LYNN — When Peter Caron arrived at City Hall to manage the city’s Assessor’s Office nearly 20 years ago, the department needed help.
“Things were a mess,” he said. “The professionalism in the office needed to be upgraded and best practices implemented.”
For one thing, he said the department was unprepared for a routine Department of Revenue audit to verify assessments were being done correctly. As a result, he said, those first days in 1998 required lots of unpaid overtime.
“I spent at least one weekend day at City Hall every weekend for eight months,” he said. “I was in my office from 7 to 11 p.m. four days a week to get everything in order.”
By 2013, the chief financial officer (CFO) post became available and Caron was Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy’s choice to replace Richard Fortucci, whose term had expired.
“Peter has advised me on utility property taxation questions and on the city’s available free cash,” she said at the time. “I’ve consulted him on a number of complex issues. He is experienced and competent.”
After initially rejecting his nomination, the City Council reversed their vote after Kennedy was re-elected. But taking on the dual role of managing the assessors and the city’s finances had its challenges.
“Within a few months we were hit with the net school spending crisis,” he said.
State law establishes an annual amount for school spending for each school district. Failure to comply may result in a rejection of a community’s tax rate, enforcement action by the attorney general, or loss of state aid.
For the third time, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education threatened to withhold millions in aid earlier this month until the city fills a $5.1 million shortfall in its school spending requirement of $197.4 million.
The trouble began three years ago, Caron said, when the city discovered they could no longer include teacher retiree health insurance as an allowable school spending expense.
“When the rule changed and we couldn’t count health care, my entire focus since the fall of 2013 has been on school spending,” he said.
While Caron is careful not to criticize Kennedy, he said if the mayor had adopted the meals tax at the start of her first term, the city could have provided the proceeds to the schools. It may not have filled the gap completely, he said, but would have raised as much as $2 million for the school department.
Caron attended Cornell University and Salem State College for three years, but didn’t graduate. Still, the lack of a college degree hasn’t hurt him. He earns $151,259 as chief assessor and CFO.
His first job came in 1974 at the Engineering Department in Salem City Hall, where he prepared documents for the Assessor’s Office.
“The job involves lot of numbers,” he said. “Assessing is trying to solve a puzzle to devise a solution for a computer model that best fits real estate sales that happened the previous year. “It’s like a video game, you have a problem to solve and you solve it.”
Caron has offered to stay on until spring if Mayor-elect Thomas McGee needs help in the transition. Beyond that, it’s out of his control, he said.
“If the new mayor wants me to stay permanently, I’ll give him my wife’s cell phone number and he can try to convince her,” he said.