I work all day at the University, where everyone is understandably obsessing about budget cuts and layoffs and whether there will be an early retirement offer; I come home and turn on ACTV to watch Town Meeting's consideration of the School budget and people are talking about things not being as bad as they had feared, restoring funds, and expecting to ask voters next year to support an override for $1.5 million. Not one Town Meeting member asked why the School Committee had agreed to pay the new Superintendent $130,000 a year in this economic climate. It felt like reality whiplash. What planet are these people living on?
It is true that so far the terrible shortfall in state tax revenues have hit cities and towns less hard than state agencies. Communities have their own funding sources. And, if they have been wise, they have some reserve funds saved during the boom years, as Amherst does. So the town is, at least temporarily, better off. It has to deal with level funding or small increases in budgets that don't cover the costs of inflation.
But state agencies are suffering actual and significant reductions in their budgets. According to the UMass Campus Chronicle, itself a victim of cuts, the budgets passed in the two branches of the legislature mean cuts of either $79.8 million (18 per cent) in the House budget, or $52.8 million (12.1 per cent) in the Senate. To prepare for these levels of reduction, the Chancellor began a process of selecting the areas to be cut. As of mid-June, the Chancellor had announced $15.8 million in reductions. He is now waiting to see what the actual budget will be before proceeding with cuts in academic departments to make up the difference between $15.8 million and that final figure.
As a result, we stare at the Web page that lists programs and how much they are being reduced. Some will lose all their state support; others, which still have some state funding, may or may not be able to continue in such a reduced mode. People working in programs that haven't been listed yet, or where the total amount is listed but no one has said what the effect will be, are worrying about what news the future will bring.
This situation comes after devastating cuts last year, including layoffs and hundreds of people retiring, many of them earlier than they had intended to and with correspondingly smaller pensions. In addition, all employees and former employees of public higher education in Massachusetts are owed money for raises in a contract the state agreed to two years ago but has never paid for.
All of this is bad economic news for the entire region. This region is heavily dependent on state spending, whether for higher education, social services, aid to cities and towns, construction and repair of bridges and roads, environmental protection and grants to arts organizations. All of these have been reduced or eliminated, and will be reduced again for the coming fiscal year. Surely private businesses are feeling the pinch of having fewer customers and less money in the regional economy.
Will things improve the year after that? Not likely. Nothing on the news suggests that Massachusetts' finances are improving. Nor was anyone optimistic at the annual meeting for municipal officials sponsored by Senator Stan Rosenberg two months ago.
Under the circumstances, I doubt the wisdom of the decision made in Amherst to take money from the fund created for capital projects (maintaining facilities) to spend on the operating budget. And I simply can't understand the apparent optimism of Amherst's officials that the town's citizens will feel they can afford to vote themselves a large tax increase when, as seems almost certain, state aid to localities is reduced again.
But mostly, I don't understand the School Committee's decision to pay an astounding salary to the new superintendent. Ours is a small school district: after all, it has only one high school, one middle school, and five small elementary schools (four in Amherst, one in Pelham). According to the Amherst Bulletin, no other town or regional district in the vicinity pays over $100,000. If an individual wants to leave a large district and move to a much smaller one, then surely he expects a significant reduction in pay, just as there is a significant reduction in responsibility. I am not convinced by claims "we got a bargain"; the statement that the salary won't result in additional teachers being laid off because the range of the salary was "taken into account" when developing the budget really means that the teachers were laid off in advance of announcing the salary.
I also wonder why we, the taxpayers and voters, weren't informed of the Committee's intention to pay at this level during the time when we could have spoken up to some effect. I did not see any reference in news coverage of the search process, or the budget development, to the kind of salary the Committee envisioned paying, and what the costs and benefits of trying to play in the big leagues are.