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Council rejected mayor's budget, setting up possible fight over school funding
By adamg on Wed, 06/08/2016 - 1:36pm
The City Council today voted unanimously to reject Mayor Walsh's budget proposals for the fiscal year that starts July 1, with education spending the major stumbling block.
The council voted to reject the measure "without prejudice," meaning there's room for negotiation.
But Councilor Tito Jackson (Roxbury), said he would vote to reject the budget completely unless the mayor adds another $31 million or so to the $1-billion-plus school budget to restore cuts to special-needs and other programs.
Jackson, a persistent critic of school spending over recent months, said it is unconscionable that a city that is richer than it has ever been since its founding in 1630 - with $115 million in new tax revenue from development this year alone - would handicap its young people in their competition with their peers at other schools in the state.
City Councilors Ayanna Pressley and Annissa Essaibi-George (at large) agreed. Pressley said she is concerned about cuts in the budget for community health center; Essaibi-George said the city needs to do more to combat homelessness and drug abuse.
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Comments
Value for money-not!
I guess $18,000 per pupil
Isn't enough for Tito what
a buffoon!
$18k - if only
Don't forget capital spending, pensions, retiree health care, external funds and other non-operating budgets. Add those in and it's somewhere around $22-$23k per kid.
What I want to know from the good councilors is this. New revenue isn't going to magically appear. So to give BPS $31 million more means we have to cut from something else.
BPS is about 1/3 of the budget. Add in fixed costs that are out of the city's control and that's more than half the budget right there. So what are we doing now that's so unessential or wasteful that we have ANOTHER $31 million to add on top of a school budget that is already one of the most generous in the world.
Lemme guess - prelude to a tax hike - oh wait -they are working on that - but it's "earmarked" for affordable housing. So ANOTHER tax hike?
I know city finances aren't
I know city finances aren't really this simple, but...
Magic revenue indeed.
115 / 3 = 38.3
I'm no mathematician, but I think I may have found where the $31 million is coming from.
I've got bad news for you
That's not how it works And its disturbing (frightening) the city council doesn't seem to even understand it.. The new property tax revenue is already spoken for. The argument isn't about the size of the pie. It's about how big a piece each group gets. So they need that $115 mm plus other incremental revenue from fees etc plus (maybe) a small increase in state aid PLUS PLUS PLUS every incremental $$$$ the council wants like $31 million for schools and more. If you give BPS more, somebody gets less. Or you raise fees and taxes.
Menino starved everything but schools and public safety during his tenure. So if you want money for schools, go tell a cop or firefighter they need to take a pay cut. Good luck w that!!!
its disturbing (frightening)
So when are you pulling papers?
I wish
Unfortunately budget reformers don't /can't win in this town. Huge number of voters work for the city or are related to someone who does ( and I'm in Zakim s district and he does a pretty good job even though we occasionally disagree on things).
Based on hub headlines today take the 31 million from
fire and police. In fact double the schools budget to 2 billion.
Triple A bond rating and PILOT Fees
Boston has a huge rainy day fund, a triple A bond rating, and 50% of property in the city owned by "non-profits" who don't pay property tax- that includes The MFA, Harvard, BU etc etc. What ever we don't spend now on schools will be spent eventually on law enforcement or health care later on.
I too enjoy line breaks.
Is it haiku
Or is it verse?
Either way,
Cutting special ed funding
is quite perverse
Burma Shave!
Good
Now I hope Pressley or Flaherty run against Mayor Walsh next year!
The Council always initially
The Council always initially votes to reject the budget without prejudice as a procedural matter, so they can then formally negotiate for amendments and additional funding and such. Not unusual, even if they do want more BPS funding.
True
So it'll be interesting to see if other councilors follow Jackson, who was talking about damning the torpedoes and seeing what happens if the mayor doesn't give him the $31 million he wants.
It's not just Tito that wants it, but
The voting parents of 57,000 BPS students whose kids education is being punted around in the service of contract posturing.
You mean like that student walkout
contract posturing?
Question
What's the source of your 57000 students? The numbers on the state website are closer to 53 or 54k.
BPS Enrollment Data
MA DESE's numbers are from 2014-2015, and is typically older when posted. BPS At A Glance has more recent and up to date info. They often update numbers in early spring. Changes can be reflective of kids previously in charters who left mid year and are now in traditional schools.
http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/cms/lib07/MA01906464/Centricity/Domai...
2015-2016 56,650 students
The student population has remained steady since 2009, as far as I've seen from data. In fact, the student population would be higher if even some of the over 4,000 preschoolers on the wait list had seats. It's also not unusual to see a fluctuation up or down a few hundred considering the transient nature of our population. I believe we have 3000-4000 homeless students alone in BPS.
Holy (expletive)
We pay a BILLION dollars for this garbage? How about we start by getting rid of pensions? When is this paying people not to work concept going to finally go away?
EDIT: We have maybe the best college on the planet across the river. Let them and Stanford and Carnegie Mellon and everybody else run the Boston schools. Give them the contract, and have Boston homeowners mail the property taxes directly to the winning university. Government can't and won't educate our kids right. Time to let private industry try.
More bad news
Per my post above that doesn't include pensions and lots of other stuff. The grand total is about $1.3 Billion maybe more. It grows like that national debt clock. And that includes ZERO for rent and taxes on all the antique schools and buildings.
Time to sell ads
What would Johnson & Johnson pay for a giant mural in a high school cafeteria hawking acne cream?
Time
It's time to go back to an elected school committee.
Captions for deaf. City Broadband & Cable.
Captions on Council WebCasts for hard of hearing folks, for the Deaf Community, for ESL English as Second Language folks, for LEP Limited English Proficiency folks obscure name plates, obscure the picture with a black instead of transparent background. City Department of Innovation and Technology Broadband & Cable haven't fixed Captions.