Voters in most Newton Wards will have the added thrill on election day to weigh in on two non-binding ballot questions.
Here’s the text for ballot question five:
Shall the state representative from this district be instructed to vote for legislation to require that a majority of the voters in a municipality approve the sale of any municipally owned real estate containing more than 7,500 square feet of land?
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Vote YES on Question 5.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Newton sold off many of its old school buildings at a dirt cheap price to real estate developers because the city statistician didn’t see any pregnant women in the supermarkets.
Question 5 is a good first start towards making sure that Newton does not repeat that mistake again.
If you believe as I do that government could be improved by employing some business efficiencies, I’d urge you to vote NO on this initiative and continue to afford elected officials the ability to do business on behalf if the City.
Mayor Mann has been criticized over many, many years for his decision to sell Weeks and Warren, two school buildings that our school system could unquestionably use today. What people fail to recognize about that decision, made a time of declining school enrollment, is that you can’t simply “mothball” large institutional buildings. Even closed, large buildings still must be fully maintained, or they deteriorate and become worthless. With his very difficult decision to sell Weeks and Warren, Mayor Mann actually saved the City tens of millions of dollars, over a period of time when we didn’t come close to properly maintaining the school buildings we were actually using.
Mike Striar, and yet the city did not sell the Carr School, which is now the lynchpin to the School Committee’s plan to overhaul the elementary school network. Imagine if the city had held onto a few more building by renting or leasing the space on a temporary basis (as done with the Carr School) until needed again by the NPS.
Life would be so much better for the kids in Newton Upper Falls if the city had held onto the Emerson School. And the Bowen and Countryside communities would have benefited also. The same can be said for the Hamilton School and the Lower Falls community.
Patrick, Newton sold the Carr Elementary School building in the 1980s for $350,000 only to buy it back in 2000 for $2.1 Million.
Talk about selling low and buying high.
What Patrick said.
What happens if the representative doesn’t follow instructions?
Joshua, thank you for the added information. I do not know the specifics as well as you. Yet, there must have been some verbiage in the contract when the city sold the Carr School because the city was able to move the tenants out of the building when it was again needed. Somehow the city was able to regain control of that one building (even at a cost).
According to the current assessor’s data base, the two properties that comprise the Carr School property are assessed at a combined $15 million. So that could be considered a really good investment by the city. Of course that is a somewhat irrelevant value since no taxes are collected on that property.
Pat, Newton spent $2.1 Million to require the Carr School and another $11.75 Million to renovate it into a functional school. I don’t think it was as good a deal as you think.
Joshua, valid point. Yet it still a better deal than spending $40 million per school to update our elementary buildings.
Wasn’t Carr sold with a 15-year buy back option? So the city was able to exercise its option, buying it back at the much higher price as Josh pointed out. Some school districts opted for leasing school building space, which might have been a good thing for Newton to do in retrospect.
Patrick, FWIW, to elaborate further on what I said in my first post, I think it was a huge mistake for Newton to sell off many of its old school buildings at a dirt cheap price to real estate developers because the city statistician didn’t see any pregnant women in the supermarkets.
I’d like to see what former Alders Cindy Creem, David Cohen, Rodney Barker, Paul Coletti, Robert Gaynor, Elaine Gentile, Matthew Jefferson, Dick McGrath, Terry Morris, Edward Richmond, Susan Schur, Carol Ann Shea, Robert L. Tennant, Ethel Sheehan, Dominic Taglienti, Mark White, Ernest Dietz, Joe DePasquale, Donald Budge and Bruce Carmichael have to say about this since they were on the Newton Board of Alders at the time.
As I mentioned above, you can’t just put a building in mothballs. Most infrastructure deteriorates at the same rate regardless of whether a building is occupied or not. So if you suggest that Mayor Mann should have kept Weeks and Warren, what other things would you have advised him to cut in order to pay for the maintenance of those buildings?
@Mike Striar, what other things would you have advised him to cut in order to pay for the maintenance of those buildings?
If Newton had full reimbursement for out-of-district students, pushed the naming rights program, given out pay raises in line with revenue growth and instituted 50/50 health insurance, it would have gone a long way to ensuring that the city could have afforded to maintain its infrastructure rather than selling it for a song and using the money to pay lavish compensation packages for the unions.
@Mike – did Mayor Mann and the city look into the possibility of renting out Weeks and Warren instead of selling them? If they could have been rented, the income could have been used for their maintenance.
Joshua– And if pigs had wings they could fly. You’re convoluting too many issues. I happen to agree with you on some of those issues, but none of them belong in a debate about Warren and Weeks. And I’ve got to tell you Joshua, I’m surprised by your position on this ballot initiative. I think we’re both waiting for the day when someone with real business experience occupies the corner office at City Hall. When that finally happens, [and I believe one day it will], I’d hate to see that person’s hands tied with a ballot initiative like this.
mgwa– We know the City leased other properties. Presumably because they found tenants for those. But the pool of institutional tenants is not very deep. Weeks and Warren were already in bad condition when they were used as schools. So the City would have had to spend a lot of money to attract a tenant, or found a tenant willing to spend a lot themselves. Those were not particularly good options. So the Mayor turned a very costly situation into something revenue-positive, and got plenty of affordable housing units to sweeten the deal.
