Public Participation

Transcript (~12 min @ 40:40)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 40:05 Speaker 1: okay good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is donald khan this is the special meeting of the board of aldermen for may 8 2017 called by mayor dolan could you please read the role ms o'shea alderman Boisselle here here alderman forbes here here alderman inferno here here alderman lemmerman here here alderman mccarty my gomas here here all the medeiros here here alderman mortimer here here alderman Tramontozzi here here alderman white here here alderman Zwirko here here president khan here here 11 present we have a quorum could everybody please Please rise and again join me in saluting the flag.

▶ 40:46 Speaker 1: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for

▶ 40:56 Speaker 1: which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Mr. President, I make a motion to open the floor for public participation. Alderman Mortimer moves that we commence public participation. Second. Second. Motion is seconded by Alderman Lemmerman. On the motion, all those in favor? anyone opposed motion passes this is the portion of our meeting where any member of the general public may come forward and speak on any matter that is on our

▶ 41:24 Speaker 1: agenda for this evening long time no see

▶ 41:33 Speaker 6: so that what that was a more general meeting responding to the mayor's

▶ 41:36 Speaker 2: statements I do want to reiterate in this setting in part this issue about

▶ 41:48 Speaker 2: the alderman being able to frame a decision around accurate information and you know the people who give you this budget they're smart people and so given

▶ 42:01 Speaker 2: that they're smart people I can't believe that they don't know how to use the munis accounting system and how to apply the care and thought to figuring out what the expenses are going to be for the next two months i think the budget that's presented here tonight is has a date on it is may 4th that would be so i would expect that to be the may 4th year-to-date charges are on there so if this if the mayor's office the people that do this can't project out accurately fairly accurately the actual what we expect fy17 funds to be then i can't believe they are doing it because they're not able to it appears they must be doing it because they don't want to and i don't think that they're lazy people either so i think that it's not that they just don't want to because they don't want to do the work it feels that there's a political motive to doing that and i want to be clear this isn't the first year this i've been here for year after year after year raising this issue that that projected amount is not an amount that you can use and in fact in other years the auditor has sat here at this table and said oh yeah pay no attention to that that's a meaningless thing doesn't mean anything well if it doesn't mean anything why put it in there the problem with the budget as it's presented to you is that it doesn't give you the information that you need to look at the historical figures about what the actual expenditures were year by year and to figure out what this year's projected expenses are likely to be in order to then extrapolate from the historical data what would be an appropriate thing for next year what i notice quite frequently is is that

▶ 43:45 Speaker 2: there's never a fiscal year besides the last one that's shown right now in this budget you're showing the fy16 actual fiscal year as it's presented to you you don't see fy15 there which might be a relevant column and you don't see any percent increases off of one and the other to know what your um you know historical increases might be based on inflation um there's a lot of columns around fy17 but they really don't relate to you i would much rather see one one spreadsheet One report showing the FY17 data and how it projects out to come out to the projected FY17. And then I would love to see, and this is how I do budgeting in my work, and then I take that as accurate as possible presentation of FY17 data in this case and to see that juxtaposed against FY14, FY15, FY16, this best guess at FY17, and then if fy18 doesn't flow naturally from those that there are notes in the budget as to what the exceptions or differences are on the historical as to why the fy18 doesn't flow

▶ 45:01 Speaker 2: naturally from them you know you all have conversations with the mayor you all have conversations with the city auditor who works for the mayor maybe you know the answers to this

▶ 45:13 Speaker 2: but i've never heard anybody here say it out loud in public

▶ 45:22 Speaker 2: and it feels to me a little bit disingenuous to be putting out all kinds of information that purports to be giving you some valid resource when it's really, in my view, a useless resource. I don't think anybody here knows why FY18 is what it is to base it on what the projected FY17 might be or the year to date FY 17 you don't need in this particular document I do want to

▶ 45:57 Speaker 2: support what mr. Lula said earlier that it's also a little bit suspect that the city with all the resources it has and all the munis accounting system it has

▶ 46:15 Speaker 2: chooses to put out a scan of the units budget that the citizens can't take into Excel import columns to be able to do work on themselves even if it wasn't in Excel or do anything with that's valuable and and and frankly it's not

