True to form, Senator Scott Brown voted against the latest piece of President Obama’s jobs bill. Whether it was the mere fact that it raised $500 from the average millionaire or a firm belief the stimulus created zero jobs (there are lots of commuters in Westfield who see everyday the jobs created as downtown is torn up and rebuilt…endlessly). From a political perspective, you have to question the wisdom of voting like this. I mean, why not vote for it and not give the Democrats ammunition. You know actually be the moderate you claim to be. Alas it was not meant to be.
It is especially troubling, too. I’m currently waiting for a response from Springfield officials about how many jobs the city has been forced to leave unfilled or eliminate through layoffs as a result of the crisis. While the numbers are nowhere near as bad as those in Newark, for example, and are partly due to Domenic Sarno playing political games with police overtime (demanding increases in it while laying off cadets), it reminds us of the terrible reality facing countless cities, a reality Brown has perpetuated.
Back in June Brown promised to do all he could to help Springfield recover from the tornado. Well, his nominal vote for more FEMA money aside, this jobs bill would have been a perfect opportunity to really show his dedication to the battered City of Homes. Springfield, like all municipalities, has a ceiling on how much it can tax property. I’m not talking about the levy limit, but the ceiling, the oft-forgotten part of the Proposition 2 1/2. Everybody knows that the overall levy cannot go up more than 2.5% year over year, unless a referendum says otherwise. But the ceiling caps the overall levy at 2.5% of all taxable property. No referendum available. Not that it would matter anyway. Raising taxes in the city any further would be like getting blood from a stone.
What does this have to do with the tornado? Well the city has suspended some tax bills for damaged property and that damaged property, especially the demolished and as of yet un-rebuilt property will soon make their way to the overall levy and further damage the already foreclosure-ridden tax base of the city. That comes on top of the close to $20 million costs the city will have in un-reimbursed by disaster aid, assuming it has to fully pay to rebuild damaged schools. As it is, the tornado has all but assured historic tax cuts last year (they were justified, these weren’t tax breaks for the 1%) will be reversed, but only to the extent prop 2 1/2 permits. In short, Springfield is as bad off as its ever been. Layoffs next year, if not this, may be inevitable barring another state bailout.
Now I don’t know the details of the jobs bill well enough to know if the city could use the money to safeguard its own employment levels without raiding its reserves, but now we will never know. Senator Brown reneged on his own promise to help Springfield. I was there one of the times he blew into town and he pledged to help and his vote tonight proves once again that he did not mean what he said.
In law school, you learn that courts assume legislatures know all of their existing law so that when new legislation is passed that does not repeal a statute, it is assumed any seeming conflicts were not the result of ignorance. In other words, courts have to make the statutes fit together unless impossible, but the key here is the legislature knows. I’m not going to assume Scott Brown is so bloody ignorant that he has no idea that Springfield has few, if any resources, but the state and federal governments to turn to. Given the fact that Brown took the time to interact with voters in Ward 7 (a wealthier ward hit by the tornado), where he got votes, I cannot assume he is writing the city off for political reasons (Monson’s got lots of votes too and they’re getting screwed, too). No. It’s just indifference. Cold indifference.
Springfield’s been on the ropes since before Brown ever rubbed his stripped self in our faces, but it is the gall of making a promise in a time of such hardship, like after a natural disaster, and then breaking it that makes me furious. Call me a fool for caring about the place I grew up.
He had portrayed himself as a man of the people. But which people? It’s all well and good to want officials you can have a beer with, but when the neighborhood bar was taken out by the tornado…
No doubt Scott Brown will be touting how he 77% of his donations came from in-state. As his report is not fully available it is hard to know exactly who and where that money came from. However, I do know that the criticism will inevitably come targeting Elizabeth Warren, for example, since she got so much money from out of state. Well, a lot of that out-of-state money came from small donors too. 96% of all donations overall, in fact. People who look around and see politicians selling them out at the altar of ideological or partisan advantage. Maybe they have have suffered disasters in their states too and have no idea how they will pay to sustain services with their tax base devastated by mother nature in addition to Wall Street. They want to know somebody is in their corner, doing the right thing by them whether they appear on their ballot or not. If nothing else It is all in our best interests to look out for our fellow Americans.
