BY DAN VALENTI

May 13, 2024

Erin Leahy at Act of Mass wrote in her political email that the Boston Globe published a news article this past week exposing the $5 million in earmarks for their districts that the Massachusetts State House of Representatives Leadership were able to secretly sneak in their fiscal year 2025 state budget bill.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13409395/massachusetts-democrats-budget-castle-earmarks.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490

The Washington Examiner published an online news article describing how Democratic Party Massachusetts state lawmakers waste our tax dollars.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/beltway-confidential/2985014/massachusetts-budget-shows-democrats-waste-tax-dollars/

To be clear, the state lawmakers in Boston voted to spend many millions of tax dollars on special interest earmarks, while most of them voted to NOT give Homeless Veterans priority over illegal immigrants for Emergency Shelters in Massachusetts.

The Berkshire delegation: Smitty Pignatelli, Tricia Farley-Bouvier and John Barrett III all voted against helping Homeless Veterans by giving them priority in finding emergency shelter during the influx of illegal immigrants that is and will continue to cost state taxpayers in Massachusetts somewhere around $1 billion per fiscal year.

Jon Melle

Trump unemployment was better than Bidens full employment of 3.8% which is the greatest ever.People can’t believe how great this is.Nobody has ever seen it this great.

May 13, 2024

Hello blogger Dan Valenti,

This is how I would have written the news article by Eagle journalist Meg Britton-Mehlisch.

Every fiscal year since the early-1980’s since the misguided state law named Proposition 2.5 went into effect, Pittsfield has had to play financial shell games with the Massachusetts state government bureaucrats by increasing its annual operating budget spending by at least 5 percent per fiscal year.

The political hack Mayor of Pittsfield breaks down his (or her) operating budget proposal by costs incurred to the city and (level 5) public school district. On the surface, it makes financial sense, but beneath the surface, it is disingenuous.

The city’s operating budget is really about receiving as much state aid funding as possible. The city’s financial bureaucrats – in this case, “Kufflinks” Matt Kerwood – sees all of the revenue sources as a means to shuffle taxpayer dollars around and create (his) secretive slush funds that are well hidden from the public.

The state and local taxpayers should be aware that in Boston, state lawmakers giveaway somewhere around $20 billion per fiscal year in state tax breaks to their special interests big business campaign donors. In fact, some lobbyists in Boston report 7-figure annual earnings. In Boston, they are all enriching themselves at the public trough.

In Pittsfield, which is at the opposite end of the Commonwealth, the state sells its regressive taxation scam products disguised as state lottery tickets. Boston loves to brag about its record profits from the lottery, and the state lawmakers love it too, because it allows for even larger state tax breaks to big businesses that don’t exist in the mostly rural region of Western Massachusetts. Boston receives most of the financial benefits from the lottery SCAM, while Pittsfield is being systemically mocked by its underclass residents spending their money on the lottery SCAM.

In Pittsfield, most people don’t understand that the at least 5 percent annual city spending increase is not about them at all. Moreover, they don’t understand that Boston is under-funding state aid that Pittsfield’s budget is really all about in the first place. Furthermore, they don’t understand that the state lottery is a scam that delivers multiple disservices to Pittsfield and the mostly unaware low- to moderate-income residents who live there.

In closing, the state and local politicians are deceiving you by taking more and more of your hard-earned tax dollars. It is all really a mockery towards most of the people who don’t understand that it is all a financial shell game to enrich the financial, corporate and ruling elites – along with all of the greedy lobbyists – at the public trough, while the rest of us have to pay for it all.

I am a journalist with a good conscience. I don’t want my readers to be played for financial fools anymore. Please vote out all of the phony corrupt career politicians and replace them with ones who will STOP LYING to you.

Best wishes,

Jonathan A. Melle

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“Mayor Peter Marchetti is calling his first Pittsfield city budget a ‘compromise.’ Here’s what’s included in his proposal”
By Meg Britton-Mehlisch, The Berkshire Eagle, May 13, 2024

PITTSFIELD — Mayor Peter Marchetti is calling his first budget in office “a compromise.”

The mayor sent the City Council the proposed $216.2 million budget, along with a letter, earlier this week, marking the official start to the municipal budgeting process. The proposed financial plan for fiscal 2025, which begins July 1, is about a $10.7 million — or 5.1 percent — increase over the current budget.

