School Funding & City Taxes

WCAP has provided a great service to the community by having all candidates for city council and school committee on the air for 18 minutes each over the past few weeks. Yesterday morning, incumbent city councilor Bud Caulfield was asked about the likelihood of a property tax increase during the coming months. Councilor Caulfield responded that if taxes do go up, it would be due to the council, on June 16, 2005, voting 6 to 2 (he and Rita Mercier oppossed, Rithy Uong abstaining) to provide the school department with $2.2 million in additional funding contrary to city manager Cox's recommendation to the council. Unfortunately, this version of events is misleading in that it only tells part of the story. The entire $2.2 million budgetary increase for the schools was due to the newly negotiated teachers' contract. That contract was negotiated, on the behalf of the school department, by the four school committee members who did not have conflicts (Doherty, Faticanti, Martin & McHugh), Mayor Armand Mercier and Asst City Manager T J McCarthy (the city manager's representative on the negotiating committee). According to published reports in the media, at least two school committee members oppossed the contract, but the mayor and the assistant city manager voted in favor of it. Without their votes, there would have been no contract and there would have been no need for an additional $2.2 million dollars. When the time came to pay the bill, however, the city manager reneged on the commitment made by his designee on the negoatiating team and recommended against providing the school department with that extra money. Recognizing that without the additional funding, the schools would have to absorb $2.2 million in devastating budget cuts, a majority of the city council did the right thing and voted for the additional funding. So if anyone should be blamed for a tax increase, it's not the schools, but the members of the negotiating committee that provided the key votes for the teachers' pay raise.