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Mayor Fiorentini's Monthly
Newsletter Hope is Back
When
I first addressed you a little over two years ago,
Haverhill faced an unprecedented fiscal crisis. We stood
on the verge of losing the accreditation for our high
school. Our
fire stations were closed, our library threatened with
closure, and the newspapers were filled with stories that
our city might become the first city in twenty-five years
to go into receivership. Two
years ago, we were a city where some people had lost all
hope for tomorrow. Our citizens spoke only about was what
we had lost — our hospital, our downtown, our radio
station, and our college in Bradford . Today,
we see a new and different Haverhill than we faced only
two years ago, and we face new and different challenges.
Today, we no longer speak of what we lost yesterday.
Today, Haverhill is alive, and people are daring to dream
of tomorrow. The
Haverhill renaissance is on its way, and Haverhill is
moving forward. This
renaissance in Haverhill did not just happen. It took a
great group of city employees, who worked harder and
longer to provide the public with service, even though
there are 55 fewer employees than there were three years
ago. It
took a great group of volunteers who make up our boards
and agencies. It took volunteers throughout the city who
stepped up to the plate and put in countless hours
helping our city in so many different ways—by
helping at City Hall, by volunteering in our schools, by
helping to plan our city and in so many other ways. Thank
you, all of you. It
took the City Council to vote to rezone downtown and to
loosen parking requirements. And, most of all, it took a
public that was willing to make sacrifices to keep our
city going. Thank you, all of you, for your sacrifices. Two
years ago, we outlined a new plan to expand our tax base.
We called it the Consumer Cities approach. Our strategy
was simple — if you make Haverhill livable, you
attract more people, and those people, in turn, will
attract more business. We
bought new street sweepers for downtown, and we worked
with a wonderful group of volunteers from Haverhill
’s Brightside to keep our city cleaner. We planted
the first trees in decades, and we brought in the first
disease-resistant elm trees in over half a century. Schools A
key part of improving our quality of life is to improve
public education. Last year, we worked with the School
Committee to become only the second city in the entire
state to institute mandatory summer school for our
students. We sent a clear message to our children —
if you don’t pass, we won’t give you a free
pass to the next grade. We
spent millions of dollars on the high school and reversed
decades of neglect to our middle and lower schools. This
year, for the first time in four decades, our children
will have fully equipped, state-of-the-art science labs.
We brought back the middle school band program, added
more teachers at the high school and tried to do a better
job of stressing the good points in our system. Then we
worked with our School Committee to hire a great new
superintendent of schools, and I want to recognize him
this evening — Dr. Raleigh Buchanan. This
coming year, we’ll work with Dr. Buchanan to
introduce some exciting new concepts in public education
— concepts that will put Haverhill at the cutting
edge of technology and the cutting edge of the best
concepts in education. We’ll work to make our high
school a virtual high school, one of only thirty such
virtual high schools in all of Massachusetts. Our
children will have the opportunity to take on-line
courses from throughout the world. We’ll tell you
more about this later. Then
we’ll work to make our high school an advanced
academy for math and science sometime within the next few
years. We’ll tell you more about this later this
year. When
our children graduate from school, they aren’t going
to be competing just with children from the Merrimack
Valley. They are going to be competing with children from
throughout the world. Our goal is to offer a world-class
curriculum and a world-class education so that our
children can compete with any child, anywhere in the
world. Rezoning To Attract New
Business To
attract new business and grow our tax base, we needed to
be innovative. When I spoke before you a year ago, I
asked the City Council to rezone some areas near
highways, to remove some regulatory barriers that
prevented large retail stores from coming to our city,
and to join with me in a 21st century retail strategy. Tonight,
we can report that this 21st century plan is working. For
over thirty years, retail stores have fled our city, and
little by little, we’ve lost our retail base.