This is not a post about Elizabeth Warren or really even about contributions or even jobs. It is about priorities and, yes about values. Has Brown ever looked beyond Wrentham and seen anything in Massachusetts, especially Western Massachusetts, other than a “meal ticket”? Probably not, and just as he would probably have voted against more aid to the poorest cities and towns in Massachusetts as a State Senator, he voted against helping his own constituents, the very least of them once again. What’s worse, he broke his promise to us in our time of greatest need.
From Senator Brown’s op-ed last month commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11:
Senator Brown’s response yesterday to a bill to provide funds to hire first responders and teachers: filibuster it.
On a bit of a tangent, the Proposition 2.5 Levy Ceiling is a crucial issue for Springfield right now in light of the tornado, one which I can’t believe people across the state can so easily ignore.
To summarize: a city cannot tax more than 2.5% of its assessed property value. For most communities this is not a problem because their housing is not very affordable – so it is possible to get $10,032 from the average single-family house in Lexington by taxing it at just 1.44% of its value because the average property is assessed at $697k. Even Worcester manages to get $3,307 per property by taxing its single-family residences 1.66%, because the average property is worth $205k.
In Springfield, the average single-family property is assessed at just $135k. The residential tax rate is $19.49, but because the CIP rate is $38.97, the blended rate (which is subject to the ceiling) is 2.43% for FY2011 – just barely under the 2.5% levy ceiling. There is no mechanism in the law to raise this.
In June 2011, Springfield had a tornado that did somewhere near $100 million in damage, taking hundreds of properties and businesses off the tax rolls. Think about what that means. The city’s expenses need to be spread across less taxable property, which means that the blended rate would need to rise above 2.5% in order to collect the same amount of revenue as last year. Meanwhile, property values continue to fall due to a horrendous economy and a spate of foreclosures.
The city’s expenses didn’t go down because of the tornado — they went up. The city’s expenses didn’t go down because of the foreclosures – they went up as those properties need to be policed more. But the law says that we must now cut services and cut taxes because, well, that’s what the law says.
It is beyond cruel to tell a tornado-ravaged city that it must cut its expenses because a tornado hit it and properties are being devalued. It is even crueler that Proposition 2.5 mandates that taxes be LOWERED – not even “kept the same”. Why? Because the ceiling is based on valuation, not on the prior year’s budget. If values go down, the ceiling kicks in and the city has to lower tax collections to keep the rate at 2.5% of total valuation.
The state of Massachusetts has been neglecting Springfield in terms of state aid ever since Proposition 2.5 went into effect. The state was supposed to make up the difference for lower-value communities who could not raise as much revenue in property taxes. Well, here’s what the state has done with General Government aid over the past 15 years:
FY98: $28.4m
FY99: $31.3m
FY00: $35.3m
FY01: $38.2m
FY02: $39.8m
FY03: $39.2m
FY04: $33.0m
FY05: $33.8m
FY06: $39.7m
FY07: $49.6m
FY08: $50.2m
FY09: $50.0m
FY10: $35.5m
FY11: $34.1m
FY12: $31.9m (proposed)
[These numbers are from the State DOR website, but may not be perfect because I did not take into account the 9C reductions (which means my numbers are too high) nor the “Local Aid Resolution” numbers (which I don’t understand).
See what is happening here? The state has slashed its general government assistance. Look at those numbers again – general government assistance, which is supposed to make up for the disparities in property values, has been slashed. We are receiving less in FY12 than we did in FY00 – even though things have gotten quite a bit more expensive in those 12 years.
So Springfield, which has been decreasing services for the past decade, will have to cut even deeper at a time when it is hurting the most. Yet no one in the Eastern part of this Democratic state talks about this. They hang their heads down, kick the dirt, and mutter something about “austerity”.
We’ve been austere for almost 15 years. It isn’t working. It’s getting worse.
I agree with everything you have said about the state. The formula itself is unfair and the cuts to it have made it worse. I will note that while austerity has not worked, so to speak, bad management is part of the problem. The mayor has used politics to get what he wants from the council like choosing the most politically damaging budget lines to get the council to reverse other-than-personnel services cuts. Some were unavoidable like at animal control and the city council was okay w/ reversing them, but others were done because Sarno had a temper tantrum. None of this excuses Beacon Hill’s cavalier attitude about local aide (and Springfield and Western Mass ain’t alone in this department) nor does it excuse federal representative break their promises, but this process is not a three legged stool. It’s like three layers of safety nets, responsible federal action, state local aid, and local fiscal stewardship.
