| The Other Emerging Framingham Infrastructure Crisis: Staffing | May 22, 2023 |
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| Geoff Epstein | Framingham Patch |
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Staff shortages are emerging in DPW and the schools, driven by the city shortfall in property tax revenue.
This is National Public Works Week, which is observed in the third full week of May 'to recognize the importance of public works in an organized society'. In the last City Council meeting on May 16th, 2023, the Framingham Department of Public Works (DPW) was recognized by the Mayor reading out a Proclamation, signed by the Mayor and each City Council member: The Proclamation rightly recognized how important our DPW staff are for maintaining our roads, buildings, water & sewer system, plowing snow covered streets, collecting trash and recyclables, and so on. We should salute them, as they are doing a remarkable job, made incredibly difficult by the severe underfunding of their operations by the city. They are the true heroes in a city which heaps praise on them, as it systematically diverts their funding to deliver property tax breaks which favor the well off. That diversion not only reduces the materials they use in their operations, but is now having a very significant effect in reducing DPW staff available to do the work. The city has 74 staff vacancies currently, with 40 in DPW, and the City Council Finance Subcommittee is hard at work, not trying to raise compensation so those vacancies can be filled, but aiming to reduce funding for those positions, as 'they likely won't be filled'. It is trying to cement the downsizing of our DPW workforce. A key document in assessing the vacancy problem is: Find out what's happening in Framinghamwith free, real-time updates from Patch. which shows, highlighted in yellow, the large personnel gaps in highway maintenance and water & sewer maintenance. Highway maintenance is missing a supervisor and 10 heavy/medium equipment operators, out of the 20 or so equipment operators we need, so they are at 50% strength. Sewer system maintenance is missing a project manager, 2 supervisors, 3 wastewater technicians and 5 heavy/medium equipment operators. Water system maintenance is missing a project manager, 2 backflow/meter technicians, 1 pump station technician, 2 medium equipment operators and 3 water technicians. Both the water & sewer departments have 20-25% of their key working staff missing. So, we don't just have a $94 million road maintenance backlog, and a $90 million school roof replacement backlog and $200 million water & sewer backlog, we have critical staffing shortages in the very city departments which are supposed to work on those backlogs. By taxing consistently below the levy limit, under relentless pressure from the King/Cannon faction on the City Council, the city has lost $40 million/year in revenue, and not only is it growing a huge infrastructure deficit, and drawing a bond downgrade warning from Moody's, but it is eroding the city's basic staffing infrastructure by keeping staff compensation low. Turning to the schools, the same problem is quite evident. We have already seen the problems with low pay for school bus drivers, which almost triggered a chaotic strike, and which could have been fixed at the start of the year by boosting driver pay from $29/hour to $34/hour. But there are further problems, with a chronic shortage of classroom aides who support our special needs students and non-English speaking Hispanic/Latino students. Last year there were more than 100 aide vacancies but when the School Committee negotiated the aides' contract, they stuck with a 2% inflation increase, and did nothing to boost aide pay to fix the shortage. This stands in stark contrast to the state, which also faced a chronic shortage in staff supporting special needs facilities which support our highest needs students out of district. Normally, the rates for those services rise by about 2% annually, but this year the state boosted them by 14% to raise staff compensation and solve the staff shortage problem. Framingham could have done something similar for its classroom aides, but the lack of city property tax revenue has forced all contracts to restrict annual inflation raises to 2%. So, hundreds of students are suffering silently every day in the Framingham Public Schools (FPS), for lack of aide support. There was Chapter 70 state aid designed to fix that problem. It would take about $2 million/year to boost aide pay by 15-20%, but all that money went to replace school roofs. Probably, the biggest staffing problem FPS will encounter is when it attempts to expand pre-K education capacity beyond the 300 students handled by Juniper Hill School with the BLOCKS program. That current program costs about $3.8 million/year, so expanding it to 900 to educate all 4-year-olds in our city, where their numbers are rising, would cost an additional $7.6 million/year. Framingham had that money with the large increase in Chapter 70 state aid, but again all that money went to school roof replacements. The irony is that the city wants to get state funding to support building a new southside school: an elementary school + pre-K complex, but the submission to the state will fail because when the state checks the educational program, which they always do, Framingham will have to confess that it won't have the money to staff the pre-K expansion. Failure is guaranteed. Pre-K expansion is a pipe dream, torpedoed by city mismanagement of its property tax revenue stream. That is a big staffing problem. Overall, almost all of the financial, infrastructure and staffing problems of the city have been caused by refusing to recognize that when the city increases property tax revenue each year by less than inflation, the buying power of the city steadily erodes over time. That means reserves get depleted, borrowing increases, debt service goes up and staff compensation becomes uncompetitive. We currently have lost $40 million/year by taxing below the levy limit. The King/Cannon property tax approach is an experiment designed to find out how much city property tax revenue can be choked off before something breaks. Of course, we should not forget that George King was town manager from 1999-2005, in the run up to the worst water & sewer system failure in Framingham's history, with 50 sewage overflows in 2007 when the state stepped in and forced Framingham to spend money on its infrastructure. It seems that we are destined to relive a variant of that scenario. This time it won't be just the water & sewer system. It will also include the roads, school roofs, and the education system. And the reputational damage to Framingham will be immense. For details on road maintenance, see: For details on school roof replacements, see: For details on the shift of $10 million/year in education funding to replace school roofs, see: |
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