Natick Town Meeting

I’ve been holding back on commenting about Town Meeting. I’ve been watching and thinking, I’m glad I lost that re-vote. I don’t think I have the stamina to attend all the meetings they’ve had this year. I noticed there has been a lot of debate on the various articles and I’ve read comments from different members who have written into the newspaper, it shows this group is serious about what happens in Town. I do have one question though. Why didn’t Town Meeting allow the voters to decide whether to have the Clerks position be elected or appointed? It’s one thing for Town Meeting to vote on articles within their purview but if it’s something that should be decided by the voters we should be given the opportunity to voice our opinion at the ballot box. Someone at Town Meeting made a comment that the Clerks position is nothing but a popularity contest and should be appointed. First I’d like to say, look around you. All elections especially Town meeting seats are popularity contests. If you like someone you vote for them even though you may not share the same political views. When we go in to vote for Town Meeting members most of the time we’re voting for people we hardly know except in passing, but we recognize their name. Sometimes it’s the parent of one of our kids’ friends and the kid seems OK so we vote for their parent. Sometimes we may have crossed paths with someone and they rubbed us the wrong way or maybe treated a store clerk rudely and that sticks with us. I vote for the people I know and like as do most people. Anyway getting back to the Town Clerk. There was a time when the sitting Clerk was going to retire, someone from within the Clerks Office was ready to step in and run for the Clerks position and that person would get elected. Why was that? Well, popularity. The Town Clerk is the one position that deals with the most citizens. If someone in the Clerks office is rude or does not meet the needs of the citizen, then there’s a good chance they won’t get elected if they tried to run for the position. The Town Clerk is the official keeper of records. I’m pretty sure there are several organizations specific to Town Clerks that are available to instruct a new Clerk and keep all Clerks up to date with the changing regulations that govern them. If the Town wants to ensure that a professional is running they could change the Town Charter to mandate certain qualifications be met by people seeking the office. That’s what the Town Administrator would do if given the authority to appoint someone, the Administrator would have a set of qualifications for the applicant.

Either way, for Town Meeting to deny the citizens the right to vote is somewhat elitist. They know better than us what’s best, sounds like a certain State legislative body.

Taking a break for a PSA

I’m taking a break from messing with our local leaders for a public service announcement. On the news this morning I heard a story about a woman who went to one of those debt consolidation places that claims to lower your credit card payments. This woman not only did not get the “relief” she sought, but the company charged her over $900 on her credit card. I put relief in quotes because most people are trying to get out of paying what they owe. When we get a card we agree to their terms. They claim the right to change (meaning raise) their rates without notice. The problem with this is the change (raised not lowered) is applied retroactive to prior purchases and interest fees which isn’t fair but is apparently legal and ultimately causes the interest owed to be more than the original purchases. I have been sitting back and hearing these ads and feeling guilty for not sharing what I know and how my wife got us out from under our credit card debt. Like most people we started out small with card limits of $500 and paid them off as the bills came in. Because we were good doobies, not that kind, the kind that do what’s expected of them, we were rewarded with higher limits. And what happens to most people happened to us, along with lay offs and using them to pay monthly bills and buy groceries it didn’t take long to amass a small debt in the low to mid 5 digits.

One night when we were paying the bills I actually read the fine print on the back of one of the credit card bills. There it was in -4 pt. print. Canceling the card would drop the rate on the outstanding debt to the current rate for an unsecured loan. The present card rates being charged is for revolving credit which is hovering around 29%. One more percentage point and it would be loan sharking, but seeing as the Fed sets the rates it’s all legal. Anyway we tore up our cards, which after years of relying on them was harder than quitting some of the drugs I took when I was younger. The thought of how would we make large purchases, how could we go to dinner, make hotel reservations, etc was very unsettling. I was used to making reservations at a hotel on a Wednesday and going home and telling my wife we were going away that weekend. It was very spontaneous and romantic but it came at a huge price.

 We cut up the cards and then we called all the places we had cards from and told them we were canceling our accounts. They said we would have to do it in writing with our next payments, which we did. Then when the next round of bills came in the rates on the remaining balances had dropped significantly. This is where it gets hard. My wife then took the lowest card debt and paid half of the outstanding debt and continued to pay the others at slightly more than the minimum payment. The following month she again paid half on the smallest and a little more than the previous month on the rest. She did this with all the cards which I believe totaled 5 between store and credit cards. It took awhile and there were some life style adjustments along with the lack of being able to make impulse purchases or in my case spontaneous weekend reservations. As for hotel reservations and other things that supposedly require a credit card, we call and make a reservation and mail a check. They still accept checks. It’s not spontaneous but it’s still romantic. When we go to dinner we pay cash. We have money in our savings and when we need something we can pay cash now which we couldn’t do before. If you are like me and thought you needed credit cards to survive I can tell you, you don’t.

