Last week, Mayor Domenic Sarno took a hard swing at city councilors for cuts they’d made to his fiscal 2012 budget. This week, the councilors swung back, holding a press conference where they defended their cuts as fiscally responsible.
They also invited Sarno to attend the next meeting of the Council’s Finance Committee to discuss the budget—an invitation the mayor declined, saying he’s got tornado-relief work to do. (Sarno will send members of his finance team, however, according to the Springfield Republican.)
The councilors’ press conference—and, indeed, their decision to cut about $2.7 million from the mayor’s budget—highlights the increasing sense of Sarno’s isolation from the Council. Interestingly, the four councilors who attended the Thursday 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). Instead, 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 historically has been perhaps 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 their current pay of $13,050 to $14,500 (their previous salary, before they took a pay cut a few years back). Last week, 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. Councilors have retorted that it was the mayor, not them, who included the raise in his proposed budget.
That’s a fair-enough argument—to a point. By law, the Council cannot add to the mayor’s budget, only cut from it. That means that the councilors couldn’t propose giving themselves a raise—but they could have excised their pay raise from Sarno’s spending plan, just as they made the other $2.7 million in cuts. While that would not have made a huge difference in the city’s fiscal health—the savings would have amounted to $18,850, out of a total budget of $542 million—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.
