We MUST change the culture of sluggish and poorly informed decision making in the administration. Multiple opportunities for improvements and cost savings have been frittered away on the current Mayor's watch.

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We have big improvements to make in:

• Education - reverse the slide in student performance

  • Fix the late buses​

  • Expand pre-K to include all 4-year-olds in the city

  • Address the chronic shortage of special needs and language classroom aides

  • Fund these improvements by restoring the $27 million the Mayor cut from local taxpayer funded support of the Framingham Public Schools (FPS) budget since he took office in 2022. See chart for the data. The Mayor should have ensured that that 'local contribution' should have kept increasing at about 2% annually.

  • Get parents into the educational loop so they know better how their kids are doing

  • Expand Keefe Tech to handle the long waiting list of more than 300 kids

• Infrastructure

  • Ramp up water & sewer system maintenance to defuse the 'ticking time bomb'.

    • See the water & sewer maps to the right, which show the pipes which need to be replaced in red (over 75 years old!!)​ - the maintenance backlog is $200 million

  • Fix the deteriorating roads​ - the maintenance backlog is $100 million

  • Replace many leaking school roofs - the replacement backlog is $100 million​

• Environment

  • Rapidly expand solar installations on school roofs and in school parking lots, reaping more than $3 million/year in utility savings​

  • Expand curbside composting to save up to $700,000/year in reduced trash collection

  • Expand the tree canopy on the south side to reduce summer temperatures there by 10 degrees, eliminating 'heat islands'

• Zoning, Planning & Development

  • Protect neighborhoods from over-development​

  • Ensure that more large Modera-style apartment buildings don't invade the Central Business District

  • Expand the Planning Board to include at least one architect

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We also have to do much better in:

• Strategic financial planning

• City asset management

• Community engagement

• Workforce protection

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Here are some facts:

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1. The Mayor has never engaged in actively improving education. He just regards the schools as a cost center which sucks up money. He reduced local taxpayer funded support for the schools by a total of $27 million in the first 3 years of his term. That is a historic drop in support for education.

2. Not a single new solar installation has been completed or fully funded in the entire Mayor's term, with a loss of millions of dollars in utility savings

3. Curbside composting could have been implemented 4 years ago, but there has been nothing but obstruction and delay.

4. Framingham could get credit for past residential developments in complying with the MBTA Communities Act to get the best deal with the state, but the Mayor has had zero interest in that, and spent all his time in the MBTA CA effort trying to ensure a favored developer got rezoning in Nobscot to enable them to make big profits while wrecking an important rural village neighborhood.

5. No one in the community understands the city budget. It has no goals, no priorities, no list of problems solved or being addressed, no progress reports of any kind and no historic data to gauge financial trends etc. The entire city budget process needs to be reworked so that everyone in the community understands what is going on, with clear goals, priorities and every department required to show what it achieved last year, its goals and plans for the upcoming year and the funding needed. The fact that the city has no budget book, with all of the standard information easy to access, is a total disgrace and failure. It stands in stark contrast to the exemplary process in the schools, which was achieved by a strong collaboration between the Superintendent, Bob Tremblay, the Finance Director, Lincoln Lynch and Geoff Epstein, when he was Chair of the Finance & Operations Subcommittee during the period he served on the School Committee from 2018-2021.

6. The 5 year capital plan, required by the City Charter, was simply cancelled last year. It needs to be at the forefront of all city financial planning. Ditching the plan last year was a major mistake by the Mayor.

7. The Community Center project has gone nowhere over the last year. It should be used to to expand pre-K classroom space so that 8am-6pm, that facility serves our kids as well as adults.

8. There has been a constant reduction in city staffing in the last 3 years, especially in the Department of Public Works, which means the city has to go to more expensive outside contractors for work which should be done in house. We need to strengthen all of our inhouse staffing, so we have the ability to handle all of the operational needs of the city much better and at lower cost.

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