To fund this budget, city leaders anticipate they’ll need to raise $114.9 million in property taxes — which equates to a 5.3 percent or $5.8 million increase over this fiscal year — and use $2.5 million in free cash alongside the state aid and local receipts.

In the letter to the council, the mayor called the proposal a middle ground between the level-funded budget requested of him by the council early this year and the administration’s goals for a level-service budget.

“You will continue to hear, ‘We need more teachers, we need more police officers, we need more,’ but that plea for what we need more of is followed by, ‘Don’t raise my taxes,'” Marchetti told The Eagle on Friday. “We as a community have to decide what our priorities are.”

Review of the line item budgets from each department shows that the mayor is seeking a middle point not only from what the council was seeking but from what city departments requested as well.

The budget isn’t set in stone. While the council met May 6 in a special meeting to officially receive the budget, the real work at refining the city’s financial plan starts next week.

Over the course of the next month, the council will host several hearings and review the proposal department by department. These meetings serve as an opportunity for councilors to hear from the city staff leading each office and for councilors to suggest their own revisions to proposed spending.

Those talks kick off at 6 p.m. Monday in the council chambers at City Hall.

At this first meeting, Marchetti is slated to present an overview of the budget and his five-year capital improvement plan. The capital improvement plan, which covers fiscal years 2025 through 2029, calls for $43.4 million in capital investments over 56 projects in the coming fiscal year.

Funding for those projects — which range from roof repairs to city schools, sidewalk improvements, street resurfacing, a new fire engine, work on sewer and water mains, and more — would come from both city coffers, state and federal aid, and borrowing authorizations.

THE ‘COMPROMISES’

The mayor’s letter lays out the financial factors he is balancing. On one side there are increasing costs. This year there will be about $3.5 million in increases to the city’s fixed costs related to health insurance coverage, retirement contributions, debt service and contractual salary increases. On the other side is decreasing revenue in a smaller increase in state aid than the year before.

The mayor has said throughout the creation of the budget that those elements alone keep the city from being able to fully pursue the petition sent to his office by the council for a “budget that is close to level funding.”

Even so, Marchetti had city staff go through the exercise of listing the cuts and impacts that would be required to create such a budget. The mayor presented those findings during the annual joint meeting of the council and Pittsfield School Committee in early April.

The picture the mayor painted of a level-funded budget included major staffing and service changes — particularly from the city’s four largest departments.

The school department would have had to eliminate more than 100 staff members, the fire department would have needed to cut its overtime and shut down a firehouse on a rotating basis, the Police Department would have had to cut 11 officers and the Department of Public Services would have had to cut five highway maintenance craftspeople and two park maintenance workers.

Marchetti said a level-service budget — one that maintains staffing and city services and programs at their current level — just isn’t in the cards.

“After we finalized the level-service budget we were looking where we were and we were still at a place where under the levy we couldn’t raise enough taxes to fund the budget,” Marchetti said.

State law prevent cities from raising taxes to an amount more than 2.5 percent of the community’s “full and fair cash value” of the taxable real estate and personal property in the city.

The different between Pittsfield’s levy limit and the taxes needed to create a level-service budget was quite a gap. The mayor said when he realized the deficit between the numbers, he went back to the department heads for the Fire Department, Police Department and Department of Public Services and asked each to cut another $200,000 each from their budgets.

The mayor then requested an additional $100,000 cut from the police budget.

His final budget proposal avoids many of the predicted staffing cuts by making reductions to the department’s supply and expense budgets. This year, Marchetti received — outside of the school department budget — requests for $134.5 million in budget requests for city departments. His budget calls for just under $1 million in cuts to those requests.

The budget put forth by Marchetti avoids many of those staffing cuts — but not all of them.

Schools: Kristen Behnke, the assistant superintendent of business and finance for Pittsfield Public Schools, said that had the district maintained the same staffing and programming as this year its budget would have totaled $84.4 million in the coming fiscal year.

Instead, the School Committee voted to finalize a budget proposal about $1.5 million shy of that at $82.9 million. School leaders knew no matter what, this year would likely mean staffing cuts due to the sunsetting of COVID-era federal aid to schools. That program, called the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, funded 44 staff positions which — for the large part — have not been rolled into the new budget.

Earlier in the budget process for the school department, it appeared lower than anticipated state aid would force school leaders to cut an additional 60 full-time employees. The discovery of a technical error on the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s part delivered an additional $2.4 million, which reduced the number of expected layoffs.

District leaders now plan to cut 23 full-time employees in the coming year in order to support the current budget.

