Deb Goldberg has a record as Selectman in Brookline that just keeps on giving…material that is to her critics. Onbrookline.com continues to remind folks what a poor job she really did as Selectman. If only Jim Conley had a couple of million bucks he felt like spending telling the voters this. Instead we’ll just see the glossy ads from Deb telling a us a whole lot of untruths and embellishments.
Give it a read, it will make you wonder.
Please share widely!
and even though I’ve only been in office a little over a year, I could personally recommend you to some people that would explain in excruciating detail just how horrible a job I’m doing.
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Now the firefighters thing might be a stretch and a play on words, but so is “I’m responsible for 18 bajillion jobs created” or “I’m responsible for worcester’s rejuvenation”. Whatever.
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That particular site reads like the guy’s been simmering in hate for anybody in charge in brookline for a long time.
Just went and browsed a bit: “But all you hear out of Town Hall is that, were the best run community in Massachusetts with a Aaa bond rating as proof.But a Aaa rating has more to do with an $11 billion valuation than the Towns management approach. I mean, it cant be news to people at Town Hall that getting credit (at a good rate) is easy to do when you have lots of assets backing you up.”
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This is false, I’ve actually talked to the Moody’s guys who do the ratings, and the total valuation of housing not owned by the town has very little to do with a bond rating compared to your debt ratio, available reserves/stabilization funds, space under the levy limit (like we had any of that left with these aid levels), accounting practices, typical free cash level, etc. You know, the things that have to do with municipal finance.
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All of these things are waaaay more important to them than the value of someone’s house in town that we can’t touch. Home values are actually pretty much irrelevant to them since they don’t mean anything to the town gov’ts revenue. New housing gives us revenue, but existing housing we’re tied up by a little thing called Prop 2 1/2 that I’d be willing to bet the onbrookline guy has heard of before.
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Don’t depend on a local crazy when coming to your opinion of someone is the moral here.
You’re not doing a very impressive job as a local leader Mr. Booth when you descend to personal attacks and invective instead of keeping your arguments reasoned and to the point. Please review our Rules of the Road and do not use personal insults on BMG. Thanks.
I wasn’t personally attacking a poster there, I was attacking some other guy with a website. Once he began posting below and we engaged in dialogue, I apologized for the personal remark without prodding.
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If Bush starts posting here, I’ll spologize for calling him an idiot as well 🙂
Don’t worry about it. We’re glad to have you.
…but there are three phases to the way people in Brookline Town Government respond to dissent. First, you’re ignored. Second, you are told that the facts you have are wrong or “likely taken out of context.” And after you break through those two, you’re called a local crazy.
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To some extent they’re right. I mean, you’d have to be kind of nuts to keep going after phase one and two.
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So I’m used to it.
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On the subject of balance on my site – Mr. Booth is right, there is none. My service is to the truth and to serve as a counterweight to town government (who happens to do a great job of promoting its special qualities).
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We call it dissent and some people have a hard time with it.
That’s good, and I’ll accept it on behalf of all of us 🙂 We’re all interested in good, vigorous, informed debate, not to mention raillery, witty badinage, and the delights of a well-turned phrase.
Selectman’s probably hard to jump right into a race for in Brookline but there’s gotta be an open seat on finance committee, school committee, ZBA or something the next cycle. You have a lot of energy and are willing to read through the budget sheets so you’re already most of the way there. It’d be a service to your town if you could channel that energy into solutions for your complaints.
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Seriously.
Let me clear up the point for Jaybooth on credit ratings. I’m not saying that the value of people’s homes are what determine a credit rating. I’m saying that there are two chief determinants of creditworthiness – ability to repay and willingness to repay. A town with an $11 billion valuation has a better ability to pay than one with a lower valuation.
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In Moody’s advisement on Brookline they say:
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“The Aaa rating reflects the town’s strong financial position, sound and effective fiscal policy, historically effective management, affluent tax base and affordable debt position.”
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Note the affluent tax base reference. We only hear about the effective management in Brookline when it comes to the Aaa.
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Is there a camp where selectmen go to learn to call everyone who disagrees with them a “local crazy?”
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Jim Conley
Publisher
onbrookline.com
However, I have some people in my town that will curse certain people’s names no matter what they do. A lot of these grudges go back years if not decades and have very little to do with policy and everything to do with personalities. So maybe I should have given you the benefit of the doubt, but your website doesn’t exactly scream “balance”.
