Some $900,000 carved from mayor’s proposal City Council overrides veto; budget will stand
“I cannot support any budget amendments that threaten the disruption of the progress Woonsocket has made over nearly four years. That is why I will be exercising my authority to veto those council amendments that are detrimental to the long- and short-term fiscal health of the city .” —Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt
WOONSOCKET — As promised, the City Council overrode Mayor Lisa BaldelliHunt’s veto of its adjustments to her fiscal 2018 budget, including cuts of some $430,000 for new jobs the mayor argued were essential for keeping the city on a path to progress.
Voting 5-2 with little comment, the same ruling bloc of councilors who approved a $139.9 million spending package on June 19 – arguing that tax relief is more important than adding jobs – reaffirmed its position in Harris Hall Monday. Council President Dan Gendron, Vice President John Brien, Councilors James Cournoyer, Denise Sierra and Richard Fagnant voted for the override, while Councilors Melissa Murray and Christopher Beauchamp were against it.
The override means the city will operate for at least another year without an economic development director, a deputy police chief, a deputy tax assessor and an infrastructure coordinator. Though personnel represented most of it, the council’s cuts amounted to about $900,000 in all.
Baldelli-Hunt was not present for the vote. She attended the first few minutes of the meeting, speaking under citizens good and welfare to announce that tax bills would be prepared without cuts in motor vehicle taxes, owing to the legislature’s failure to pass a state budget.
In her formal veto message, however, Baldelli-Hunt had had rebuked members of the council for ignoring the advice of department heads who recommended that the positions be filled.
“Unfortunately, the gutted budget offered by the majority of the council impedes the work that our city departments are charged with,” Baldelli-Hunt wrote in a formal veto message. “Their tireless work, achieved with taxpayer support, has led to noticeable progress and was set by the wayside on June 19, 2017, when a majority of the council chose to ignore the informed departmental budget requests made
by our chiefs and directors.”
The mayor said the elimination of funding “for key initiatives and positions” that she and her department heads were recommending “would have a detrimental impact upon the operations of local government and the greater community.”
“I cannot support any budget amendments that threaten the disruption of the progress Woonsocket has made over nearly four years,” she said. “That is why I will be exercising my authority to veto those council amendments that are detrimental to the long and short term fiscal health of the city.”
About the only debate on the override came from members of the general public who addressed the council under good and welfare, an early portion of the meeting when the council invites feedback from anyone who offers it.
“I would ask that you hold together and that you vote to override the veto,” said Albert G. Brien, a former president of the council and father of Vice President Brien. “It’s about time the taxpayers of this community are given some consideration. For the first time in a long time, they have a seat at the table.”
With little discussion except for some clarification on the legal formalities, the council took two back-toback votes, quickly vanquishing all of the cuts the mayor had vetoed last Thursday.
The perfunctory last words on the matter came from Gendron:
“The budget stands as passed by the council,” he said.
Much of the debate on the cuts played out on the op-ed pages of the The Call, where Baldelli-Hunt and Cournoyer were featured in dueling commentaries after the mayor announced her intended veto last week.
In addition to the personnel cuts, the mayor had vetoed two other alterations to her proposed spending plan, including the reassignment of nearly two-thirds of what she sought for the elimination of neighborhood blight. The council shaved $190,000 from an account used mostly for acquiring – and razing – substandard, neglected architectural eyesores, most of them residential.
The move left BaldelliHunt with $300,000 for blight eradication. But the reduction did not represent a true cut because most of the funds at issue – $160,000 – were shifted to a new account, created by the council, to demolish the long-abandoned trash incinerator on Cumberland Hill Road.
The mayor also vetoed the reassignment of all but $5,000 of $250,000 her budget would have dedicated to a type of debt known as Other Post Employment Benefits. OPEB consists largely of future debt the city will pile up in the form of retiree health benefits – a black hole projected to exceed $150 million in the decades ahead – unless the city finds a way to pay it down.
When Fitch Ratings upgraded the city’s bond rating recently, the modest dent the city had planned against OPEB was one of several reasons the credit analysts gave for doing so. The review also gave Baldelli-Hunt further ammunition for attacking the council’s cuts.
“Directing funds towards the city’s future health care liabilities has been recognized by financial credit rating agencies as a key indicator in the city’s improved fiscal outlook,” she said, adding – “and quite frankly is a move that departs from the ‘kick the can down the road’ mentality which originally created the serious fiscal problems we have had to overcome.”
Cournoyer, the leading architect of the budget overhaul, dismissed the $250,000 line item as a purely symbolic down payment with little practical effect.
Responding to BaldelliHunt’s protests in his published commentary, Cournoyer said the case for the cuts leaving the city shortstaffed or administratively hobbled is vastly overstated by the mayor. Cournoyer said the cuts amounted to a mere .6 percent of expenditures proposed by the mayor – in other words, the council approved 99.4 percent of the original proposal.
Though some new positions were not created, he said the budget includes, among other things, funding for two new patrol officer in the Woonsocket Police Department; salary increases for all but two workers who’ve been on the job less than a year; $329,000 for law enforcement equipment, including new police cruisers; and a $690,000 contingency for unexpected needs that might arise.
Baldelli-Hunt’s budget had already called for residential and commercial tax reductions. As a result of the council’s cuts, however, it appears the rates for the new fiscal year will be 74 cents lower that the mayor’s on the residential side, or $30.10 per $1,000 of assessed valuation, and $1.06 less for commercial property, or $36.93. In addition to the personnel cuts the mayor vetoed, there was at least one position the council eliminated that she did not seek to restore by veto: that of business outreach liaison/public relations coordinator. In a feud that endured through the final few weeks of last fiscal year, the council defunded the line items for that job, previously held by Blake Collins, a former public relations operative in the administration of Central Falls Mayor James Diossa.
Councilors complained that Collins was used much like a campaign tool and eliminated funding for his job effective April 29, but Baldelli-Hunt essentially ignored the council. The mayor resurrected the position in the 2018 spending plan, prompting the council to eliminate $67,757 budgeted for salary and benefits – a hundred percent of the allotment. Collins is believed to have severed ties with the city, effective June 30.