Yes, that’s right There will be a public hearing (for those folks who happen to be in the City in the middle of the summer), on the Blue Ribbon Commission’s recommendation this Wednesday evening at 7:00 p.m.in Room 211. Here’s the Report and their recommendations for those of you who want to testify at the hearing.
This just in from the Programs and Services Committee Chair, John Rice: This is the first of several public hearings that will be held to discuss the Blue Ribbon Commission’s recommendations. There will be at least one additional public hearing scheduled in September. In addition, one recommendation made by the Blue Ribbon Commission, if approved by the City Council, would need to be approved by the end of this September to go into effect by January 2020 and if the BRC recommendation is approved after this September, any change in compensation would go into effect by January 2022. That is the reason why committee members wanted to start getting feedback in the summer and continue into the fall.
Even a bad fortune teller could predict the outcome.
I guess I’m a worse than bad fortune teller. Please tell Mike.
To quote the late Nancy Reagan “Just say NO”.
I agree with peter, no increase until they reduce the size of the council. We all know their last effort to cut the size of the council was a joke, so the ballot question would be voted down. They made a promise of reducing the size and until that happens they shouldn’t get a pay increase. Just say No.
I’m just so surprised they would hold a public hearing on this item (potentially controversial – given the state of the City’s finances) in the middle of the summer.
I sat on the Blue Ribbon Commission but voted against the commission’s recommendations, in large part, because I objected to the majority of my fellow commission members who voted not to hold a public input meeting prior to our final report vote.
That said, I believe it’s a mistake the way so much council business is put on hold during the summer on the argument that too many people are away. Most people take a week or two off, not a full summer. And there are certainly other ways for vacationers to communicate with their councilors. (Raise your hand, if you’re reading Village 14 today at the beach!) It’s counter productive to progress to put off all business during the summer.
Also, it’s essential that the full council vote on the BRC recommendations well before this November’s municipal elections.
So you have to have the hearings now to allow that vote to happen in September.
An interesting detail caught my eye in the report – this quote from the City Charter
The mayor “shall receive for HIS services ….”
@Amy Sangiolo – Holding a public hearing in mid-summer during a vacation time is certain to draw a poor turnout.
It’s deliberate ploy. Mayor Fuller needs to use her bully pulpit and speak in opposition to any salary increases.
Oh and one more thing, the BRC did hold public two comment sessions this spring and the turnout was also very poor. (Not even Peter Karg or Mike Striar, who clearly have strong feelings about this, showed up.) So if turnout is low Wednesday it might have nothing to do with the calendar.
@Greg: No one is suggesting putting all business off during the summer months – just controversial topics – such as increasing the salaries of elected officials – particularly when our city finances are tight and union contracts have yet to be settled.
@Amy: I think you know from experience that over the years many of your then council colleagues or council leaders have suggested that committee or council work should not happen in the summer.
The Commission held open eight of its meetings for public comments . The Commission also widely distributed a request for comments online, including a post here on Village 14.
The Commission received over 300 comments from the public and elected officials.
All of those comments are in the report: http://www.newtonma.gov/civicax/filebank/documents/97344/Blue%20Ribbon%20Commission%20Report.pdf
@all: As Greg and Doug have noted this topic has been widely publicized and promoted for the past 7 months. The City is tied to a calendar schedule that is mandated by previous City Council (Alderman) edicts that tell you when you must vote on these items. The Programs and Services Committee met on this item earlier in the summer, and has to have this voted out by the full Council prior to the November election.
Council size has nothing to do with this compensation and sound management practices, just as we don’t negotiate the other city contracts based on decreasing or increasing FTE’s.
There are many reasons that previous Council bodies ignored this topic since 1994, none for sound management and fiscal practices sake. Addressing compensation now allows for Newton to join every other city/town in the state in sound management practices and recognizes that to have great diversity of talent you must compensate fairly. (The city should not be managed solely by wealthy and retired residents) Anyone that says Newton is in dire financial straights should come forward and help me cut the budget as I have been promoting for 5 years!!
@Jim Cote – If you truly want to cut the budget, please take a leadership role and speak out about reducing the size of the City Council and oppose any salary increases.
@Peter: Do you know what percentage of the city budget are city councilor salaries? You should given your repeated lobbying on this issue.
