Countdown to Town Meeting: Articles in Depth Part 2

This post was authored by BOS Chairman Tom Boussy and cross-posted from the Growing Stoneham blog: http://growingstoneham.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/countdown-to-town-meeting-articles-in-depth-part-2/

 
In continuing the spirit of presenting residents with information on Warrant Articles they will be voting on at the May 5th Town Meeting, this week we would like to tackle Article Seven. I have invited fellow Selectman Ann Marie O’Neill to join me in authoring this post.

Article Seven is a proposal that has a direct impact on the Town’s Finance Advisory Board (FAB). The FAB is comprised of 11 volunteers who are appointed by the Town Moderator as described in the Stoneham Town Code, which can be found in its entirety on the Town web site. These volunteers dedicate many hours of research and debate in order to best advise the residents of Stoneham in matters relating to the finances of our Town. The key point to remember for the moment is that right now the FAB is *appointed* by the Town Moderator.

Allow us to switch gears for a moment. Essentially Stoneham has three branches of elected officials – the Board of Selectmen (BOS), The School Committee (SC), and the Town Moderator. The Town Moderator has several important functions; the most visible is leading our Town Meeting. Another important function is appointing interested citizens to various town boards such as the FAB. The reason the Town Moderator appoints members to various boards is to ensure checks and balances are in place such that appointed members are not beholden to the agendas of either the BOS or SC. The Town Moderator is only beholden to the you, the voters of this Town. Having the Town Moderator appoint the FAB creates a financial watch dog board whose best interests are not seated with either board, but with the community as a whole. Article Seven wants to change this approach, which would essentially remove the checks and balances that are currently in place.

Article Seven looks to reduce the FAB from 11 members to nine members. Three members would be appointed by the BOS, 3 members would be appointed by the SC, and the remaining three would be appointed by the six members who were appointed by the BOS and SC. It is only natural for the BOS and SC to seek out appointees who best support their respective agendas. By extension, the remaining three members would be appointed by the same people who support the same financial values and interests. As mentioned before, this strips away the checks and balances that are established in our current town code.

Should Article Seven pass, the current members of the FAB would be forced to resign. Should they or anyone else like to be (re)appointed, they would approach either the BOS or the SC. Citizens look to the FAB on matters, knowing they have researched all sides of an issue, and rendered their decision based on sound financial practices and community needs. What recourse does the public have should they object to members of the FAB? Like all other elected officials, citizens currently use their vote to either replace the Moderator or maintain his/her position.

Decimating the FAB is, unfortunately, not new to Stoneham. In 2010 four members of the sitting FAB were unceremoniously dismissed at the same time despite the fact there were already four vacancies. Public perception was that this was done out of spite because the FAB did not agree with the budget proposed at Town Meeting. Not only was this coup unprecedented, it left the Town with a new FAB and no longer had the services of the dismissed board members who had knowledge pertinent to the Town budget and history.

Another important point is that in 2010 there were already four vacancies on the FAB. It is not easy to encourage people to volunteer, to commit to the great number of hours required to properly research and debate important issues that impact all residents of our town, and to sometimes bear the wrath of public opinion when difficult decisions need to be made. The FAB has struggled over the past few years to regain footing, and they have made great progress. We currently have a committed FAB who have terms of appointment. They have divided departments amongst themselves for evaluation and have made tremendous progress. The only thing they are currently lacking is complete access to the budget itself, which will be a post for another day.

The author of Article Seven is also the author of Article Six. On the surface these articles seem unrelated, but they in fact go hand-in-hand. One can begin to see the control the author of these articles would like to enact over the Town, thus removing independent decision making and citizen involvement.

If you examine Article Six, Section 3, Default Budget, it states, “If the final motion of the budget is defeated, a default budget shall be established by a joint meeting of the BOS and FAB after a Public Hearing, but the total budget cannot exceed the amount of the total budget in the original motion.”

Duplicity can easily be accomplished and a budget can be designed by a few and forced upon the Town without any real voice of the people. Consider this: let’s say that a hypothetical proposed budget being reviewed at the Town Meeting in May grossly under-funded the Senior Center and/or the Police Department. Adjustments are made by the voters who are present at the Town Meeting to properly fund these areas, but in doing so it creates an unbalanced budget.

Please note that, by law, the budget doesn’t need to be balanced at the May Town Meeting. While we are in the midst of our May Town Meeting, the State is working to finalize their own budget, which will have a direct impact to our Town’s budgetary expectations. Therefore, in May the Town does not have all key information needed and the Town does its best to project State funding.

However, in October the budget will be balanced at the Town Meeting when officials actually know how much money will be available from the State. So that means the budget can be worked on through September, once we have we have the final figures from the State, with the caveat that nobody is suggesting an unbalanced budget, but we as a Town shouldn’t be forced into a budget that is bad for the Town without any input.

Back to a key part of Article Six should it pass: if the May budget is approved by the voters at town meeting, knowing it is unbalanced, but with the intent to balance it in October when the state numbers are known, then the Town has to revert to the default budget.

As per Article Six, the default budget is established by the BOS and FAB. As per Article Seven, a third of the FAB would be appointed by the BOS. And another third of the FAB would be appointed by people who were appointed by the BOS. Now you can see the importance of how disruptive Article Seven can be to our town’s checks and balances. As two of your sitting Selectmen – we oppose the potential vacuum of influence this can create and prefer the openness and transparency for our town.