Somerville’s City Council approved next year’s budget on Thursday, funding the city from July through June, by a vote of 9-2, with a $394 million spending plan. The Finance committee met a half-dozen times this month, going department by department in more than 17 hours of occasionally spicy deliberation.
In the end, nobody proposed cuts, and everybody except councilors Kristen Strezo and JT Scott voted in favor, which meant that mayor Jake Wilson’s first budget was approved almost exactly as he submitted it. These “no” votes were symbolic, given that a majority of the council said ahead of time that it intended to vote in favor: Strezo said she could not support a budget that failed to give the schools all the resources requested by the School Committee. Scott said the budget “failed to meet the moment” by increasing funding for armed policing while laying off staff and cutting services.
Several councilors did introduce resolutions Thursday. These are nonbinding statements that express the council’s opinion. Will Mbah called on the mayor to restore funding for the department of Racial and Social Justice, which was gutted and rebranded as a department of “Equity and Belonging.” Jon Link asked that dedicated funding for the Teen Empowerment program be restored. Strezo asked for a modest amount of money for after-school programs to give kids something to do when schools let out early on Wednesdays. She also asked for a tiny pay increase for members of the Licensing Commission.
Scott likened all of these requests to “wishes whispered to Santa while sitting in his lap at the mall,” while going ahead and voting in favor of each. None of this was acknowledged in the amended budget submitted by the mayor’s team Thursday, which amounted to trivial accounting adjustments.
Perhaps Santa will be more generous in the fall, once the council returns from its summer recess. The budget process is conservative by design. Staff make deliberately minimal estimates of revenue to avoid the city being caught short. Most years, we accumulate a surplus that can either be used via “midyear appropriations” or else stashed in stabilization funds that carry forward into the following year. These end-of-year transfers are actually really important. Under state law, any funds that are unused and unallocated will reduce the city’s tax levy for the next year.
That’s why, after approving a horribly constrained budget, the council went on to dish out a bit over $12 million in “free cash.”
- $7.2 million to reduce next year’s street repair bond
- $1.6 million to reduce a deficit in the snow removal budget
- $1.2 million to the “other postemployment benefits” trust fund
- $1 million to the salary and wage stabilization fund, mostly to fund lump-sum payouts when union contracts are approved.
- $550,000 for traffic safety improvements
- Just under $380,000 for costs associated with the purchase of the new fire station at Assembly Square
- $250,000 to cover current-year overruns in unemployment compensation
A person could be forgiven a bit of confusion at this point. The entire budget process, including the layoffs, was predicated on the idea that the city is short of money; budget season arrived with a warning that the city would be more than $5 million in the red. Somehow, we also had a bit over double the stated budget shortage sitting around in an account that literally has the word “free” in its name. It’s like the decision to spend $14 million to pay down debt while also running layoffs that netted perhaps $2 million in salaries and absolutely going to the mat over $600,000 for the schools: I understand the math, but it still leaves me cold.
One question going into the council’s customary summer break is the fate of the state grant to buy body-worn cameras for the police. The council has slow rolled approval of the grant pending approval of a surveillance oversight report describing in detail how the cameras are to be used and who has access to the data. The mayor submitted a memo Thursday urging the council to accept the money under a good-faith assumption that the relevant concerns will be addressed. He even threatened to cancel recess, saying he “would be happy to call a special meeting of the City Council in July to facilitate a public hearing and any additional deliberation needed on the items.”
In any event, we’ve got a budget.
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