The withdrawal of a proposal giving the City Council more power to rebalance Cambridge’s budget was another in a series of signs that the city would emerge from its first charter review in more than 80 years with a government working much like the one it has now.
The proposal – which likely returns Feb. 13 with changes by councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler – was to allow councillors to raise parts of the city’s annual budget by up to 10 percent just as they can lower parts, without increasing the total amount of the budget. City staff and several councillors responded at a special meeting Jan. 27 with fears it would cause chaos with as much as $100 million in changes at the end of a process taking most of a year.
“Budgets don’t happen in April, May or June. Departments begin to build their budgets in November of the previous year, and it is a long, arduous process,” said Owen O’Riordan, deputy city manager. “The potential for that destabilizing our process is enormous.”
Also set to return for council discussion was whether to let voters elect the mayor, whose role would stay largely ceremonial, from among council candidates who want the job; and giving the council approval over the choice of city solicitor – the city’s lawyer. The original proposal was to let the council hire and fire the city solicitor, taking that power from the city manager.
Defeated unanimously Jan. 27 was a proposal for council terms to run four years instead of the current two; and for councillors to approve the city manager’s department head appointments, which drew only one vote in favor – from Sobrinho-Wheeler.
The votes follow 17 months of work by a Charter Review Committee tasked by the council in 2022 with recommending changes. That committee’s final report numbered more than 350 pages and covered everything from councillor term lengths to “resident assemblies.” After passing through the council and state Legislature, any changes that survive would be approved or rejected by residents during municipal elections.
But the council has largely been rejecting possible changes, whether proposed by the review committee or councillors themselves.
Other proposed changes
At a previous special council meeting on charter-changing options held Dec. 9, councillor Paul Toner said, there were votes to keep the current form of government – a strong city manager that runs day-to-day matters and a weak mayor and legislative council; to keep an at-large council of nine members (as opposed to members representing specific parts of the city) elected by proportional representation; and against introducing the resident assemblies.
Other votes were against measurable goal setting, which the review committee called “a structured vision for the city to guide elected officials in their decision-making processes,” because it’s already part of city rules; and a public tracking mechanism of council policy orders because it will be made a part of council rules faster and with more certainty than if it is left to the charter process. A proposal for resident initiative petitions was taken out of consideration because residents can already get nonbinding referendums on a ballot through a state process.
The charter will be rewritten and modernized,
and the way votes are counted on election night – set back in 1938 – can now be updated. Several things were referred back to committee for refinement, Toner said. Those included letting residents vote in municipal elections even if they aren’t U.S. citizens, and letting 16- and 17-year-olds vote as well; moving municipal elections to even years because it might increase people voter participation; and creating a committee to study campaign finance reforms.
Getting more engagement
The bulk of the Jan. 27 meeting was spent on the budget proposal, which Sobrinho-Wheeler clarified was, like the others, “about good government, strengthening collaboration between the executive and legislative branches, adding checks and balances to our charter, which is our city’s constitution, and increasing the effectiveness of policymaking and administration.”
The School Committee has the power to rebalance budget items, Sobrinho-Wheeler and councillor Patty Nolan noted, and so does Boston’s city council, which can change line items without limit. Sobrinho-Wheeler proposed the 10 percent figure “as an attempt at a compromise … if 10 percent isn’t the right number, is 1 percent? Is 3 percent? I would have been a little more interested in figuring out how do we get to yes on that rather than focusing on 10 percent.”
“The goal is not to have the City Council make big changes in the last couple weeks of the budget process. The goal here is, how do we have more engagement by the City Council?” Sobrinho-Wheeler said.
The amount did become a focus, though, and the idea that the ability to adjust budget line items was meant to reduce the likelihood of the council rejecting a proposed budget altogether. “I don’t think there is the nuclear option. At least the three years I’ve been here, there’s been one person who’s voted against the budget about one particular line item, and it always, in my observations as a longtime Cambridge resident, it was always a vote of 8-1,” Toner said.
Difference in scale
While the School Committee has powers with its own budget that the council doesn’t have with the overall, roughly $1 billion city budget that includes schools, “with all due respect to the School Committee, I think our government is a much more complex organization. We have, I think, about 60 departments and 29 budgets,” O’Riordan said.
The School Committee also hasn’t used its powers to make last-minute changes to budgets, but has followed the same path as the council in identifying priorities that staff then put in place – sometimes over the course of many years, said officials such as Claire Spinner, the school district’s longtime chief financial officer before becoming assistant city manager for fiscal affairs last year.
Another problem with the budget proposal, again focused on the potential for $100 million in disruptions, was pointed out by Spinner: If debt service is untouchable as 10 percent of the budget, another 10 percent goes to health care costs and 30 percent to schools, that leaves only half the budget to alter.
Ellen Semonoff, assistant city manager for Human Services, meanwhile, imagined what a 10 percent change might do to her department’s budget of $75 million: A loss of $7.5 million to grapple with. Not to mention that “I spend somewhere between 150 and 200 hours getting ready working on the budget, and that’s just me,” Semonoff said.
“It’s not broke”
More opposition came from councillors, who worried it would hurt the city’s stellar bond rating that allows it to borrow money at low interest rates to pay for projects. The proposal “offers little to no benefit and potentially high cost in terms of fiscal stability,” said Taha Jennings, budget director for the city. Vice mayor Marc McGovern imagined the council making changes one year that the next council would change again as the membership changed with elections.
McGovern proposed an alternative – setting aside some money for council priorities. But what Toner summed up as “participatory budget for the council” got a skeptical reading by the budget director: “Every dollar is an increase on the tax levy,” Jennings said. “I don’t know what the feelings are about putting [an additional] millions of dollars aside.”
Councillors made it clear the 10 percent proposal was unpopular.
“I’m a great believer in if it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” councillor Cathie Zusy said.
Councillors point to problems
Still, councillors saw cause for more and better collaboration during the budget process, even as their Finance Committee chairs over the past years – Nolan and Toner – have been dragging it in that direction.
“Sometimes in the last few terms there’s something that comes up where it’s like, ‘Where was that, actually? We didn’t know where that came from.’ It wasn’t a council priority,” councillor Sumbul Siddiqui said. “I have a few examples. I don’t want to say them.”
McGovern agreed that, while council priorities are often reflected in budgets, the system isn’t perfect, and sometimes they get ignored. “I don’t know how many 9-0 policy orders I have to file to work on day services for the homeless, and yet it never appears in the budget,” he said.
Though Toner tried to pull the item out of consideration by sending it the Finance Committee as part of the existing budget process, Sobrinho-Wheeler resisted. He’d already withdrawn it for a rewrite, he said, and was “happy for that conversation, as long as it includes the charter piece.”
A stronger
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