PERSONAL STORY

 

I moved to Framingham, MA in May 2014 from Newton, MA, where I had lived for 24 years, shepherded 2 children through the school system, and served 6 years on the Newton School Committee, from 2008-2014. In Newton, I learned a great deal about how local government works, including how goals are set and how the community can work well with elected officials to make sure objectives are met.

 

The principal lesson learned about local government was that there is often a lot of fog about decision making and the community may well be in the dark on important matters. In Newton, I worked to dispel the fog and bring facts and good decision making options to the community.

 

Although politically unknown, when I first ran for the Newton School Committee in 2005, and almost all sitting selectmen and school committee members opposed my run, I got 40% of the vote. A further run in 2007 was successful, with 60% of the vote. I was the first challenger to unseat a sitting School Committee member in 20 years. My message was that math and science, and more generally STEM needed large improvements in what was otherwise regarded as a high performing school system.

 

When I came to Framingham, I had no plans to serve in its government, although I did serve on the school district Communications Task Force in 2015, as I had useful know how to contribute. However, when the town voted to become a city in April 2017, and a new Superintendent was confronted with some very basic, entrenched school district financial mismanagement, I thought I could usefully bring to bear my prior Newton experience to help ease the Framingham transition to a city, and to solve some very obvious problems with the Framingham Public Schools and also the Framingham School Committee, which displayed surprising dysfunctionality when observed more closely.

 

I served for 4 years on the Framingham School Committee where I was chairperson of the Finance & Operations subcommittee and the Climate Change, Environment & Sustainability subcommittee. I had a hand in hiring an excellent new school district financial officer, Lincoln Lynch and in a very productive collaboration with him and the Superintendent, Robert Tremblay, transformed the entire school district budget process to ensure that there were clear goals, budget drivers were explicitly identified, progress was well described and full information on all aspects of the school district financial planning was presented in a comprehensively rewritten budget book. Major financial policy reforms were completed during my School Committee service, plus my work on in the climate change area resulted in the first school district policy on Climate Change, Environment & Sustainability in the state. I served from 2018-2021.

 

A key experience I had during my elected service was that, although the school district had been well funded during the town years, when Framingham became a city, its new Mayor, Yvonne Spicer turned out to be no help in funding the schools properly, largely due to poor financial advice from the city CFO, and the remarkably adverse financial impact of the new City Council, which dropped the annual property tax levy increase to zero for 4 years, totally stalling city revenues.

 

When a new Mayor, Charlie Sisitsky, was elected in November 2021, on a platform of major change, including improving communications and, very specifically, ensuring that the school district was well funded, hopes ran high. However, the city’s financial support of the school district abruptly changed for the worse.

 

After solid annual increases for the school district of the locally funded portion of the school district budget, the local contribution, during the town years, followed by substantially smaller increases during the Spicer years, the new Mayor made huge cuts in the local contribution. It dropped from $89.8 million in FY22, the last Spicer year, to $84.8 million in FY23 then to $80.0 million in FY24. A huge annual drop of $10 million in school district taxpayer funding. In FY25, a portion of the drastic cuts was restored and the local contribution rose to $86.7 million, still $3.1 million below the FY22 level.

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The graphic to the right shows the Mayor's impact on the schools.

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This was unprecedented 'defunding' of local support for general education.

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During this 'defunding period' the Mayor filled the gaping holes he ripped in general education support by shifting money from state Chapter 70 education funding to general education, diverting it from its intended purpose to boost support for low income students, non-English speaking students and special needs students. The state had specifically boosted Chapter 70 funding with the Student Opportunity Act, to address the student achievement gap, but the Mayor had zero interest in making sure that new support reached its target.

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The net effect of the Mayor's financial manipulations was to divert the state's Chapter 70 investment in students to replacing school roofs. The total diversion was at $5 million in FY23, $9.8 million in FY24 and $3.4 in FY25: $18.2 million. If you add in the fact that the local contribution should have increased by inflation on its FY22 base of $89.8 million, the total amount the Mayor diverted from education over 3 years totals about $27 million.

 

The Mayor has proven to be a major obstacle to educational recovery form the pandemic. It is hard to imagine anyone being less supportive of our kids' education. 

 

There are many more reasons to be concerned.

 

It turns out on examination of city management that there is a huge problem with funding city infrastructure. Enormous backlogs have been silently building in water & sewer, roads and school building roof replacements. The total backlog lies in the vicinity of $350 million. And the community is completely unaware that this crisis exists, nor that it is now starting to dramatically undermine the school district.

 

There is, in fact, a long history of somewhat toxic decision making in Framingham, which dates back at least to the years before 2000, when sage local decision makers decided to deliberately neglect water & sewer system maintenance. That came to a head in 2007, when the state intervened on the town after 50 sewage overflows occurred in one year. The state forced major infrastructure repairs, but the toxic decision making was not repaired and has been the force behind a series of further mistakes, which include: doing nothing on solar installations from 2014-2021; taxing below inflation since 2013, choking off vital revenue; neglecting the water & sewer system again, so that by 2017, the backlog of maintenance was as bad as in the state intervention years; dramatically lowering funding for road maintenance so that roads are on a major downward spiral, failing to plan for school roofs replacements, where 12 school roofs need replacement in the next few years.

 

That completes the immediate background.

 

It is why I began publishing The Framingham Observer Substack newsletter in March 2023, which can be viewed as a record of everything I have done to make improvements in Framingham by trying to ensure the community is well informed on what its government is doing.

 

I started out thinking I could write about 6 articles. I have now clocked up 150 articles.

 

Things were in much worse shape than I originally thought, dominantly on the cityside of management and operations.

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That is why I am now running for Mayor.