I served with Greg on the Commission and also voted no to the overall recommendation (partly) because of the lack of a final public hearing. There were plenty of opportunities for the public to come and comment during our research phase, but once we had some final recommendations, there was no opportunity to comment. And ‘our straw-vote’ recommendations kept changing the last few meeting in response to new information we received each week, so unless you actually attended you would not know what the most up-to-date recommendations were.
The issue with this upcoming public comment session is that they are based on the recommendations of the Commission, and not a recommendation of the Programs & Services Committee. At the last meeting, the committee seemed to have some deep issues with the recommendations, so I think it’s highly unlikely that what we are being asked to comment on will be what the City Council ends up voting on.
@ Greg Reibman -The point is we don’t need a City Council with 24 Councilors making it the largest elected Municipal body in the State if not the Country. We certainly don’t need to increase their salaries at a time when they refuse to offer any kind of plan to reduce the size of the body. Further, the budget is very tight with many union contracts still to be negotiated. “Just say NO”.
Here’s my read on the city council size controversy. Powerful real estate development interests wanted to reduce the city council size as long as they could get rid of those pesky ward councilors (hence Charter Reform). Reducing the size of the city councilors but keeping the ward councilors would make the ward councilors more powerful than they are now, which is even worse for real estate development interests (so it’s not happening). I am interested in hearing contrary analysis and evidence on this subject.
@Bruce: It’s an interesting “read” but not really backed up by the historical facts. The push to review the charter was spearheaded by the Newton League of Women Voters and some other private citizens, not businesses or real estate developers. The folks who were elected to sit on the charter commission were Newton residents, most of whom had been active in civic life for years and not connected to businesses or real estate developers either. They concluded their proposed council configuration independently because they thought that was the right configuration.
It seems to me like this “Blue Ribbon Commision” looked at two basic options with the City Council. Either increase their compensation package, or keep it the same. [I welcome any of the commision members to correct me if I’m misrepresenting their work]…
I believe the Commission should have looked at the possibility of completely eliminating compensation for council members. Not because the job has little value. In fact, I could easily make the argument that City Councilors are underpaid for the amount of time they put in. But I could also make that same argument for hundreds of youth sport coaches and Girl Scout troop leaders, all of whom voluntarily dedicate countless hours toward making Newton a better place…
In my opinion, compensating City Councilors has led to self aggrandizement, which in-turn had led to an untenable level of arrogance and disrespect for constituents. This is clearly evident by the fact that there are still 24 people on the Council, despite decades long public support for a reduction in its size…
Council members are so out-of-touch with the electorate that they blocked patient access to prescription cannabis for nearly two years, and voted to overturn a recreational cannabis law that their constituents voted for.
If I may add a personal note to those Councilors… You are not the boss of me. I don’t need you tell me what kind of bags I can get at the market, what kind of container my water should be in, or which hand to blow my nose with. I would like you to focus on things that improve and maintain our city. You can start by fixing the rat problem much of Newton is experiencing. Get that done and we can talk about a pay raise.
So I’m not speaking on behalf of the Commission–this is just my ‘take’ on our deliberations. The Commission did discuss the purpose of compensating our officials and researched a number of other Massachusetts cities and towns to create peer groups. The City Council peer group pays their City Council members–every single one of them. Believe me, I’m with you on the number of City Councilors here in Newton, but these positions are different from volunteer positions at local community groups in that City Councilors have legislative and fiduciary responsibilities for our local government. What was interesting was that all the local communities (mostly towns) in the School Committee peer group did NOT pay their School Committee members. We discussed that option for Newton, but felt that taking away compensation would signal that we did not value the work of the School Committee or how important schools are to our community.
To be honest, I felt that the main focus of our discussion was how to equalize compensation among City Councilors. We included health benefits in our analysis, and found that about half of the City Council takes the health insurance plan, adding up to $20,000 or so in additional compensation, while half did not take any insurance and received $9,750. We felt it would be more fair if everyone could received about the same amount, but there was no easy solution.
What Sue said. We took many straw votes, including whether to pay anything at all.
This is another instance where the real problem is a lack of journalists covering Newton. Back in “the day” there would have been a reporter watching and reporting on this process.
Oops…just to clarify. The $20,000 is on top of the $9750 for those who take health insurance, so totaling almost $30k.
This is more of the same – people who love to make judgement leaps not based on the facts accusing others of nefarious intentions.
I went to one of the quite well publicized public comment sessions and there were two, count ’em, two people there. If you want to make a difference, at some point you have to get out from behind your computer and get over to city hall.
