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davis_squareDisclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of any agency of the City of Somerville or its employees.
First off, I’d like to say that it’s wonderful to see so many people expressing interest in preserving and improving the West Branch Library. It’s also great news that the City and its firefighters have hammered out an agreement that will avoid the need to make citywide layoffs and wide-ranging service cuts to pay retroactive firefighter compensation.
But over the past couple of days, I have encountered some major misconceptions about this episode – some of which have been actively promulgated by Alderman Gewirtz – and I just can’t sit silent any longer.
To begin with, it’s important to understand the constraints the City faced under the Joint Labor Management Committee process. As was widely reported in the news media, the City was ordered by the JLMC to fund a payment of $4.3 million to the firefighters. The City had to come up with the necessary funding more than half-way into the fiscal year—using monies that were already spoken for in a very lean budget. The Mayor was required by law to submit an appropriation and support the award. He couldn’t publicly comment or express a negative opinion.
The appropriation and payment plan he put together (in consultation with his financial team and city department heads) required some very difficult decisions. Layoffs would be necessary; services would be cut. The challenge, as always in these situations, was to minimize the impacts and spread them across the whole of city government . That was the context for the decision to focus the library’s share of the burden on the West Branch, which is the City’s least-used library facility.
But the West Branch Library was not the only city facility or service in which cuts would have been made if the City had been obligated to go through with funding the original JLMC firefighter award. Budget transfers and layoffs would also have resulted in the closure of the city’s two police substations and the Lowell Street fire station (which, like the West Branch Library, was the least-busy facility of its type). Layoffs would have also occurred in almost every city department – including the Mayor’s Office. Thirty-one critical positions including community police officers would have been eliminated.
So it was disingenuous and misleading of Alderman Gewirtz to ignore that larger picture and to make this all about the West Branch Library.
It was also flat-out wrong of her to allege, as she did in her email message of January 17th, that “there [was] a solution. At the BOA meeting on the 12th, the president of the firefighter union offered to make a concession, and have the award paid out over two years. This could potentially prevent the city from having to make these sorts of layoffs or the closing of the library.” Aside from the fact that she was taking the firefighters budget analysis as completely accurate and implying that the mayor was misrepresenting the city’s finances, Alderman Gewirtz was suggesting that paying the same amount of money in six months’ time would magically eliminate the need to find further economies in the city budget.
I know that all of the folks who wrote or called the Mayor were sincere in their desire to protect the West Branch Library – but I also know that, well before the first call was made or email sent, Mayor Curtatone and union negotiators were already working to resolve their differences and find a genuine solution.
That solution came not as a result of a 48-hour campaign to “save the library” but because the Mayor never gave up trying to find a larger compromise that both the City and the union could live with.
I hope folks stay active in working to support the West Branch Library. The energy generated by Alderman Gewirtz’s call to action is wholesome and helpful. But it didn’t have anything to do with resolving this dispute. There is simply no evidence for Alderman Gewirtz to claim, as she did last night, that pro-library lobbying “had a very important role in this.”
The resolution to this situation was not about saving the West Branch Library – and it certainly wasn’t about Alderman Gewirtz’s newsletter. The key factors in resolving this fiscal challenge were the Mayor’s willingness to make tough decisions and be held accountable for them, combined with the union’s recognition of the true fiscal implications of the JLMC award. When those two factors came together, the union reached out to the Mayor to find a way, as union President Jay Colbert said, to “maintain the integrity of the arbitration award, while addressing the concerns of the city.”
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Date: 2012-01-20 08:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 10:18 pm (UTC)- Mayor isn't allowed to actually oppose the award himself, so he does the next best thing: makes a proposal to the BOA that is guaranteed to raise loud public protest
- This puts pressure on the firefighters' union to be more reasonable or else risk the wrath of the West Branch Library-going public
- Alderman Gewirtz, whose ward contains the threatened library, does exactly what she should have done - rouse her constituents to defend the library
- Firefighters' union partially caves in to avoid a public battle where they might not come out the winner
How does that summation look to you?
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Date: 2012-01-20 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 11:27 pm (UTC)Ron: That looks pretty much like what I had assumed, although I don't think that the last point is a necessarily a fair characterization. I think that the union and the city both had to compromise, and probably had a lot of overlap in what they wanted. It was not about "winning."
Tom: I appreciate your desire to defend the mayor here, especially when he is limited in what he can say publicly about this whole issue. But I don't think Rebecca was attacking the mayor. I think she did want to raise public awareness of the potential cuts, and the library was probably the most easily visible example of that. And I do think that the public outcry probably helped spur both parties toward a resolution. But, I agree it was the efforts of the mayor and the union in trying to reach an agreement that were necessary to get to that resolution.
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Date: 2012-01-21 12:29 am (UTC)I have an awkward question to ask you, though, Tom, about this post:
Are you posting as Tom Champion, private citizen? or as Tom Champion, Spokesperson for th City of Somerville?
The reason I ask is that as Private Citizen of course you should express freely your opinion of the actions of an elected representative. That's how we *do* democracy. But as Spokesperson for City of Somerville, it would seem to make a very uncomfortable role to have the Mayor's Office calling out an Alderman like that. And coming from an ambiguous position-- it makes the whole communication murky.
