Gabrieli brings to the board years of experience as a leader in education innovation, business and public service.
Following the success of GMIS, the healthcare software company he co-founded, Gabrieli joined Bessemer Venture Partners, where he has been active for the last 15 years. In 2000, he co-founded Massachusetts 2020, an educational nonprofit focused on expanding the economic and educational opportunities for children families across Massachusetts, and which is currently leading Massachusetts’ first-in-the-nation initiative to redesign and expand learning time at public schools. Gabrieli is also the founder and Chairman of Boston’s After-School for All Partnership, a $25 million collaboration of the City of Boston and twelve foundations, universities and corporations aimed at expanding and improving after-school opportunities for children.
Morton is a well known leader in Springfield, serving as President and CEO of the YMCA of Greater Springfield. Before joining the YMCA, Morton was a history teacher at the High School of Commerce, where he participated in the development of curriculum for the Law and Government Program, chaired the School Centered Decision Making Team, and served as a member of the Accreditation Steering Committee.
An attorney with his own practice from 1993 to 1999, Morton has also served as the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Career Development Institute, Inc. and of the Hampden County Employment and Training Consortium, managing the agency?s multi-million dollar budget and overseeing a staff of 22.
Currently, an adjunct professor at Springfield College in the School of Human Services, Morton has also taught at Elms College, Western New England School of Law, and Northeastern University School of Law.
“I am honored to have been selected by the Governor to serve on the Springfield Finance Control Board (FCB),” Morton said. “The previous FCB did a great job of managing the city’s finances and implementing policies and procedures designed to maximize the efficient operation of city government. I look forward to continuing in that vain and to moving toward the day when the FCB will be obsolete – to the day when our city can return to self-governance. This is an enormous responsibility, and I will endeavor to always serve the best interests of our City and its residents.”
As Director of Local Affairs for the Patrick/Murray administration, Nunes runs the Division of Local Services within the Department of Local Revenue and serves as the main contact point between cities and towns and state government.
Nunes brings to the job 25 years of local and state government experience and was the longest serving mayor in Taunton?s history. As mayor, he managed the city out of two fiscal crises in 1992 and 2004 and built four new schools in 10 years without debt exclusion.
Nunes is also a past President of the Massachusetts Mayors Association and a former member of the Local Government Advisory Council.
“As a former mayor I have a keen understanding of the challenges cities sometimes face,” said Nunes. “I look forward to using my experience in local government to help reinvigorate Springfield and make it a model of success for other cities.”
If memory serves, you’re a Springfielder. What do you think?
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I am big Gabrieli fan, so a) I like this move, and b) I like that DP is deploying him.
I think the choices are very good. Chris Gabrielli will bring a lot of credibility to the board. James O’S. Morton is Black and from Springfield (one of the knocks of Mitt Romney’s board was that it was 3 older white guys from Eastern MA.). I don’t know anything about Nunes but he seems to come with good credentials.
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I think that it’s great that Deval Patrick has extended the term of the control board. I feel this way because our local representative government is still dysfunctional (the city council, not the mayor). Case in point: the city council could have voted to switch retirees to Medicare B two years ago. This would have resulted in no change in coverage whatsoever, and no financial impact on the retirees. The only change is that the federal government would have picked up the health care tab for retirees, saving the city $6 million per year.
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It failed in a 4-5 vote. Why? Because although there was no change in coverage or costs to retirees, some councilors voted against it because there was no guarantee that there would never be a change in coverage or coats to retirees.
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I’ve watched several city council meetings on TV. We have some genuinely incompetent councilors. Most do not understand how Proposition 2.5 works. Most do not understand basic accounting principles — when the city announced that it was receiving millions in payments for back-taxes owed, councilors started planning on how to spend the money. Problem is, they had spent it once, but just never collected it.
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I blame the bland representative government on the lack of ward representation in the city. At 150,000 people, each city councilor represents more people than a state representative. The city is too diverse, too large for anyone but the most bland, uncontroversial, candidate with good name recognition to get elected. Often those candidates are pushed through by special interests or corrupt political machines.
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There have been several instances where incumbent councilors have withdrawn a couple of weeks before the election, but they still got 25% of the votes that winning councilors received. Why? Because when there are nine choices to make, people vote for names they are familiar with, not candidates they are familiar with. The first couple times I voted, before I became politically aware, this is what I did — I looked for people I had heard of. The system encourages that.
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Even an unpopular incumbent enjoys significant mathematical protection, because even if 80% of the voters decide they don’t like a councilor, they often can’t agree on who to replace him with from the field of 17 other candidates on the ballot (select 9 from 18); the vote gets split, and the disliked councilor remains in office. It’s a bad system and needs to be changed. It’s scheduled to be put out for a vote this year.
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But here’s my rub — I don’t think that Springfield is all that worse than most other cities and towns in this state. And I think the well-known corruption is a symptom rather than the disease. The main problem is that we need to be 100% above average on everything, because we do not have any slack in our revenues and we face significantly more problems than nearly every other municipality in the state. Many people could manage a company that had strong revenues and weak competition, but few people could manage one with weak revenues and strong competition. That’s what’s happening in Springfield — we haven’t had good general government (i.e. not Chapter 70) revenue in years, and municipal services have been whittled to the bone, and surrounding communities have been very good at drawing away nearly all of Springfield’s middle class.
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And even though our Chapter 70 money is the biggest in the state, we have among the lowest paid teachers in the region. Why? Because Chapter 70 brings you to the foundation budget level. As the recent editorial by the SJC justice pointed out, most places spend well above foundation. They can afford to; Springfield simply can’t. Look at tax revenues sometime. Springfield residents are paying less than half of what residents in other towns pay. Why? Partially because when Proposition 2.5 went into effect, that’s what they were paying. Proposition 2.5 is a governor on accelerator. Since every other town was collecting more per resident when the law went into effect, and since everyone can raise by the same percentage, there’s no way to catch up. Once poor, always poor.