Tonight, Lowes and BJ’s — the two largest
retail stores ever to locate within our city, have
announced they are coming to Haverhill . Starbucks is
going to follow and there are more on the way. Our
rezoning policy also worked downtown. Our anchor tenant,
the Beacon project, has broken ground, and the first ever
artists’ lofts are available for sale downtown. We
should rejoice in the fact that so many people are
starting to recognize what we have always known —
Haverhill is a great place to live and a great place to
work. Now our challenge is to manage this growth —
to mange the traffic that will surely increase, to
preserve our open space, and to keep our neighborhoods
livable as we move forward. The first step to controlling
growth is to push growth downtown, where we can control
it, and preserve space in the outer areas of our city. The Challenges Ahead Our
progress has been great, but the challenges we face are
also great. The Hale debt that preceded us, $7 million a
year, is still with us. This
year, we face an immediate budget deficit of nearly $4
million. This figure is misleading because it does not
include the real deficit in Haverhill. Our
real deficit is that we do not have the money to fix all
of your potholes, repair all of your schools, streets, or
take down all of the trees that need to come down. Our
financial problems threaten our renaissance — they
threaten our ability to provide people with the services
and schools they need to make this an attractive consumer
city. Our
challenge tonight is clear: how do we keep the vital
services that are so necessary to keeping the Haverhill
renaissance going? The
same spirit that has brought us this far can carry us
forward and help us to surmount the challenges ahead. The
root of our financial problems is simple—the rising
costs require us to spend more than we take in. Controlling Health
Insurance Costs This
year, healthcare premiums will increase by $2 million to
a total of $21 million. This year, we will pay more for
health insurance premiums than we will pay for the entire
Police Department, the entire Fire Department, and the
Hale debt, combined. The increase in health care costs
— $2 million — is more than all the revenues we
are getting for all of the new condominium projects
combined. If
it weren’t for this increase, we could add ten
additional policemen, 10 additional schoolteachers, 10
firefighters to open a station in Ayers Village, and
still have $200,000 left over. We’ve
made enormous strides in controlling health care costs.
We worked with our unions to combine five (5) health care
packages, and used our increased bargaining leverage to
negotiate a lower rate for our employees. Most
of our unions — but not all of them — agreed to
pay more for their health care in exchange for a cost of
living increase — and the remaining unions need to
join with us to move our city forward. With these
reforms, we were able to save hundreds of thousands of
dollars last year. But More Needs To Be Done.
Next
week, I will meet with our insurance advisory board and
ask them to work with me to achieve the next level of
health care reform. I’ll
ask them to fashion a program to allow our employees and
retirees to import prescription drugs from Canada and
save up to $200,000 per year. I’ll ask them to join
with me in coming up with a reformed health care plan
that is fair to our employees and that we can afford. Our
current plan — which my family and I have —
allows us to go to a doctor with a $5 co-pay. We pay
between 75% and 90% of the cost of health insurance for
our employees and retirees, and surely, if we could
afford to do so, we could continue on this path. But,
this path is a path that leads in only one direction
— to layoffs. I’ll
ask our advisory board and our unions to work with us
once again — this time to increase co-pays and
deductibles, provide bonuses to those employees who take
their spouse’s plan outside the city. I’ll also
ask them to devise programs for new employees that will
work with higher deductibles and co-pays, and work with
health care savings accounts, to provide health care
needs at a cost we can afford. Reorganization of City
Government Controlling
costs must start with health care costs, but it cannot
stop there. Two years ago, we instituted a government
reorganization plan that saved vital services and
streamlined government. This year, we will once again
recommend a reorganization of government to make our
government leaner, but not meaner. Our model should be
private industry — which for decades has used
automation and mechanization to constantly improve
efficiency and meet the challenges that face them. Our
challenge is to keep our city affordable and keep taxes
to a reasonable level. The best way to do that is to make
government more efficient. Increasing Revenues —
Selling Water and Waste Water Stabilizing
our finances has to start with controlling costs, but it
must go further. We also need to look under every rock
for new revenues. The
first stop should be our wastewater department. Our
wastewater treatment plant was built to accommodate over
100,000 people, and is expandable from there. We process
today the wastewater from the entire town of Groveland
and for State Line Plaza in Plaistow. We have the
potential to make millions of dollars in hook-up fees,
and hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring
revenues if we sell our services to groups outside our
city. We have enormous potential there—and it is
time we explored this option. URBAN VILLAGE APPROACH In
the long term, keeping the renaissance going means being
a city with a high quality of life that will attract
people to live here — a city with clean, safe
streets and excellent schools. Our
future lies in a Haverhill where people face the
waterfront rather than turn away from it and a city where
people once again live downtown. Our
future lies in being what planners call an urban village
— where people live, work and dine all in the same
area. To
make this happen, we need to take a fresh look at our
zoning laws. The
old model of zoning was used as a means of keeping
certain things out of certain neighborhoods. But zoning
can also be used as a tool to spark a revival and bring
business in. We know that rezoning works to attract
business because it’s worked here in Haverhill. Within
the next few months, we’ll present our urban
renaissance-zoning package to the City Council to remake
our downtown. Our new renaissance zoning will take a
portion of our downtown, and rezone it for housing as a
matter of right. We’ll
seek to become the first city in the state to take
advantage of the new housing incentive laws, general laws
chapter 40R. Our renaissance zoning will bring in up to
$400,000 in new state aid immediately, and give us a
chance to bring buildings in our downtown area back to
life. EXTENDING THE URBAN
VILLAGE TO MERRIMACK STREET Rezoning
has helped us make great progress on Locust Street and
Locke Street. Now it’s time to extend the Haverhill
renaissance to Merrimack Street. Make
no mistake about it — extending the Haverhill
renaissance to Merrimack Street is fraught with
challenges. Merrimack
Street could live again, but it will not be easy. Some
buildings on Merrimack Street have been vacant for
decades, and for good reason: parking and regulatory
barriers have made it difficult to put residences there.