Since we're used to seeing official posts from this LJ account, I wonder if it might make sense for you to make yourself a second LJ account for personal opinions as distinct from city announcements? Many of us here use a nick-name for person posts and reserve our $REAL_NAME accounts for professional uses. Anyway, it's a thought to consider. I for one appreciated the back-story, but felt uncomfortable with the idea that The Voice of Somerville might be Officially Calling my Alderman "disingenuous and misleading."
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Date: 2012-01-21 01:04 am (UTC)Which hat are you wearing here?
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Date: 2012-01-21 01:18 am (UTC)(and I'm speaking as an ordinary Davis Square resident, not as a co-moderator of
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Date: 2012-01-21 04:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 05:29 am (UTC)As I look back at my handful of posts and comments, my tone seems more breezy and informal than it is “HEAR-ME-O-PEOPLE-OF-SOMERVILLE.”
On at least two occasions, however, I posted press releases because I wanted to get them out as widely and as quickly as possible – so, on those counts, I plead guilty to blurring my roles.
On the other hand, and as many people noted the last time I had to bow out of DSLJ (http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/08/10/champion_logging_off_blogging_experiment/?page=full), the only reason my posts or comments hold any general interest is that I work inside city hall and can sometimes explain or assist on stuff that seems impenetrably official.
But to answer the “awkward” questions:
The views and opinions I expressed in my earlier post, and in this comment, are entirely my own.
I was first moved to speak out back on Jan. 12th when Alderman Gewirtz sponsored FF Union Pres. Jay Colbert to address the Board of Alderman. She was aware that, because of the legal constraints imposed by the JLMC statute, neither the Mayor nor anyone else from the administration could rise to answer Mr. Colbert. Mr. Colbert gave a very political speech and I don’t blame him. You can watch the whole thing here (http://somervillecityma.iqm2.com/Citizens/VideoMain.aspx?MeetingID=1391)– and you should – because it’s pretty clear from Alderman Gewirtz’s comments that she uncritically accepted the union’s version of reality and identified with their point of view against that of the administration. (The relevant portion begins about 9 mins in.)
She’s entitled to her opinion on these matters, but I thought the way she sponsored the union president that night was designed expressly to embarrass the administration and further the union’s cause. (Remember, this was at a meeting where nobody could answer back, and at a time when everyone knew that substantive presentations from all parties would be occurring at finance committee meetings later in the month.)
At the time, however, I remained silent.
My suspicions were confirmed when she sent out an alert that reduced the City’s entire appropriation plan to a threat against the West Branch Library – and then explicitly offered the union’s “concession” as the solution to all our woes.
But what finally caused me to post was when she sent out her Jan. 19 newsletter telling everyone who phoned or emailed the mayor (did any one write or call the union?) that “You had a very important role in this and I want to THANK YOU for taking action. You called, emailed, and made your voice heard at city hall.”
To me (personally), those words imply that there was a connection between the resolution of the collective bargaining dispute and Alderman Gewirtz’s efforts to mobilize opposition to one small portion of an emergency appropriation proposal. It seemed to be the declaration of a cause-and-effect relationship where none existed.
And so, Ron, I respectfully disagree with your summation, because it implies complementary, even choreographed actions by Alderman Gewirtz and the mayor. On the contrary, it appears to me as if she were pursuing an agenda that was, if anything, avowedly supportive of the firefighters’ position. (Of course, to take such a position is her right, and her responsibility, if that’s the way she feels.)
And so, balsamicdragon, I *do* think Rebekah was attacking the mayor, and I *don’t* think that the public outcry over the library had any effect in spurring either party toward a resolution. (The parties were in fact already back at the table when Alderman Gewirtz’s January 17th alert hit the wires.)
And perhaps the solution to everyone’s concerns about detecting the hat I’m wearing in a particular post isn’t to have two LJ accounts, but in future just lead with a disclaimer whenever it's needed.
I have edited my original post to make this distinction.
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Date: 2012-01-21 06:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 10:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 10:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 02:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-21 06:14 pm (UTC)But the fact is, as far as I can tell, the library took *way* more than its fair share of cuts in the mayor's proposal. I mean, the library system is less than 1% of the City's budget -- but the mayor proposed to use it to cover nearly 10% of the deficit and 10% of the layoffs. In other words the library system was taking *ten times* its share of the pain.
So (I hope this is a fair summary) Tom is saying here that the mayor was not trying to provoke public outcry by targeting the cuts at the library, and that the public outcry had no effect on the outcome. I'm willing to believe that. But what that means instead is that the mayor wanted to cut ten times as much from the library as the rest of the budget because that's how (un)important libraries are to him. Until that changes, it's going to have to be about the library.
Tom, I've been pretty cranky on this site about the library thing recently and it's not a style I love. I hope we can have a good conversation about it soon. But I also hope you can start by acknowledging that the pain was not spread equally on this one, and that folks who contacted the mayor were not only sincere, but were making an important point.
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Date: 2012-01-21 08:23 pm (UTC)And I agree somewhat with the above. The Mayor is justifiably proud of our city's reputation as a place for creative artists. Threatening to close a library is wildly inconsistent with that.
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Date: 2012-01-23 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-24 10:10 pm (UTC)