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In regards to the affluent tax base reference. The quote you cite from Moody’s report on Brookline is a long ways from the quote on your website, “But a Aaa rating has more to do with an $11 billion valuation than the Towns management approach. “
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I’d go as far as to say that even the quote you cite here from the Moody’s report is somewhat misleading and likely out of context. The words “affluent tax base” are almost completely irrelevant to a municipal official from a policy standpoint, as long as they’re well off enough to pay their property tax bills, their actual income doesn’t matter at all to us. It matters somewhat regarding potential future overrides I guess but that’s a moot issue in most towns. Likewise, the size of the tax base doesn’t matter so much as the ratio of debt to revenue, reserve funds to revenue, and the overall balance of the budget. A larger local receipts # obviously allows you to carry more debt and maintain more firefighters, along with obliging you to hold more reserve funds. The ratios are the important thing. It doesn’t matter whether your local receipts are 20 million or 200 million, they only go up by 2.5% a year. Can that 2.5% keep your government running, that is what matters. I’d say that the composition of the tax base, business vs residential, matters more than the overall size because businesses tend to require fewer services per tax dollar. But now we’re getting into details where you’d need to talk to an actual Moody’s person.
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So basically, the most important thing to a bond rating company is how the town manages its finances and one of the least important things is the absolute size of the tax base in a vacuum. This stands in direct contradiction to your original assertion.
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And yeah, I endorsed Deb a long time ago because I’m sick of cuts in local aid balancing the state budget. They have their own problems but they’re not laying off teachers at the state level, they can afford to cut more out of their own budget and less out of ours. I want a municipal official in that office who understands what we’ve gone through at the local level.
Just too bizarre an analysis to respond. Affluent tax base is irrelevant to a local official from a policy view?
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God save the Town of Tynsborough.
There’s no number for “taxpayer’s average income” on my budget sheets. There is a number for “local property tax receipts”. It goes up by 2.5% a year. From a political standpoint, affluence matters, but not from a policy standpoint. People deserve competent government regardless of their income.
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Too wonkish for you?
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Tyngsborough’s doing just fine, we have a lower average tax bill and a lower tax rate than most of the towns surrounding us.
Gotta agree.
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The wealth demographic of the tax base is probably the single most important factor of a Moody’s rating, and probably should be decisive with respect to policy decisions. i.e. Town policy should favor maintenance of high property values.
Don’t you think the Counsel of say, Brookline, looks at policy decisions a bit differently from say, Springfield.
The makeup of your electorate will naturally inform your decisions.
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But on fiscal policy, the actual wealth of a person has nothing to do with it because of Prop 2 1/2. The only amount we can raise local taxes by in a given year is 2.5%, a number below inflation. So in times like these, we’re going to be raising to the levy limit almost every year. Some towns have space under the levy limit, I don’t know if Brookline does, but that
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In easier times like the late 90s when there was lots of money coming from the state, I could see the affluence of a town playing into local levy decisions. But right now we’re pegged against the wall as far as our property tax decisions.
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Were we collecting income tax, the income # of residents would be the #1 concern of Moody’s. But we’re not, and it’s not. It’s a factor in that it’s part of a lot of ratios, but what is important is the ratios. We can only control the other side of the ratio, i.e. reserve funds : tax base, expenditures : receipts, etc. So to me, the tax base is important but it’s not something I can control so it’s hard to do a good or bad job with.
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Also, and this one is really counterintuitive, property value is largely irrelevant to us aside from new construction. The total levy goes up by 2.5% regardless. So everyone’s home value could go down by half or up by 3x and the amount of money we have to work with goes up by 2.5%. They could go up and down relative to each other, and their tax bills will change relative to each other, but the local government still just has a number that went up by 2.5% while healthcare costs went up by 10% and core inflation is above 4%.
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So at the end of the day, the number that matters the most in terms of revenue from your residents is the total local receipts #. What matters for your bond ratings is the ratios within the budget (which takes state aid and excise tax, etc into account as revenue as well), specifically the debt:revenue ratio and the reserve:revenue ratio as well as the overall balance of the budget and how you handle your free cash, other processes, etc. Those are what dictate your ability to pay your bills on time.
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Anyways, I gotta get back to work now. Remember: Ratios.
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I wouldn’t give GM a higher bond rating than a well-run small business just because it’s bigger.
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That is simply untrue. From your perspective you’re aware of the ratios and other data that the town provides, but Moody’s, S&P and Fitch care about 1 thing: Default Risk.
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Default risk factors (in no particular order) are: 1) The municipal and regional economy 2) Debt structure (the ratios) 2) Financial conditions (again, the ratios) 3) Demographics! and 4) Management, accounting, internal practices…
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Respectfully, you would be wrong. Which would provide more shelter to investor/lenders from potential default? GM because of the ‘demographic’ of the borrower.
