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Ready, Se, Go Override!
Ready? Look at how the mayor outlines our blessings. Big box retail on the highway and a housing boom downtown. It’s another word for growth. But what is the first measurable impact of growth? The mayor announced that we don’t have enough water. We’ll have to tap the river and, of course, that’s going to cost us more for each glass of water we drink. So the strategy to conquer the curse, namely growth, ends up compounding it. Set! Not enough water is just the start. Soon, the schools will be bursting at the seams (after we’ve sold or leased several school buildings). Soon, our intersections will be clogged and we won’t have enough money to redesign them. Soon, our open space will diminish because we won’t have the funds to preserve it. Soon, our public safety forces (police, fire and highway) will be stretched to the breaking point and we’ll all have to pony up so as to hold on to our quality of life. It’s a set-up for an override. But it’s a bad set-up. I admit, I promoted growth. But we did it within existing infrastructure. By the late ‘90s we knew we were at saturation point. I appointed a growth control task force, headed by John Guerin and George Dekeon. It sent to the City Council, and, it approved, major restrictions on growth as well as watershed protections. Now, thousands of new housing units are planned while restrictions are lifted. Without proper controls, they are the curse not the blessing. True, Proposition 2 1/2 allows for growth to pay for itself. But that’s when it occurs without major expansion of the existing infrastructure. So, what we should do is limit growth to the capacity of the existing infrastructure. That is the one and only way in which growth will be a blessing which reduces the curse of the Hale debt. If we did this, then each year the city could apply at least three million extra dollars (allowable under Prop. 2 1/2) so as to meet its increased costs. Outside of that, its sole focus should be to whittle down the Hale debt with annual revenues or cost reductions, rather than simply selling off land. How could we come up with an extra seven million dollars without an override? First, by the mayor’s own admission, the city has already absorbed three million of it. For this year we have a four million dollar deficit, not a seven million dollar one. This was achieved by several factors. The most prominent are: the taxes paid by the old Hale and Glynn now that they and spin-off industries are private and thriving (about one million); the excess capacity we had in the tax levy in 2001 (about 1.2 million); a major reduction in the city workforce since 2002 (savings of about 2 million); and the adoption of a single payer medical plan (about 600 thousand). The irony is that all of these were contemplated in 2001 and accomplished under Mayor Guerin. The further irony is that all of the above amount to almost four million dollars of annualized new revenues or cost reductions, and, still against an alleged seven million dollar debt we now have a four million dollar deficit. When I learned arithmetic, 7 take away 4 equaled 3. What this means is that in spite of all the land he sold, in spite of all the increased state aid Rep. Dempsey and Sen. Baddour got us, our current mayor is losing ground when he should be gaining it. The mayor will point to increased health care costs, but it was he who campaigned on the promise to reduce the city’s contribution from 90% to 75%. He hasn’t done it. He’ll be pictured on new street sweepers, but he hasn’t yet come up with a plan to pay for needed improvements in the downtown. Team Haverhill has the right idea; let’s increase commercial growth downtown. But by the time that pays off, most of the Hale debt will be gone. So we’re in a tailspin, or should I say “Hale Spin” to an override because we’re relying on uncontrolled growth when we should be managing it. And, when we should be running the city on allowable increases under Prop. 2 1/2 only, while we’re all focused on the successful new ways we’ve already and can further reduce the Hale debt, instead we are being set up to use that debt as an excuse for an override that will simply pay for uncontrolled new growth. Instead of counting our blessings, we’re mixing our curses. Jim Rurak is a professor
at Boston College and is the former mayor of Haverhill.
Email your comments or questions to Jim Rurak at JARandKAS@comcast.net *Send your questions comments to ValleyPatriot@aol.com |
The mayor’s state-of-the-city
address is really a masked call for an override. The
problem is that it is his policies, not the
“curse” he outlines, which lead us to this
brink.