obligations related to pensions and health care. Taxpayers should know that you are deferring over $20 million per year onto future generations of taxpayers for government employee benefits that are earned in the current or previous budget years. The net present value of future obligations (in today’s
dollars) is over six times our current annual property tax revenues.
How are you going to make that math work in the long run? The few times that you do talk about it, you’ve tried to minimize the situation be saying “all the other cities do the same thing” or “we’re all in the same boat” or “this is bigger than Westfield”. I’m sure you’ve heard more than once “Just because Johnny jumps off the bridge, doesn’t mean you have to follow him!”
You seem to be trying to make the City Council look bad by implying that we do not understand the situation, or that somehow we’re to blame for not rubber-stamping every proposal you send our way. We have lots of very smart people on the City Council – we understand very well.
I understand that your closing sentence in your open letter to Chairman Keefe says: “All I ask is for the City Council to fulfill its responsibility and take a vote to set the tax rate.” That’s funny. You know we don’t vote on the tax rate – we only vote on the tax shift!
Last December we tried to vote on the levy – you stopped us. This year we voted to make a major budget cut in June to force the tax levy to be lower. Now in December, we’ve repeatedly asked for you to lower the levy so that we could vote on the tax shift (which leads to tax rates). You refuse. When we came up with what we thought was a good alternative, you’ve indicated that you would intentionally low-ball local receipts (excise taxes, fees, etc…) in order to force higher property taxes. That’s sneaky behind the scenes manipulation – not exactly “clear as glass” as you claimed on a recent radio show.
According to your staff, your actions, or inactions, with regard to this matter will cause delays in sending out the third-quarter tax bills, cause the city to spend over $100,000 in short-term interest, and potentially affect the city’s bond rating and future borrowing costs.
Speaking only for myself, if you want the City Council to vote on the tax shift, to satisfy the will of the taxpayers, and avoid the negative consequences of sending out late tax bills, please send the City Council the information it needs, and please send the City Council a sufficient appropriation of free cash or stabilization “to reduce the tax levy” as requested by Chairman Keefe, the majority of the City Council, and the many taxpayers who made the effort to show up at our last City Council meeting. Even better: show up yourself, explain your position, and take questions from the City Council and taxpayers.
Sincerely,
Dave Flaherty
City Councilor