Yours truly,
The public school teacher who was supposedly in cahoots with the major real estate developers in the city during the charter commission revision process.
Wow! So the compensation package will total almost $30K for those Councilors that take the City health plan. Any Profiles in Courage on the Council that want to speak in opposition? The BRC proposal needs to be rejected outright. The City just can’t afford these wages especially when many union and teacher contracts have yet to be settled. If public service is financially impacting a Councilors day job they need to think about moving on.
Out of curiosity, since payroll increase has been so thoroughly discussed, what was the discussion on trade offs?? How will that impact the budget going forward??
The compensation given to city councilors, even to those who receive health coverage, is barely commensurate with the hours they put in to their work. They have lots of responsibilities, and all serve on multiple committees and subcommittees, usually several nights a week. Two or three top city administrators have combined salaries that surpass those of the entire city council.
It should be obvious: Newton’s financial woes have little to do with the compensation of our hardworking councilors. No one becomes a city councilor to make a buck. I still believe that we need all twenty-four of them, given the numerous tasks they must address.
Bob Jampol. Amen.
Larger cities than us have less councilors/aldermen and do as well or better than us. Logic is silly. Several councilors went around the city campaigning against the Charter commissions proposal for a smaller board…an issue that nearly 70% of the constituents agree upon over the past 40 years, councilors went on made false promises saying they would lessen the size by themselves and do it their way. Many people took their word for it. They failed and now we are going to reward people for deceiving constituents?? Cut the Council in half and pay them twice as much it’s a win/win because the city will be better off because we’ll have less people on health insurance which would ultimately save the city money.
Also, as far as their current compensation is concerned…they went into their job totally aware what the job paid. They still wanted it, if any of them feel underpaid they can step down and 5 people would run for their seat. Many people don’t take into consideration the very generous health insurance package…how many pt employees get health insurance like that??? The job at one time was volunteer, they should feel lucky getting roughly 10-30,000 for a pt job. Just say NO. Now, I don’t have to go tomorrow night, I said my peace.
@Tom: For Bruce Wang’s benefit, can you:
1. Estimate how many hours you spent putting charter reform on the ballot?
2. Tell us what it’s like being in pocket of “powerful real estate interests”?
LOL, gladly Greg lol
I’ll start with number 2….I don’t know any developers.
number 1. originally the LWV wasn’t for this issue. When we first started fighting for a charter commission the LWV had a committee that was researching the idea. They were open to it, but they don’t do anything without thoroughly researching the idea. So, maybe 8-10 people all started the process by gathering signatures. We all put in a lot of hours…hard to say exactly how many hours. The amount of signatures we needed was 15% of roughly 50,000 voters. So, we needed roughly 7500 signatures..I think the actual number was 7800 signatures. Of course there is a rule of thumb in the city is that you collect 50% more than you need, so our goal ultimately was roughly 11,000 signatures. I personally collected over 1000 signatures and I estimate that 20 signatures per hour, so on just collection of signatures roughly 50 hours. This was over several summers, as there was no deadline to turn in the signatures. The signature count was on a rolling basis, in other words, we can hand in 500 signatures and in about 2 days later we’d hear an update from the clerk saying that 375 out of the 500 were certified, etc. Then we decided to approach the league..we probably had roughly 2500 signatures all together. We did a presentation we came back for a discussion with them and eventually it led for them to get involved. At that point, we were comfortable that they would continue the work, They did a wonderful job in collecting and educating the public. At the time I had a local cable show on newtv, we did shows on the issue and had guests talking about charter reform. This wasn’t put together willy nilly. A lot of hard work went into this. This was an issue that the public supported for 40 years. If I had to put a number of hours I personally spent on it as a volunteer, probably close to 90-100. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was fairly overwhelming when your going through it. That doesn’t include all the phone calls and discussions, etc. That’s as close to a number as I can get. I hope this makes sense and it helps towards the discussion.
@Tom Sheff – well stated. Newton Citizens will be outraged if we start paying City Councilors close to 30K a year with benefits. Let’s cut the size of the City Council.
It’s the largest Municipal body in the State if not the Country. No one is saying they don’t work hard but as Tom stated it wasn’t that long ago that they weren’t compensated at all.
@Tom: Can you remind us all (especially Greg) if eliminating the Ward Councilor positions was part of your pitch in reducing the size of the Council? I don’t seem to recall that as part of your agenda.
No, my pitch was cut the size that’s it. Not really my pitch, it was the will of the people.
