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Mayoral roundup: City workers
By adamg on Mon, 04/13/2009 - 3:27pm
Michael Flaherty proposes that city workers who haven't already agreed to wage freezes work an unpaid day once a every other month for the next twelve months. He says this would save the city almost $20 million a year, or enough to pay for the costs of unemployment and health benefits for all the workers the city plans to lay off.
Meanwhile, Kevin McCrea says this wouldn't be necessary if it weren't for 165 new city workers he says Menino has hired over the past year.
What? Jonathan Papelbon is endorsing Flaherty? Does the Papelbot even know there's an election this year?
A New Season For Boston from Michael Flaherty on Vimeo.
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Comments
Cost vs Benefit
how much did this stunt cost? someone told me because of WEEI licensing (I think it is WEEI that issues the "official K signs)those K signs weren't allowed inside Fenway.
Regardless, it's campaign
Regardless, it's campaign money anyway. I think it was a creative way to get his message out.
Convicts/Confiscated
I was at openning day and it seemed like he picked up 5 guys from a halfway house in southie and gave them a hot meal in exchange for passing out signs. I would doubt that the lasting impression of delinquents and stacks of confiscated signs at each gate was what Flaherty was going for. Maybe it was a good idea if better thought out and operated by different people.
Unnecessary layoffs?
Councilor Flaherty's proposal seeks to avoid "unnecessary layoffs" and is interesting if you can talk everyone into a voluntary 4% pay cut :-) - but also completely ignores an inconvenient truth pointed out in a McCrea blog several months ago - the city has hired over 1200 additional employees just in the past 5 years - I think about 200 are teachers and maybe 100-150 are cops which are hard to argue against, but that still leaves almost 900 new "other" employees including the 165 the city ADDED last year (about 60 new custodial positions just in the schools?!) despite predicting a $33 million deficit for 2010 (did councilors Flaherty and Yoon miss this during the budget process and over the past year!?).
This in a city with essentially zero population growth and a school district that shrinks by about 500-600 kids every year and will continue to do so for at least the next 4 years (the extra teachers were necessary to get us up to "average" for the state = about a 12.5-1 student teacher ratio).
Somebody in this city has to start making some hard decisions - we have about 250,000 households in the city - but the city, including external funds, the BRA and BHA - employs about 20,000 people - or almost 10% of the households in the city!
City may be overstaffed but ...
Assuming that it is based on the percentage of households who work for the city isn't a fair metric because the city's "population" explodes on weekdays.
If we didn't have all those pesky downtown office buildings, we could have much smaller police, fire and public-works departments.
yeah but if it werent for
yeah but if it werent for all those pesky businesses there would be far less of a tax base, ya know? besides in my neighborhood the biggest demand on the fire dept is the ten times a day they are called to the jewish elderly housing. when i work downtown things seem neat and orderly and emergency vehicles seem pretty quiet.
anonymousonthecelly has a good point
Commercial property pays 60% of the property tax (and about 37% of the total operating budget). If you break it down about 90% or more of the city employees would probably still be needed if we had no commuters coming into the city. Over half of the city's employees work just in the school department alone.