Springfield’s municipal budget for fiscal 2012—a $542.2 million affair—has long since been finalized and sent off to the state bean counters. But the political aftershocks of the budget process? Well, they’re still reverberating around City Hall.
The drama began late last month when the City Council did something that, sadly, felt almost historic: it made some cuts to the proposed budget sent to it by Mayor Domenic Sarno.
By law, the budget is drafted by the mayor and his financial team, then sent to the city councilors, who can make cuts to the spending plan but cannot add items. Traditionally, the Council has shown little inclination to exercise that power, which perhaps made it all the more surprising—not to mention vexing to Sarno—when the Council this year voted to cut about $2.7 million from the mayor’s budget.
Those cuts included an across-the-board five percent cut to the non-salary accounts of all city departments. Councilors also cut police overtime, eliminated a number of funded but unfilled positions, and took $100,000 from the Finance Department (a favorite target of some councilors, who are prone to complain about the high salaries paid in that department). They also killed the CitiStat department, which was created four years ago by that other bane of many councilors—the since-dissolved Finance Control Board—to improve government efficiency.
Sarno responded with a press conference chastising the Council for its cuts and outlining what he described as the effects that would be felt by the public (to be understood: voting public). Those effects include reductions in street maintenance work, cuts to the Police Department budget for “crime prevention supplies,” and a number of layoffs, including the CitiStat staffers and police cadets.
“Unfortunately, the Council did not allow the administration or the department heads to discuss the ramifications of the cuts that were voted on nor were we made aware of the cuts prior to the meeting to be able to speak to the impacts,” chided a public letter signed by Sarno and Lee Erdmann, the city’s chief finance officer.
Last week, a group of councilors held their own press conference, where they defended the budget cuts and invited Sarno to attend a meeting of the Council’s Finance Committee this week to hash things over. The mayor declined the invitation, saying he’s got tornado relief work to do, although he will send Finance Department staffers.
With the budget already submitted to the state—and, indeed, in effect as of July 1—the battle between the mayor and councilors really doesn’t amount to much more than election-year posturing at this point.
It does, however, highlight the increasing sense of Sarno’s isolation from the Council. Interestingly, the four councilors who attended last week’s press conference did not include the mayor’s most vociferous critics (such as veteran at-large Councilor Tim Rooke, or Council President Jose Tosado, who is running for mayor this November). Rather, it included councilors who’ve had largely peaceful relationships with the mayor—Ward 2 Councilor Michael Fenton, Ward 7’s Tim Allen—as well as at-large Councilor Kateri Walsh, who, after the 2009 retirement of Bill Foley, has been Sarno’s strongest ally on the Council. (That relationship perhaps began to fray this spring, when Walsh’s husband, Dan Walsh, abruptly retired from his job as City Hall’s long-time director of veterans’ services, after a former employee filed a complaint about him with the Mass. Commission Against Discrimination. Dan Walsh told the media he was retiring for health reasons, not because of the complaint. MCAD has yet to issue any findings in the case.)
Perhaps the most entertaining part of the battle between Sarno and the councilors concerns one particularly sticky aspect of the budget: a raise for the city councilors from $13,050 to $14,500 (their previous salary, before they took a pay cut a few years back). While Sarno slammed the councilors for approving a raise for themselves at the same time that city employees are being laid off or asked to take unpaid furlough days, the councilors retorted that it was the mayor, not they, who included the raise in his proposed budget.
That’s a fair enough argument—to a point. Because it’s the mayor’s job to draft the budget, the councilors did not, in fact, propose giving themselves a raise. But neither did they eliminate the pay raise from Sarno’s spending plan, though they cut the $2.7 million in other expenditures. While that would not have made a huge difference in the city’s fiscal health—the savings would have amounted to $18,850, or .0034 percent of the total budget—it would have saved the councilors a good deal of political grief, especially come election time this fall. Indeed, it raises the question of whether Sarno put the raise in the budget as a bit of a political trap for the councilors, who took the bait.