That being said, the people that opposed cutting the size of the council successfully worked at keeping the size the same. Now, some of you want more money (understandable), where is that money coming from?? What are the ramifications of your decision?? If we cut the size down to 16, we could argue for a 50% increase, the public wants to keep things the same. If you vote just a 5,000 increase times 24 councilors your looking at 120,000. Where is that money coming from?? Your tying the hands of the mayor during budget season. You got things to stay the same, so should salaries.
If your argument is 120,000 is a tiny portion of the budget I’d argue that every dollar of the budget gets spent every year so you are taking money away from departments. Give us a plan. If the Mayor came out and said I could find X dollars in cost savings lets give the board a raise, I’m all for that. BUT, your putting the cart before the horse and your spending money that may very well harm city services. But, who am I?????
AND Councilor Cote: The salary increase has everything to do with cutting the size of the council…everything.
Let’s put it this way. I’m fully aware that it was the LWVN that spearheaded the attack on ward councilors.
Since there seems to be such broad consensus that the city council size should get reduced, why not reduce it? One at large and one ward councilor for each ward seems to enjoy considerable support among Newton citizens. The obvious opponent is real estate interests. Who else would oppose it?
Bruce: For starters the charter commission opposed that. And other than owning their own homes, I’m not aware of any of the commissioners having the kind of “real estate interests” I’m pretty sure you’re alluding to.
Bruce – I’d far prefer 24 councilors with the current composition to 8 and 8 configuration. The promise of 8 and 8 was an 11th hour ploy by the sitting council and nothing more. As I’ve said before about a city council that I have great respect for – it was not its finest moment.
Come clean Tom and Jane: which developer paid you to have your opinions?
I would have liked an 8-4 configuration, where ward councilors represent 2 wards. ie, one ward councilor would represent wards 1 and 2. The next 3 and 4, etc. Then double the salary (to get back to the original post).
Let us not forget a really important issue that increasing salaries of Councilors adds to our pension liabilities. Yes, Councilors can qualify for city pensions and lifetime health benefits after 10 years of service. The BRC recommendations need to be rejected.
@Greg: It’s not that Tom or Jane received any compensation from developers, it was about who was funding the YES on Charter campaign. And don’t forget, there was a vote by the then, City Council to vote to reduce the council to an 8-8 membership, but the then, sitting Mayor, would not put it forward and then current Mayor, agreed.
But that was then and this is now. The focus should be on…should the recommendation of the Blue Ribbon Commission be accepted by this sitting City Council at this point in time. Again, I’ll refer to our current financial situation. IMHO – just not a good time to be seeking a raise.
@Peter: Yes.
@Amy: My sole point is that it is not accurate to suggest — as Bruce and others have — that the only people who supported the proposed charter did so because they were beholden to “real estate interests.” It’s just not accurate.
@ Greg Reibman – When you served on the BRC did the Commission analyze what effect raising Councilor’s salaries would have on future pension liabilities and health care costs?
If you take the value above of ~$30K/councilor, the councilors are currently costing us about 34 cents/resident/year each. The impact of their decisions and actions on our finances exceed that many many times over, for better or worse. Not raising compensation in line with inflation over time and limiting available candidates to those with resources doesn’t help our finances or decision making. Our President reportedly doesn’t take a salary. How’s that working out?
To the extent councilors participate in our employee pension and health care benefit programs, perhaps this yields an appearance of bit of a conflict of interest on how they might prioritize addressing/changing our practices in those areas. A fair (and higher) salary of equivalent total value without those benefits might decouple them from that issue/appearance.
With regard to the charter, the fact is the YES campaign was built on message that a smaller council would be better, and the the city council would never ever ever vote to downsize itself. Then the council did vote to downsize itself for the 1st time in history, and YES immediately turned out in droves to block this option from being PUT IN FRONT OF NEWTON RESIDENTS for a clean up or down vote. What wrong with 8-8 in their mind? It retains the local representation that ward councilors provide.
Background: http://www.newtondemocracy.org/news
Has this post pivoted to 8-8 talk?
I recommend folks take the time to read the main body of the report. But here’s an excerpt from page 19:
Also the pension rules are governed by state law. There is nothing the city can do to change those rules locally.
So just to correct an earlier comment–LWVN did not ‘spearhead an attack on Ward Councilors’…LWVN supported the recommendation of the Charter Commission. And I was at that meeting where Tom Sheff asked LWVN to get involved with collecting signatures for a Charter Commission. LWVN did say ‘no’ at first and then did a study (as is the League’s way) before joining in the signature drive.
