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Date: 6/17/2020
WESTFIELD – After moving $1.5 million from free cash to supplement the school budget, the Westfield School Committee and City Council met on June 10 and June 12 to hammer out the final details of the budget with the new fiscal year looming.
During a general comments portion of the school committee meeting, school committee member Heather Sullivan said she wanted to preserve as many teaching jobs as possible because of the impacts teachers have on students throughout the district.
“Kids come to school with a whole host of things and the teachers are working the front lines, supporting them is the most important thing we can do,” she said. “We are a district filled with teachers saving some kids’ lives every day and when you start playing zone defense with less people we’re not gonna be able to reach them and do this in a way to keep our city and students successful.”
When asked if the city had gained any revenue since the previous School Committee Mayor Don Humason explained that it had not, but the current number allowed the city to use the $1.5 million from free cash. He said, “Instead of having a $2 million deficit we had a $500,000 deficit. So that is one of the things that gave us the comfort and ability to use the $1.5 million in free cash.”
One of the biggest issues in the School Committee’s discussion was a confusion over how much the school budget was supposed to be cut. While they were asking to cut $2.35 million, after doing the math, school committee member Ray Diaz said that the cuts would be closer to $1.1 million after the $1.5 million in free cash, $1.14 million from CARES Act funding, and over $700,000 in restorations.
After some discussion over the amount that needed to be cut from the school budget changing several times throughout the budget process, Sullivan expressed her displeasure over how easy it is to manipulate the numbers in the budget. “It’s crazy to trust anybody who’s giving us these numbers, Cindy’s saying it, Ray’s saying it, Bo’s saying it, it doesn’t make sense. It’s so funny how everybody can just move these numbers around and make it look the way they want it to look. I’m going to tell you you’re setting us all back 15 years, this is ridiculous,” Sullivan said.
She added, “I would say to you and everyone else who might be listening, to get back to the table and start thinking about other things. This is ridiculous that you keep going back and forth.”
Another point of confusion at the meeting was the issue over how the offsets would end up affecting the budget. Chief Financial Officer Ron Rix explained that the offsets do not actually go into effect until after the budget is settled.
With the preliminary discussion out of the way, Superintendent Stefan Czaporowski jumped into the revised budget. He explained that as a result of the revisions the district was able maintain 19 positions across the district that were originally going to be cut. The budget still requires a projected reduction of 27 positions, however.
Czaporowski said, “We did try to keep the cuts away from the kids as much as possible. I think that this list of restored positions, if this budget passes, check what we consider priorities in our district.”
School committee Chair Tim O’ Connor voiced his support for the new budget and said, “I think this is one of the better budgets that puts us in a position to manage any mid-year cuts as we move forward.”
Ultimately the school committee approved and sent along the revised budget to the city council.
For the majority of the city council meeting the council questioned Mayor Humason about the different aspects of the budget and the planning process.
As part of the city council meeting, Humason explained some of the important expenses the city was able to keep in the budget. He said, “One thing that we were able to preserve is the need to pave city streets and so I can say if there is one highlight in the budget it’s that we were able to fund that.”
He added that one of his primary goals in the budget was to preserve jobs as much as possible. “We tried to impact personnel as little as possible, for example we wanted to lay people off as little as possible. What we really went after were travel expenses, supplies, and things like that,” he said.
One of councilor Dave Flaherty’s concerns over the budget was the increase in tax revenue between the tax rate going up and in new growth. He said, “If we’re $8 million short and we have $3 million in new taxes, it’s a big problem, it’s a growing problem and it’s not going away.”
Humason also said that he and his team only accounted for money the city actually had when making the budget. “I had to count the money we had on hand, not money that was promised to us or that we might receive only because I feared what would happen if we used revenue that was not coming in. Mid-year cuts are far more painful then beginning of the year cuts so, I tended to base our budget on revenue we did not already have,” he said.
After the discussion with Humason, the city council approved to send the budget along to the next step in the review process.
The Westfield City Council will host a public hearing on the budget on June 22.