We do not want to raise expectations beyond what we can
produce, or we set ourselves up for failure But the
greatest failure of them all is to fail to try. This
year, we’ll ask the City Council to allow for
housing as a matter or right on Merrimack Street. Then
we need to tackle the biggest problem, the problem of
parking. Now,
Merrimack Street has far more parking than Wingate
Street, but Wingate Street is booming and Merrimack
Street is not. We
have a parking garage on Merrimack Street that is almost
100% vacant at night — which we cannot afford to
clean, we cannot afford to adequately light, and we
cannot afford to repair. The
key to Merrimack Street isn’t to build more parking.
The key is to use the parking we already have to
encourage mixed-use buildings. If Merrimack Street is
going to be redeveloped, if we are going to extend the
renaissance to Merrimack Street, we need to allow
investors to lease spaces in the parking facility. We
need to examine every option, including leasing parking
spaces, selling the air space over the parking garage,
and even selling the parking garage, if we can make
certain the public interest is protected and there are
adequate public places left to park. The parking facility
on Merrimack Street could be the key to allowing
residences to return to Merrimack Street. We need to
explore that option. We
also need to turn our attention to our shopping centers.
Some of our shopping centers are worn and tired — in
need of the same renaissance that is taking place
downtown. Our
zoning laws should allow and encourage these shopping
centers to also become urban villages, where people can
live, walk and work in the same area. We should begin by
soliciting proposals from existing shopping center
owners, and we should rezone those areas for mixed use
development — to allow people to live over the
centers, and live, dine and work all in the same area.
New urbanism has worked throughout the country. It can
work here. Over
the past two years, we’ve made great progress in our
city. Our city is experiencing an unprecedented
revitalization. Where
retail stores have left our city for decades, today
Lowes, Starbucks and BJ’s are coming to Haverhill.
Where our shoe factories have been vacant for decades,
today they are living again as artists’ lofts and
new housing. Our anchor tenant, Beacon Company, has
broken ground and Forest City, the largest urban housing
developer in the country, is exploring turning several
old shoe shops into housing. Where
people turned their backs to the Merrimack for decades,
now they are turning towards the river and bringing in
boats, docks and marinas. This spring, with the help of a
grant secured by our congressional delegation, we will
begin testing to see if we can dredge the river. Where
we have complained for decades about parking, today we
have the largest ever grant ever given to our city, $7.6
million, to build a new parking facility downtown. Like
any community, we have our difficulties. But working
together this year as we worked together in the past
year, we will continue the renaissance that the Boston
Globe called the ‘picture of progress.’ Make
no mistake about it. The
Haverhill renaissance is moving forward, and in
Haverhill, hope is back. Thank
you. - Mayor Jim Fiorentini, To
read more about the New Urbanism concept of zoning and
Urban Villages, here are some links: http://www.newurbannews.com/AboutNewUrbanism.html. Urban
Villages links: http://www.commuterpage.com/ART/villages/linkvillage.htm. Another
article on urban
villages:http://wwwistp.murdoch.edu.au/teaching/istpline/studygds/S455/Week%207.html.
Good
book on Urban Villages: City Comforts: How to Build an
Urban Village, Revised Edition (Paperback) with a preface
by one of my heroes, Jane Jacobs. *Send your questions comments to ValleyPatriot@aol.com |
Good evening and thank you for
listening. I want to start by thanking the City Council
for their hard work, and I particularly want to thank the
public for the great honor and privilege of serving you
as your mayor.