The Taxman Takes Another Bite

The Newburyport City Council provided quite a show Monday evening. There was drama, deal-making, possibly a little skull-duggery and for the PG-13 set, several councilors even discussed their showering habits and it was all topped-off with a $300,000 tax hike. The meals tax pushed by Councilor Cameron was nearly de-railed when a proposed ordinance that put the spending cart before the tax horse was deemed legally suspect and tabled, splitting the coalition committed to making it more expensive to dine in our city. Undaunted, Cameron with the able assistance of Councilor Connell and input from Mayor Holaday, who was watching it all on t.v., devised a plan to keep the taxpayer squeeze alive. At this point, the committee recessed to hastily write a new proposal to keep the votes of the "sidewalk two" in favor of the tax.

Now, prior to the meeting I took a quick gander at the city budget and found a line in nearly every department labeled "Longevity". During the break in the action, I asked Councilor Earls what exactly these longevity payments were. As I feared, he informed me that they were payments, above salary and overtime that the city was contractually obligated to pay public employees based on their length of service. These bonuses start at $718 for the Harbormaster's Dept. and top out at $128,133 for the Fire Dept. and total $313,573.38 for this fiscal year, excluding the school department which didn't itemize their personnel expenses. Councilor Earls also informed me that education was one of the few areas that isn't walled off by collectively bargained agreements, so it receives the vast majority of whacks from the budget axe.

It is a given in America that contracts are inviolable, unless you were a secured creditor of Chrysler and your rights conflicted with the president's political patrons at the UAW, that is. While the city must pay these bonuses, even though it meant cutting foreign language programs from the schools and guarantees future cuts, there is nothing stopping the unions, other than greed, that represent the public employees of this city from re-negotiating these ridiculous contracts. I've been around long enough to realize that AFSCME, which represents most public sector union members in this country sees taxpayers as nothing more than an ATM. Which is why they spent $87.5 million in the mid-term elections trying to keep as many of their Democrat party patrons in office to keep that money flowing. But won't they do it for the children? Shouldn't a decent salary, generous health and retirement benefits and plentiful overtime be enough?

The residents of this city, state and nation need to realize that public sector union contracts are bleeding us dry. Because the pension fund for state workers has an unfunded liability of $22 billion, $1.3 billion was spent this year to shore it up. That's a devastating $1.3 billion in cuts to local aid, which could have been spent on schools statewide. You can bet that Gov. Patrick and the Democrat-controlled legislature will bail the fund out again this year and every year until we wake up and stop them. Here's hoping watching California go banrupt will wake the voters' of Massachusetts up.