A quick coat of paint

Mayor Ballantyne presented her budget proposal for the coming fiscal year (FY25) to the City Council last Thursday. I’ve been paying attention to city government since late 2017, so this will be my seventh budget season. Here are a couple of reminders about the city budget process:

• The Mayor is exceptionally constrained in what they can propose. Collective bargaining agreements, multi-year contracts, bond obligations, written policies, and proposition 2.5 combine to make it seem like most of the budget has already been written before the finance team even picks up their pens.
• The City Council’s role is also very constrained. Mass General law, Ch 44 Sec 32, says that the council shall “make appropriations for the purposes recommended and may reduce or reject any amount recommended in the annual budget. It shall not increase any amount in or the total of the annual budget nor add thereto any amount for a purpose not included therein except on recommendation of the mayor.” Put another way, the council’s job is to review the Mayor’s proposal, cut what they don’t like, and pass the rest.

Taken together, this can make for a frustrating process. The Mayor can’t realistically give us everything we want, and all the Council can do is cut — though they will certainly talk a lot along the way.

The core problem is that there are too many important things going on in the city to adequately address them all. Even a summary list of the top issues is enough to leave a person out of breath. We’ve got students in crisis and school buildings where the walls fall off; undrivable roads and increasingly dangerous drivers; homelessness, housing un-affordability; all sorts of public safety issues — from police oversight and developing a nonviolent emergency response through to abysmal morale on the force; still more crumbling buildings, including fire stations and city hall itself; addiction and overdose prevention; equity and access in all their many varieties; and so much more. The list is long and we can’t do everything first.

I was in the chambers for Thursday’s presentation. People had packed the room to advocate (mostly) for fully funding the schools and to demand that the Mayor reach an agreement with our city’s unions. The Somerville Municipal Union Association (SMEA) has been without a pay increase since 2021. This has led to calls for the council to cut the salary line for the Mayor’s executive staff back to its 2021 level unless an agreement is reached in the next two weeks. I think that’s unlikely to happen, but it’s a nice thought.

As the meeting ground on, the hour grew late, and the crowds thinned out. Soon, there were just a few of us in the audience besides the city staffers present to take questions from council. I found myself in conversation with a commissioner for the city’s Commission for Persons With Disabilities. We chatted about one of last year’s hot-button issues — the purchase of a braille embosser, also known as a “brailler.” Under pressure from the council, Mayor Ballantyne added funds to purchase the device to the FY24 budget. The machine has apparently been delivered, but neither of us knew for sure whether the damn thing had even been taken out of its shipping materials. The city website says that requests for braille materials need to be submitted 30 days in advance, which is substantially longer than the required public notice period for most meetings, so it seems unlikely that braille will be available for anything particularly time sensitive.

That leads to the third important thing to know about budget season: Having funds in the budget is neither necessary nor sufficient to see a thing done. Practical change takes staffing and a sustained focus from the Mayor, and the council approves mid-term appropriations all the time. Many important priorities die on the vine for lack of attention, no matter how much time to council and public spend advocating for them. Consider the vacant properties ordinance — passed in 2019 and seemingly still toothless five years later.

If you visit the city council chambers, take a look at the ceiling, where the paint is crumbling from a leak in the roof that happened years ago. My fellow volunteer and I tried to guess how many days of work it would be — and for how many workers — to set up scaffolds and to scrape and paint the ceiling. It’s not either of our specialties — but it didn’t seem like it would take much work to repair this bit of obvious, visible damage … right there in the central room of our city government.

A quick coat of paint for the council chambers seems unlikely to happen this year, in part because if we’re not done feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and educating the children … if we’ve still got addiction and hunger and injustice, if the staff remain underpaid and we have to defer implementation of our most urgent initiatives … then nobody is going to speak up for a coat of paint — though lots of people will speak up for municipal composting. Deferred maintenance doesn’t make the list, despite the fact that we could make a pretty big difference with a modest investment— especially if we brought the work in-house and paid a competitive wage.

I think that we need, to paraphrase the old saying, the wisdom to go ahead and address the things that are within our reach — even if it takes a scaffold.