I see Jasper is still at it…
Some interesting dynamics between the councilors at last night's meeting… a bunch of them have clearly had it with Councilor Lapienski (P7), and understandably so.
The guy seems to take pride and delight in his poorly-thought-out gadfly antics, and does himself no favors by random accusations of bias and corruption against the other members of the council.
Throughout the evening, he repeatedly called for roll-call votes, needlessly drawing out the already lengthy proceedings. Then when called out on it, he said "You just don't want your vote in the record."
He also seems to have a tendency to not attend subcommittee meetings or read the materials and then snidely ask questions and raise issues that have already been addressed.
2023-05-18
The City Council has closed the gap for the schools in the Mayor's FY24 operating budget. What comes next?
As of about 9:30 last night--after nearly nine hours of debate over two evenings, plus countless hours of committee meetings beforehand--the City Council voted to scrape ~$1.1M out of various line items in the Mayor's FY24 operating budget and put that money back into the school budget
With the addition of ~$300k and change that the Mayor came up with, that fills the $1.5M gap between what the superintendent and the School Cmte asked for and what the Mayor requested.
The final vote was unanimous and most of the councilors mentioned in their remarks immediately preceding the final vote that this decision reflected the clear and overwhelming will of the community. Councilor Bullock (P5) mentioned that she had received over 300 emails calling to fully fund the school budget, a record for her.
Multiple councilors mentioned during the discussions and debate that these are all trade-offs and that we are taking calculated risks to prioritize funding the schools. Several councilors also noted that broader funding concerns remain--especially next year as various grant sources dry up--and that the community needs to work with the state to adjust the funding formulas.
Another thread that surfaced late in the discussion was around the request originally put forward by the superintendent--that it had already had a number of items cut out of it--and also that the City Council had received no capital requests from the school department. By law, the Council can only cut money from the budget or move it around within the budget; they cannot add any money to the budget. That would need to be requested via a financial order from the mayor.
At one point, Council President Dan Guin (At-Large) pressed the superintendent on something she had said at a previous presentation about how she could probably cut another $625k out of the school budget request "without impact." He was clearly trying to look for ways the Council could reduce the amount of money they were pulling from other parts of the budget to fund the schools.
What became clear in the back-and-forth that ensued was that the phrase "without impact" did not mean that there was $625k of fluff in the budget. It meant that the schools could not fill a number of open positions (backfills for retirements) and understaff a number of elective classes with via staff rotation and a juggling of schedules.
It seems like years of underfunding by the city have left our school department with a bare-minimum, "We'll figure out some way to get by" mindset. It's understandable, given the conditions under which they have had to operate, and I don't mean to criticize them; they're doing the best they can, given the circumstances. What is clear is that it is now on the community to figure out how to change those circumstances.
2023-05-19
This seems like a problem.
Given that we have been in budget season for a couple of months now, I guess I would expect that all of the FY24 budget documentation that has been under discussion by the School Committee, the Mayor's office, the City Council, and the Ways & Means Committee would be posted here.
What is the city's social media policy? It is not clear there is one.
Out of curiosity, I emailed the Mayor's office a few days ago asking what the city's social media policy is for employees and departments. While they responded quickly, what I received was a list of city social media accounts and a PDF of the Greenfield Police Department's social media policy. The latter was created in 2011 and last updated in 2017.
The inventory of city accounts is helpful, I guess, but not really what I was asking for. As for the police department's policy, it is fairly boiler-plate.
The whole reason I asked about the policy is that the GPD routinely posts on Facebook, and many of the posts seem to at least skirt the limits of what is acceptable. During the recent controversy over the racial discrimination lawsuit against the Chief of Police and the city, as well as the budget fights with the City Council, the GPD has routinely shared articles that seem to be advocating for their own positions and advantage.
Furthermore, the department seems to do no moderation at all of the obnoxious trolls that frequent these posts. Worse still, they routinely respond aggressively to critics—private citizens—in the comment threads of their own posts and those of others.
Coming from the corporate/business world, my expectation was that the city would have a general policy regarding what departments have social media accounts, which employees are responsible for maintaining those accounts, and what sort of content and behavior is appropriate. It is surprising that there seems to be no such policy, and that the only policy of any kind at all is the one that the police department created for itself.
Even assuming good intentions—which, given what has been going on with the GPD the last few years, is a stretch—allowing any department to set its own social media policy seems like maybe not the best idea. If this department is also responsible for monitoring and enforcing the policy, that seems like an even worse idea. Given the state the GPD's Facebook page and posts, it seems to be working out just about as badly as I would expect.
So I guess my questions for the mayor's office would be whether she thinks that this situation is fine, or whether there any plans to update the policy so that there is some 1) an overall policy for all city departments, 2) vetting and monitoring of of posts by city departments and employees (in their public roles), and 3) what the process is for moderating the comments and discussions on posts from the city-controlled social media accounts.
I guess El Greco is for sale.
2023-05-20
The obscurity and complexity of municipal government
Thinking about the budget debates over the last few months and the uptick in public engagement, I feel like a big part of what is challenging for folks about these sorts of municipal issues is how opaque the whole process is.
Some of that may be by design, but I tend to think it is largely structural, a combination of arcane process—often the result of good intentions with unintended consequences—and a lot of very technical finance and accounting practices and terminology that all seems weird, sketchy, and possibly unnecessary if you're unfamiliar with it.
People show up to these meetings because they have heard something important is going to be discussed—like the school budget—and they want to get involved and have their say. But then they are immediately confronted with this very formal proceeding governed by an inscrutable set of rules that seem arbitrary. Sure, they can take three minutes to make a public comment, but they have to get up in front of a whole room full of people to do it and no one will respond to them.
Then the councilors spend the next few hours talking amongst themselves, and if you're not familiar with Roberts Rules Of Order, the whole thing seems artificial and complicated. Motions and seconds and calling of the question and are we voting on the motion or on the amendment… on and on. It is made even worse by rules about first readings and second readings and public hearings, with councilors reading complicated legislative language off the page after page in a monotone.
And all of that comes before we even get to the financial business of revolving funds and stabilization funds, free cash and capital expenditures v. operating budgets, and what MGL says you can do with this part of the budget versus that part of the budget. It sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to the uninitiated, and even the people discussing it get confused.
It's no wonder that the public watching all of this assumes something dodgy is afoot and that everyone involved is trying to pull something over on them.
Don't get me wrong—all of this stuff is in place for reasons, and mostly good reasons. You need something like Roberts Rules to organize these sorts of proceedings or else they descend into chaos, and Open Meeting Law requires everything to be stated explicitly and repeatedly on the record precisely so that the public has access to these conversations.
I'm not sure I have a good answer for or solution to this problem. Municipal government and finance largely fall into my "Complicated things are complicated" bucket. There is probably not much that can be done to make them less complicated that will not also have unintended consequences, consequences which would likely be worse than the problems we are trying to solve.
That said, I do think public bodies like the City Council and the School Committee could do a better job of helping the public understand why these processes work the way that they do, and the Mayor's office could do the same regarding the finances. I think when you're in the weeds of this kind of stuff all day every day, there can be a tendency to forget that none of it makes any sense to people who don't have to deal with it all of the time.
But then that brings us back around to the fact that Greenfield is a relatively small city with limited resources. While the Mayor and her staff are paid, none of the members of the City Council or the School Committee are, and most of the city departments are stretched pretty thin doing their actual jobs. Unfortunately, communications is one of the things that tends to fall by the wayside.