@Mike – thanks for the information. I did not realize they were in bad shape; it was before I’d moved to Newton.
Does anyone know why Weeks and Warren were not being maintained, or why the city has not budgeted to maintain other buildings consistently? It seems like it would be obvious ongoing maintenance is required to preserve a building’s value, and to prevent escalating maintenance costs for unaddressed issues. A cost/benefit analysis would show that. Even keeping the land and building a new school later would have been preferable to selling some of these properties.
Mike, despite what Greg Reibman tries to tell you, I’m not someone who can be easily defined in anyone’s ideological boxes.
The referendum is non-binding, so even if the voters vote for it the state representatives might not take actions.
And even if the state representatives do take action and co-sponsor such a bill, unless the Gravy King Himself (Bob DeLeo, the House Speaker and an Unindicted Co-Conspirator in the probation scandal) takes an interest in it, the bill will not advance.
http://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/07/prosecutors_designation_of_hou.html
That being said, what hurt Newton when it sold city properties to developers in order to raise money to fund lavish compensation packages for the unions was that it no longer controls the land. Newton is a densely populated suburban city and as such, land is at a premium here.
Considering that Newton agreed to sell the Austin Street Parking lot for a cheap price to a couple of politically wired developers (Scott Oran and Geoff Engler), I think the voters of Newton should have a right to weigh in on the sale of valuable publicly owned properties. Taxpayers are committed to excellence in municipal capital asset management, but lets keep in mind we live in a city, not Oran/Engler’s personal Monopoly board.
Joshua– The City of Newton ALWAYS “controls the land.” If we [the community] wanted to take back Weeks and Warren, we could buy either or both at fair market value anytime. Of course taking what’s now residential property would reflect very poorly on those in City government, so it’s a highly unlikely proposition.
The same can be said for selling City property. There will always be a political price to pay anytime the City sells a property. That “political price” serves as the control mechanism that [in theory at least] keeps elected officials from selling properties most residents want to keep, or selling a property too cheaply.
Only by drawing the most meandering of lines, can one connect any of these sales, Weeks, Warren, or Austin Street to “lavish compensation packages for the unions.” True, everything in the universe is somehow connected, but Mayor Mann sold Weeks and Warren because it was a good business decision and the smart thing to do at that time. And although I’m not particularly supportive of the Austin Street deal, I believe Mayor Warren has pursued it for reasons other than accumulating cash to compensate City employees. I believe he thinks it’s a good business deal for the City, and he’s willing to take the political risk. Although I don’t support the Austin Street deal, I do support the Mayor having the authority to do business on behalf of the City.
Based on both past history of the city selling property that may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but turned out not to be in hindsight, and what seems to be up for sale now, I am enthusiastically supporting a Yes on Question 5. (And no one can argue this question is hard to understand, although unfortunately, it is only non-binding and advisory to our state reps.)
When it comes to selling land, I want it to be difficult. I want a backstop to insure against shortsighted decisions by elected officials who may be inclined to sell land as a solution to present-day financial problems, whether for the immediate cash infusion (which in the case of Austin Street is not all that impressive), or to save on maintenance costs, as has been cited as a reason for selling the elementary schools. It’s worked out a lot better when we leased a building we didn’t have a current need for, like Bigelow, or sold them with a buy-back option like Carr.
Question 5 is not just about Austin Street, and by the time any legislation got passed at the state level, it would probably be too late to affect the Austin Street proposal (whatever that now is). It’s about anything the city owns that a future administration might take it into their heads to sell.
For me, it’s particularly about the former Parks & Rec property at Crescent Street. As I said back in September on a Ward 3 election thread:
The ‘No’ proponents think the current process for surplussing land is adequate, but I disagree. How many people have even attended a meeting of the Real Property & Reuse Committee? Most people don’t focus on stuff like this until and unless they feel personally affected, and by then it’s usually too late to do anything. It’s true, as Mike Striar points out, and as a Ward 2 alderwoman said during an Austin Street public meeting, “if you don’t like what I’m doing, we have elections” (inspiring at least one person, Jeanne Marrazzo, to run). But by the time we get to vote on the alderwo/men every two years, the land may be gone forever. I’d rather be voting on the land sale, once I know what we’re getting for it, and what will be done with the property.
Town governments have the advantage allowing residents to vote on many important decisions like this. Newton could benefit from having residents vote on permanent decisions like land sales.
And Ken Parker is also for Yes on Question 5:
My sentiments exactly, but more succinct!