Like the megastorm in the book, “The Perfect Storm,” a trio of financial challenges is threatening to saddle Lynn taxpayers with a tax hike initially estimated at $165 per household.
Contractual raises for municipal employees, borrowing costs associated with building two new middle schools and a miscalculation potentially adding millions of dollars in added costs to the city’s net-school-spending-formula are stirring up choppy waters for the city.
Cities, like individuals, can’t ignore or not pay their bills. This is especially true with the new round of expenses the city is facing.
Accelerating public school enrollments are threatening to swell the wave of elementary school students aging into the city’s two antiquated middle schools The flagship of the Lynn schools, Marshall Middle School, is not sufficient on its own to absorb this enrollment increase. The city needs new schools and paying for them requires — even with state financial assistance — spending millions of dollars on borrowing costs.
Net school spending is the financial headache Lynn can’t seem to make disappear. Costs associated with this complicated school financing formula have plagued the city since 2013 when a miscalculation was blamed for a $17 million potential city spending shortfall that was halved through negotiations.
Yet another more recent miscalculation threatens to add millions of dollars to the payoff plan hammered out between the city and state to resolve the net spending problem.
These financial worries are headache enough for Lynn’s mayor, its top financial planners and the city council.
But these officials are now faced with the prospect of asking city residents to approve a tax-raising measure called a Proposition 2 ½ override to meet city expenses. Lynn officials over the years have asked voters to approve spending tax money on borrowing costs associated with building a new police station and schools. They have never asked taxpayers to approve an override.
If precedent is to be broken and an override is to be proposed, then city officials should first take a new, harder look at city expenses. This examination should include a proposal to ask city unions to defer or waive pay raises. The agreement signed between local unionized police officers and the city is more than $3 million paid over a four-year period. Lynn firefighters and the city have yet to ink a pact that could add millions of dollars in negotiated raise costs. Pay raise costs associated with other city unions are proportionately smaller.
City workers deserve a raise. But raises, as anyone working in the private sector can testify, sometimes get deferred or cut. City union employees are hard-working people and many of them are city residents. They have a stake in looking at their paychecks and asking if deferring or waiving a pay cut might be a solution to avoiding an override.