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The old FCB was operating under orders from Mitt Romney to only look at balancing the books with existing revenue. Whenever anyone asked it if the city needed more money, they said “we’re not here to answer that question”. I’m hoping that the new FCB will look at things from that angle. I hope they try and solve from a root-cause perspective. Springfield is bearing a disproportionate burden of problems in the state. We have among the highest concentration of poverty here. We have a significant homeless population, 50% of which come here from outside the city. We have scores of absentee landlords, many of which are unresponsive slumlords.
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Look at the demographics of the region out here — Springfield is poor, but there are a ring of wealthy communities surrounding us. The middle class left for a variety of reasons, the biggest nail was probably busing for desegregation in 1974. Springfield schools were once known on a national level for their excellence. They are now one of the biggest reasons that people avoid the city. I think the problem isn’t so much with the quality of the teachers, it’s with the quality of the students. I know I’m not so keen on sending my children to a school where a non-trivial number of kids have parents in jail, are in foster homes, or are so poor and neglected that they come to school in the dead of winter without winter clothing.
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There is a lack of young, vibrant, middle-class people in this city. We aren’t 100% in poverty because not everyone moved out, but we aren’t attracting young professionals to replace the people who either die or retire elsewhere; we are increasingly attracting the very poor.
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Crime, or more correctly the perception of crime, is the second biggest problem. We have 3 TV stations in Springfield, and they love to report body counts ad infinitum. We have had 9 murders so far this year. I think half of them were domestic incidents, the rest were drug or gang related. But that doesn’t stop the media from running “do you feel safe in Springfield” polls every week. There is a significant gang and drug problem in the city; it isn’t pervasive in every neighborhood, but every story places crime in “Springfield”, not “the bad neighborhoods of Springfield” (imagine if every Dorchester crime was reported as “Boston”.
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The bottom line is that Springfield needs a middle class. We need to attract one back. The middle class has left for other cities and towns that offer newer houses, better schools, more economic segregation (which many people like), less crime. We need to solve the major problems we have and offer services that can overcome the negatives that accompany a large city. We can’t afford to be just scraping by with a bare-bones approach to things. We need to be able to compete at a much higher level.
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If this state actually had an urban strategy that helped urban areas, more people would be interested in living in those places that are designed for density and mass transportation. Pressure to develop would be reduced in other towns and rural areas. But instead, we see farm after farm bulldozed for housing subdivisions, we hear about families with children moving into small towns overwhelming the services there. That sounds like the opposite of where we should be going.
One thing comes to mind. I hope that when they tackle economic development, they will try to develop jobs that are suited to people in Springfield. If the state said that a new company was going to locate in Springfield tomorrow, and would bring 1,000 new high-tech jobs, 900 of those new employees would not move to Springfield. They would move to a suburb of Springfield. Springfield would hardly improve.
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To me, that is very telling. We are not offering the middle and upper class an experience they want to have. Even about 75% of our police, firefighters, and teachers do not live here. Springfield taxpayers are paying for about 5,000 suburban houses outside of Springfield to be occupied with a middle-class family.
100 high-tech jobs for people living in Springfield would help after all, and then there’s the low-tech jobs that come with it, everything from cleaning the building and landscaping to cafeteria service and maintenance.
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Job gains like this would certainly help the property tax burden because the housing stock would improve, thereby growing the property value base. After all, high-tech jobs pay enough that some of those 100 would move into new or newly-renovated housing, which raises the 2.5 limit.
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As for police, firefighters, and teachers — Boston requires many city employees to live in Boston. Why doesn’t Springfield? Sure, you’ve got to balance the benefits of employees living in the town (stability, availability) vs. the cost (they might rather quit and work for a suburb than have to live in Springfield), but it is certainly something to consider, especially for cops (who can’t help but improve public safety 24/7).
I’d take 100 more upper income residents over nothing, but I’d rather see 1,000 more mid-range jobs, jobs that could be performed by people living in Springfield, jobs that could improve the lives of people willing to live here.
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As for the residency requirement, that would have to be bargained, but I hear it is notoriously hard to enforce. Also, in the early 90’s, the state put forth a law saying that teachers could not be forced to live in a community in which they work. Teachers are exempt from any residency rule.
NoPol, I was emailing him about another matter, so I sent him your post above. He replied:
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He added that you should feel free to send him ideas at Mass2020.
…in many ways.
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First of all is the money thing. If there is hope in finding the money to revitalize Springfield, Chris knows the people who could come up with it.
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Secondly, he’s someone who’s used to working with urban groups through his educational initiatives.
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Finally, it’s a bit of a thankless task. Even if Chris succeeds, he won’t get much credit for it, as the general public won’t understand what was done.
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Finally, as a Gabrieli supporter who heard Chris speak as a candidate many times, the “I can’t wait to get started” quote brings a smile to my face, because I heard it so many times during the campaign. He really can’t wait to get started on projects like this. Let’s hope his enthusiasm is contagious.
A combination of experience in succesful governance, growing an economic powerhouse, and long term planning – and no, this is not a “thankless job” but an opportunity to change a part of the world out on a basis of hope, experience, and hard work. BRAVO!
Good call on Deval’s part. Gabrieli has a knowledge of education issues, and certainly no incentive on the job except to do what is right. Plus, I think public sector workers can feel a level of comfort and trust in him, which should ease negotiations. I was surprised not to see him at the convention, though…