I was beginning to doubt that it would ever happen. I still do - and I'm superstitious enough to be reluctant to talk about it. The legislature has apparently decided it should actually honor the Commonwealth's commitments, and has voted to pay higher education employees (including UMass) the raises that were negotiated two and a half years ago. As I write this, we're waiting for the Governor to decide if he, too, believes in honoring commitments (and whether, if he vetoes the bill, the legislature follows through on its commitment to override his veto). What the legislature has voted is to start paying employees in January what we are supposed to be paid at that date, according to the contract. There is also a verbal commitment to find a way to pay for the retroactive amount due us, but that hasn't been written into a bill yet, let alone passed.
Add to that the fact that lots of money is owed to people who have been laid off or who have retired in the meantime, and a whole bunch more who may retire just before the pay raises take effect - and you can see there are lots of places where the temptation might be overwhelming to cheat us employees out of our money.
You can understand, I'm sure, why all my digits are still crossed.
My feelings are mixed. I do want to thank the legislature for finally "doing the right thing." I sincerely want to thank Stan Rosenberg and Ellen Story, Amherst's State Senator and Representative, for working for this vote, and the ones that must follow it. I am absolutely sure they have done their best.
None the less, I am becoming increasingly cynical about governments honoring their commitments, and that's not a comfortable position for me to be in. Not only am I a long-term employee of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I am also the child of two public servants: both my parents were librarians who worked all their lives for governments (state, federal, county). Also, I believe government has many important roles to play in our lives, including providing services that people need and deserve but which will never make a profit, such as libraries, public education, open space and habitat for non-human species, etc.
It has infuriated me that the voters of this "Commonwealth" have repeatedly voted against paying for those common goods. In the past half-decade or so, I have called members of my union, all of them public employees, asking them to vote against tax-cut referendums and in favor of Democrats running for office. Mostly they agreed, but I was appalled at the number of them who either said right out that they were going to vote the other way, or whose tone of voice conveyed tense disagreement. I would rather put up with some waste and get the good, than throw the whole thing out. But the elections show that I am in a minority in this state.
It's not just me. Survey data indicates that our part of the state is much more supportive of public services and the taxes needed to pay for them than other parts of the Commonwealth. So now I ask: what can we do about that?
One thing we might do is educate people. On October 24, there was a conference at UMass, sponsored by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), called "Where Did All the Tax Revenue Go? The Fiscal Crisis of the States." I wasn't able to go - had to be at work, after all - but many of the papers given at the conference are available on the Web at: http://www.umass.edu/peri/fiscalcrisis.html
Elissa Braunstein, a research professor at PERI, showed that the primary cause of the state budget's fiscal meltdown was a reduction in tax revenue, not the recession or overspending. According to her research, changes to state tax laws in 1996 led to significant declines in corporate income taxes, capital gains taxes, and personal income taxes during the late 1990s. She calculates that the Commonwealth could have collected $4.4 billion more than it did during those years. If it had put that money into the "rainy day fund", we would have been prepared to ride out the recession relatively painlessly.
Which gets us back to the question of credibility. What would the governor and legislature have done with that much money in the boom-boom 90s? In hindsight, we can say they should have put it into savings. But is that realistic? Legislators get defensive when anyone suggests they should have put more aside when times were good. They are acutely aware that large savings accounts for government are considered evidence of "over taxing" by voters. I thought then, and still think now, there was another choice: paying for needed repairs to courthouses, state parks, campus buildings, etc., with cash, instead of borrowing. If we had fixed up our public facilities with money that was available then we might have been able to both reduce our dept and defeat the tax- cut initiative.
But that's all water through the dam. Now we have to balance our budgets, meet our obligations, and restore credibility for government. As both a government employee and occasional official, I'm hoping for the best but not willing to be too gullible. Has anybody got any good ideas?