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P.S. We in the financial community are terribly interested in the potential impact of GAS 45 when all towns will be required to book their unfunded pension liability. Any progress on that front from your town?
And straightening out our management of free cash. We had 3 town administrators (4 if you count “nobody”) in a 1 year period and it coincided with some really rough financial times, lots of teacher layoffs, and like I said moving our free cash from being spent within the fiscal year it became available based on what it was estimated at to being put into reserve funds and spent the following year based on what it actually came in at. So we’ll get there :). Honestly I don’t know as much about that
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Apparently you know more about finance than I do, I was basically parroting what the moody’s guys told me which was admittedly based on what we could control. So sorry for talking down to you before.
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But is there any kind of history of municipalities defaulting on debt? I could see a municipality not paying bills on time or having to borrow to pay debt service which would be a disaster but as far as defaulting, I’ve never heard of such a thing. At any rate, I haven’t had to deal with those situations and I’d prefer not to 🙂 Although I do remember Newt threatening a default on the feds’ debt back in the day.
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I disagree on the GM thing… weren’t they recently downgraded to junk bond status? My point was that lending to a big company that might implode is more risky than lending to a small company that’s doing great, even though the big company has a higher revenue number. The analog to the present situation was that if Brookline didn’t run its finances well, its total size wouldn’t matter as far as a bond rating. What am I missing here?
Which is probably ‘junk’ status as the term is used.
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A current quote on, for example, GM Corp Debt due 2032 is 4.61%. Even with a BB+ rating, it’s still quite a low yield because, even though there is greater risk of default, GM is still quite attractive. Compare all bond ratings from Moody’s.
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There were 2339 municipal bond defaults according to Fitch between 1989 and 2002.
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Orange county infamously cratered in 1994 (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) ‘midst fraud and, I guess, a total failure by the rating agencies. Something like $800 million I recollect.
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Rather a tangent this thread took….I’ll turn it back over the Deb v. Frank et al.
Just too bizarre an analysis to respond. Affluent tax base is irrelevant to a local official from a policy view?
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God save the Town of Tygnsborough.
I assume that jaybooth is Selectman Jason Booth of Tyngsborough who has endorsed Deb Goldberg. Now we know where the term “local crazy” came from.
I just find it almost comical to hear how she did so well by the Brookline Fire Dept. but she can’t get one to appear in her ad…that fireman we see in her ad is from Boston…pretty odd huh?
I’m not invested in the Dem LG race, so merely offer the perspective of a bystander to the debate. But it seems to me that the flurry of negative attacks (where is Mike Dukakis’ no-negative police squad when you need it anyway?) should warm the cockles of the Goldberg campaign’s heart. It simply means that she’s perceived as the frontrunner by the other campaigns and press. If you don’t believe me, just ask Deval.
Whatever.
but the site posted seems to be run by a local “activist” whose primary issue is with the form of government in Brookline, seems to hound everyone in that government, and feels personally aggreived by whatever they do, and accordingly hates this particular candidate for statewide office. Not sure why this was recommended by anyone.
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As for the silly debate about the primary risk factor for municipal debt being the value of the property in the town, please tell that to the former holders of bonds issued by Orange County, CA, where property values were not what one could describe reasonably as “low” when such bonds were issued.
I don’t hate Deb Goldberg. I barely know her (I don’t find people in politics particularly interesting). I’ve covered Brookline Town Government for four years as a columnist at the local paper and I’m invested in this as a taxpayer and a homeowner.
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I’ve chosen to focus on Deb Goldberg the way I have for two reasons. First, I saw a TV ad that said she increased the number of firefighters in Brookline at a time other town’s cut them and I knew that to be wrong. Deb Goldberg is spending $2 million of her own money to present herself in a way that I’ve not seen, nor the public record supports.
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Second, I don’t believe that the way Brookline does business should be a model for the State.
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There are plenty of people in town government who will you how Brookline is the best run town in Massachusetts. I just choose to present the other side of the story (see Cass Sunteins “Why Societies Need Dissent”). The only thing I’m personally aggrieved by is a government that thinks I should shut my mouth.
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Jim Conley
Publisher
onbrookline.com
I suppose my issue was less with your website than with the “Gotcha!” seemingly implied above. Although it seems like you are right on the fireman ad, I didn’t thqink that this alone was quite so cataclaysmic for the Goldberg campaign as others.
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As for your right to dissnt, have at it.
Where are you getting this from? The ether?
I intended for it to be clear that my comment was based on the website cited in the original post. Evidently, I didn’t make it so clear.
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Thanks.