Sarno is right that the city has a revenue problem more than a spending problem, but the city cant rewrite the laws that affect that. So that leaves spending one way or another and how effectively we spend those dollars however dwindling. Sarno, has took often chosen politics, I am sorry to say.
All that said, my focus, is of course on Brown. I would argue that even with better local and state hardship, the problems from the hurricane could remain severe and badly require the infusion of federal money.
In final paragraph that should stewardship, not hardship.
I’m no Sarno apologist, and I will probably vote against him because I don’t think he’s been particularly effective as a mayor and manager, and four more years for him aren’t warranted, but in fairness, it is a very difficult situation to manage a declining budget versus an increasing budget. Maybe the one thing that stops me from embracing Jose Tosado more is that, at least from his portrayal in the Republican newspaper, he doesn’t seem to connect budget cuts with service reductions.
The quote that really disturbed me was:
Tosado seems to be lecturing at Austerity 101 – and to me, this signals a certain ideology about government. Is it better for people to have $5 more in their pockets but building permits take 5 days longer (a hypothetical example)? A city budget is not like a family budget, and although it must be balanced (unlike a federal budget), there needs to be a recognition that the government can and should do good things, that a government can be a very efficient use of funds (i.e. one fleet of garbage trucks paid for by the city instead of 5 fleets all criss-crossing each other).
I respect the city council’s decision to specifically eliminate CitiStat (though I don’t think they should have done it since the savings was minor and the potential was large) because they made a specific decision, versus a very ambiguous strategy of cutting $2.7 million from the budget and then acting like “it’s not that much, you should be able to find it”. Likewise, I think things like a blanket elimination of vacant positions or hiring freezes to be cop-outs.
I think that it was also somewhat foolish for the city council to leave tax levy on the table in last year’s budget. I understand that the new ward councilors are stretching their muscles a bit, but they put too much stock in the tax whining crowd – who will really never be satisfied. Face it, Springfield homeowners pay among the lowest taxes in the state, but the whiners always focus on the high rate – it’s as if they would rather move to a community with a $13 rate but don’t understand they would pay 50% more in taxes and an extra $1k/month in mortgage because their house will cost more. 98% of the city (and I bet 2/3 the city council) doesn’t even understand how the tax rate and valuations interact, that the valuations are just an allocation method for the levy. No, 98% of the public thinks that the city “fixes” the assessments to get more money, and also believes that if their valuation drops, their taxes should go down too, not understanding that city obligations don’t drop along with property values (in fact, they increase).
Honestly though, I have no idea why our state delegation doesn’t get together to try and get help for the city. They don’t seem to be too unified, and realistically, there are just 4 state reps (and 0 state senators) who live in Springfield. Although Ashe, Petrolatti and the new guy from West Springfield have slivers of Springfield, they are concerned with their suburban communities, as are Welch and Candaras in the Senate.
My insight into the council is this. They did not want to make the cuts that they did, but Sarno didn’t even give the budget a serious consideration. For months before this budget, councilors wanted more information from department head. What can slim down on and they got a cold should. Then they act unilaterally and then the department cut only the things that are visible? Then after that happens, one of the department heads (It was Pat Sullivan, who is a professional, but still had a lot of chutzpah to say this) suggested that the councilors and he speak in more depth for the next budget. That is exactly what they wanted to begin with.
In Sarno’s defense, he has never been in city government with a council that utilized the power that belongs them. The mayor was judge and jury that’s that. He seems loath to govern by concensus. As for the taxes, I agree with you on the residential level, but its the business level that troubles the councilors who actually know what they’re doing. The fear among business may be more psychological than true expense as property values are low.
One way or another, I think the best way to think of it is this. “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Whether austerity is the right medicine or not, the council is acting within its prerogative for the first time in year and the mere fact of that, wisdom of individual cuts notwithstanding, is what bothers a lot of establishment folks.
Has the Springfield delegation thought about filing a bill that would create some sort of temporary workaround? It does seem as though the tornado is a once-in-a-lifetime situation that legitimately calls for extraordinary measures.