Fire: The Fire Department submitted a request for an $11 million budget to the mayor’s office — up 5.2 percent from its current $10.5 million budget.

Marchetti’s proposal would give to the department $10.8 million — a 3.3 percent increase — this year while avoiding the major reduction in overtime that would have forced the weekly closing of a firehouse due to staffing shortages. Rather than completely eliminate the overtime budget, Marchetti is reducing it by $25,000. The reduction gives the budget more space to cover contractual salary and service agreement increases.

Police: When Marchetti presented the picture of a level-funded budget, councilors said they were against major staffing changes to both the fire and police departments. Marchetti’s budget proposal cuts overtime for general policing and drug investigations rather than the number of staff officers.

The department’s budget request for fiscal 2025 was for $15.3 million — a nearly $934,000 increase from this year’s budget. Marchetti’s proposal stops just shy of that at $15 million by making cuts to overtime staffing and supplies.

Marchetti is considering whether the city should change the way police staffing of special events is handled. Currently some events are city sponsored and the cost of the police detail and officer overtime is pulled from the city’s budget. The mayor said there may need to be a conversation with organizations hosting events about fronting the cost for the police details.

The mayor’s budget would reduce funding for annual training and recertification, uniforms, ammunition and technical equipment while still proposing a roughly $634,00 increase in the department’s funding.

Those cuts would come alongside department proposed reductions to the budget for officers attending the training academy, the contract for ShotSpotter and body cameras and temporary custodial services.

Department of Public Services: The department requested a nearly $487,000 — or 4.4 percent — increase to its current $11.1 million budget in the coming year. Marchetti’s proposed budget would instead give the department a $287,000 — or 2.6 percent — increase if approved.

The department’s funding request proposes reducing spending on equipment rental, tools and safety equipment for highway maintenance and parks maintenance supplies.

The budget put forth by Marchetti goes further and anticipates the acceptance of a proposed contract with Casella Waste Systems for trash pickup. That contract relies on the city switching to a trash program that would give residents a standardized toter and have them pay for additional receptacles. That contract would save the city an estimated $80,000 in its trash collection costs.

A ‘pay-as-you-throw’ trash proposal has fizzled before. Will Pittsfield embrace the ‘toters’ under the latest proposal?
Other changes: Outside of the largest departments, Marchetti’s proposed budget attempts to find savings in efficiencies.

One example is a $50,000 change being made to the Office of Veterans’ Services. Each year the department allocates funds to cover financial and medical assistance programs for veterans and their families. This year the department budget $750,000 for those efforts but as of this week had only spend $632,000. In fiscal 2023, the department budgeted $800,000 for those programs but spent just under $600,000.

The mayor said that made him feel comfort that cutting from that budget wouldn’t impact the services veterans are seeking.

Another example Marchetti gave was a simple change to the city’s phone plans.

Up until this year, departments like the Health Department, building inspector, Municipal Airport and Cultural Development entered to individual contracts with cell providers for phones for employees. This year, those plans have been bundled together and included in the IT department’s budget for an overall savings.

Department leaders looked for similar savings in their budgets for office supplies and equipment budgets.

“[Department heads] couldn’t touch salaries or contractual obligations so they had to make other changes,” Marchetti said. “That gave us an opportunity to see where we could make impacts that wouldn’t hurt at the end of the day.”

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Eliminate the administrators of the ARPA funds and have the community development office handle the work. This would save $100,000 per year for the next two years. If need be credit the community development office line items for the amount saved by eliminating the administrators.

Reduce the DPS amount by the line item amount for the business manager. THIS POSITION IS NOT NECESSARY. If the commissioner needs financial assistance, then the finance department should do their job by helping him or else get another commissioner that has a financial background.

Reduce the purchasing department by the line item amount of one of the assistants. The department head does not need two assistants for such a small department that has as a backup with the finance department.

Reduce the Mayor’s office by $35,000 with the goal of reducing the administrative assistant position to part time.

Eliminate the DEI office and have the personal director handle those duties. That’s the approach of many municipalities. You will save not only the DEI directors salary but also the DEI assistant. By the way, the personal director does NOT handle the school department. They have their own.

Conclusion: Pittsfield has expanded many departments in city hall in the last eight years which was not necessary if the department heads were doing their jobs correctly. It’s high time that the city hire qualified individuals. Other municipalities operate by multitasking. Why can’t Pittsfield?