▶ 46:32 Speaker 2: just the citizens you can't either unless unless the city auditor is giving you or the mayor has given you a different budget than what they give that you've put on your website for the public to access you can't do these things either you know it's sad that there is real good work that could be done to evaluate and analyze all the funds that are listed in that budget and how they've been applied to try to parse out some of the issues with them and do better at figuring them out as long as the city prevents you from having access to the data in a way that either you or if you don't even feel competent to do that or that's not your skill set let somebody else do it's hindering the

▶ 47:20 Speaker 2: process and again as I spoke about earlier I would hope that this year that we can find a way to to frame a better process that will help the city meet some of those goals the mayor said because revenue is always going to be tight you know there's not going to be any white knight from the state or federal government giving us anything we need to figure out things differently we need to and and you know frankly the mayor doesn't want he expressed that oh we've done all the cutting we can do well you say all the cutting we can do but you know we see every year that there are excess amounts budgeted for certain items that then show up in free cash and then the free cash is there for oh well the mayor overspent this so we want to apply the free cash to that and some of that's legitimate I don't I don't disagree with that but the mayor ends up making policy decisions through his use and end requests for free cash that I believe ought to be in this room with this board to decide in this budget process you

▶ 48:31 Speaker 2: don't have a just like you don't really have you know an opportunity here to micromanage the mayor's budget except to say well we're not going to fund this to fund that and you can't do that with the school committee's budget either but one of the things that i notice as in some ways a conflict of interest for the mayor is that the mayor sits here and tells the schools this is how much money you have tells the city well tells you this is how much i want for the city departments and by doing both sides the mayor can basically if he wanted to enlarge city government city side of the government way more and then say to the schools oh well this is all you got left and he can give his favorite department heads all the money in the world and reduce their hours all we want and make it this way and all you can say is well you know it's hard for you i want to be acknowledged it's hard for you to say in any of these line items oh we want to cut it right it's not a popular thing to do you feel like it at some level somebody's to challenge you and say that it's arbitrary what you do but at some level if you don't put a limit on the mayor's assertions the mayor is free to do more and more every year and i'm not saying whether he's right or wrong but he's establishing priorities that at some level i believe ought to be yours and so i would hope as you go through this budget process that you look carefully at the budget items you figure out what could be done differently you figure out you know your task now is really about numbers and and you're you're already behind the eight ball in a sense that you're constrained with what you can do because of the processes played out here year to date what you can do in this budget process as we go over the next few weeks is you can make it clear to the mayor's government of the city that you are going to challenge them on their premises why is this this way well why did you have the contracts this way you know the school contract is a huge thing the the school committee always acts oh we have to pay our contracts because they're they're what we have well they voted for those contracts and it's always I'm very sensitive to how they claim that oh well you know we're limited because our contracts and prices have gone way up well they should have known a year or two or three years ago when they approved the contract what the implications of that was going to be here for the rest of their budget you need to make even the school committee and the schools understand that their job needs to be done they can't just whine and complain that oh well it's out of our hands we can't do anything so we're going to cut some direct services to kids because we've inflated our budget the same as the mayor and anyway thank you for your time I look forward to engaging with you in this process as it goes forward I hope that everybody interprets my comments with the intentions that I have that I want the city to work better I want it to be more dynamic I want to find those solutions that the mayor thinks is the solutions the mayor feels are not in the room I believe they could be in the room today and that we could do something and I appreciate the opportunity you give for the citizens to engage with you here in this meeting I do very much I'm somebody who probably takes more advantage of it than many others but if you and the mayor truly want the citizens involved you do need to open the process up you do need to make the data available in the right formats for us to look at things so the the with the online capabilities here there's no reason why anybody in Melrose shouldn't be able to go and click on any one of those salaries and wages things and see every position not people every position under and what we're funding there is there is a huge capability allowed here and to say that this is the most transparent budget ever when it really is so limited in its transparency obviously we could all make a hundred public records requests and ask the city for this detail in that detail in that detail but isn't it kind of crazy the city doesn't respect and acknowledge that that goal or that usefulness at the beginning to make it public thank you for your time I hope to see that we can have a good accessible public document on the budget and that we can really engage in the details of it. Thank you again.

▶ 52:53 Peter D. Mortimer: Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Motion to close public participation, Mr. President.

▶ 52:57 Speaker 1: Second. Alderman Mortimer moves that we close public participation. Motion's been seconded by Alderman Zwirko. On the motion, all those in favor? Aye. Anyone opposed? Motion passes.