No one denies that City Councilors spend a lot of time fulfilling their duties, and that if you did a dollars-per-hour analysis, they might not event make minimum wage. The issue for me, as a member of the Commission, was whether time or money were barriers to potential candidates, and what the City Council could control. My own personal opinion is that it is more an issue of time and less of money for people who are considering a run for office. It raises the bar when City Councilors talk about how much time they spend on the job, or that certain Councilors were ‘pretty much full-time’ city employees. Not many people can imaging carving out that much time if they have a job, family and other responsibilities. The City Council does have some control over how much work they take on and what they delegate to others, but they’ve chosen to do the work themselves. I would like to see the City Council work more on this issue before any increase in compensation.
I hope people come to the public hearing tonight!
@Greg Reibman. The State law you referenced indicates that through Councilors have to be “eligible” for benefits. Is there any stipulation that the City has to pay for those benefits? In the private sector employees are paying more for less (higher deductibles, etc). Also is there a way for moving forward to change the lifetime coverage for Councilors? I would guess most City employees are covered under union negotiated contracts but how are Councilors’ employee agreements set up?
I agree with @Sue Flicop I would like to see what duties can be transferred to City employee before compensation decisions are made. Some duties seem better suited for employees rather than elected officials from an efficiency stand point.
@Amy Sangiolo also agree that the timing of these raises is not good.
By all accounts, we’re in good economic times. Trying to figure out why the optics be bad at this point.
Limited time today, so a quick question: does the final report include a recommendation for a description of a city councilor’s typical responsibilities beyond what the charter requires?
No need to knock around the tired debate about the size of the City Council. Whatever its size, the compensation of our councilors represents a tiny part of city expenditures. Funding salaries of full-time city employees, especially of top administrators, pensions, health care, special education, public works: here lie the bulk of municipal expenditures. Many of them are contractual or fixed and difficult to control. But we are not a poor community, and our median income is well over six figures and climbing.
As for pensions: I remember that the percentage of salary that I contributed to the state pension plan climbed over the years, and justly so. Still, I’ve been told that the increases haven’t kept up with the costs.
As for special ed, almost a quarter of our education budget: much of what Newton does is mandated by the state or federal government, but their contribution, I am told, is inadequate. Generally speaking, improving the education of this population, in the long run, leads to more productive future citizens. It’s a wise investment.
As for health care: Europe’s health care networks cost less per capita and yield better health outcomes on average. Political posturing, sadly, prevents our country from both improving our health care and lessening its cost.
I could go on, but the blue ribbon commission’s analysis and recommendations are an important but modest piece of the bigger picture regarding the costs of city government.
Pension rules are set by the state–there’s pretty much no way for the City to change anything, other than paying people less than $5000 a year so they aren’t eligible. Yes, the proposed increase for the School Committee would put them in the ‘pension’ category, but it takes 10 years to vest and the SC term limit is 8 years. So…to be eligible, a SC member would need another two year term after a hiatus, or perhaps a move to the City Council, Mayor, or City employee (for at least 2 years).
One of our previous Mayors allowed elected officials to join the ‘full-time employee’ category–we never heard how far back it went, so it could have been Mayor Mann or maybe even before him. The Commission did investigate changing this so that City Councilors would no longer be considered full-time, but we were told by the City law office that if the Councilors could show that they worked 20 hours a week or more, they would automatically go into that category whether the Mayor designated them full-time or not. It seemed a pretty pointless avenue of pursuit.
The law office also advised us that any change to health benefits for elected officials would require a change in health benefits for all City employees. This led to two lines of thought–the first was that maybe everything should change along the lines of the Commission recommendation, and the second was that there might be a way to categorize elected officials as a separate category from other city employees without a required change for everyone. The Commission made a recommendation that would likely require one of these two things. This is what the Programs & Services Committee needs to consider–or reject.
I’m not at the city council hearing tonight about the BRC recommendations, but I’m getting reports that a number of councilors are advocating for significantly higher compensation for all elected officials over and above what the BRC recommended.
There will be another hearing on the issue September 4.
@Greg Reibman – Sorry I missed you at the Hearing this evening. I offered my comments for the record. Cut the Council size and then you can review salaries.
Just realized the optics of raising salaries with so many city contracts ending on August 31 aren’t great. Councilors should think about that. I have no problem with the raises themselves.