 I will add this though. We keep our money in the local bank that has no branches. We don’t have an ATM card which cuts down on accessing our money. Our refrigerator died on Memorial Day. So we went to Home Depot got a store card and bought a refrigerator that day off the floor and brought it home. They had no interest for 1 year on purchases over $500. We paid that off over 2 months. We could have paid it in one but what the heck no interest. When we got the card the rate was 7% on purchases under the $500. We just received a phone call last Friday from Home Depot saying their rate was going up to 29%. Guess where that cards going. We’ll stick to paying cash.

Our house is 200 years old. We’ve wanted to replace the windows for years but couldn’t afford them. We called a local company that said they could arrange financing. The financing turned out to be through Capital One. They had a special rate for this particular companies customers, it was 19%. That was 2 years ago. We passed and saved up the money and paid cash just last week. If we had taken the financing it would have cost us more and we would still be paying it off.

And one last thing, I heard a government economist say not to cancel your cards because it will negatively impact your credit rating. Mine went from below 400 to an embarrassingly high of over 750, so considering what the government has done to help the economy it’s wise to consider the source and that includes me

I don’t know if this will help people but that’s what we did and it seemed to work for us.

Natick Priorities

There’s an article in today’s MWDN about the physical condition of Cedar Gardens. Cedar Gardens was built at the same time as the original section of the High School and appears to be in the same state of disrepair. What is it about our Town that we can’t seem to maintain our buildings?

First I need to make another comment about the claims being made by the school building committee that construction costs are down. I checked with my iron workers this week, the cost of steel dropped 3 cents a pound last year, but has since come back up. When you are talking hundreds of thousands of pounds in a building it does add up. The problem with public construction is the bidding laws do not allow for qualification of bids. In private work we receive bids with qualifiers that base the bids on the cost of materials at that time. If the cost goes up or down before the contracts are signed the price will be adjusted accordingly. In public work it is a crap shoot. If a company bids on a project based on the price of materials the day the bids are opened and the contracts aren’t signed for a year the fluctuations in material costs cannot be realized. If the costs go up the contractor has to absorb it, if the costs go down the contractor makes a larger profit and the municipality is the loser.

Again the justification for building a new school is the one we have now has leaks, an old heating system and old windows. Following that reasoning we should be building new senior housing as it has the same problems. The high school is used 10 hours a day, 5 days a week for 10 months a year. Cedar Gardens is used 24/365. And a lot of the residents never leave their apartments except for doctors appointments. Actually we should be repairing both but that plaque thing keeps getting in the way.

Our seniors don’t need a new center, they need decent housing. The usage numbers being floated by the senior center are misleading. They claim over 3000 people used the senior center. That’s not true. Every time someone goes in or makes a call, that counts as a use. It’s not 3000 different people. It’s like McDonalds saying billions served. McDonalds has served more people than there are on the planet. The Town should look at building new senior housing that would incorporate a community building into it along with a therapy pool. There is grant and low interest loan money at the federal level for a project like this. And as we are all going to get old this would be beneficial to those of us that will someday no longer be able to afford our homes but don’t want to leave town and still provide a meeting place for the seniors that can afford their own homes. And you’ll get your pool.

But for the time being, something needs to be done about the existing buildings at Cedar Gardens. These apartments are peoples’ homes and if a landlord of private housing allowed their buildings to deteriorate like this the tenant would be calling the BOH. I am curious about the broken floor tiles, if they are really old, what do you think they are made of? As for the moss on the roof I guess we could just tell them it’s a roof garden.

Natick Revenue

In a misguided attempt at having the meals tax reconsidered I have to ask the question who is Jim Brown trying to protect? First I’ll use the example of the Quinn bill. The State created the Quinn bill as an incentive for police to further their education. Then the State decided to cut their share of the funding leaving the local towns to decide whether to pick up the States’ share.  I am using this bill as an example because it is representative of other State programs and mandates that are now going unfunded by the State yet the towns are required to maintain. The State level politicians aren’t completely stupid. They can’t risk raising taxes again even though the turnover in our legislature is disgustingly low. So at the prompting of the city of Boston the State allowed the local option rooms and meals tax.

Now our Town Meeting bought the bullshit (yeah I said it) that raising the room tax would put Natick hotels, motels and inns at a competitive disadvantage to surrounding towns. By the way Framingham just raised the room and meal tax. Now Jim Brown is requesting the meals tax be reconsidered because it would effect more than just restaurants. It would effect every vendor of prepared foods in town. The problem I have with his argument is this. All these vendors are required to collect a sales tax and changing the rate does not affect their ability to do so, nor will it effect their sales. This money does not come out of the vendors pocket it comes out of the customers. If anything I would say reconsider the room tax. If the Town does not take advantage of these revenue sources then either cuts will be made in local budgets or there will have to be another operational override placed on the backs of property owners to continue funding the States’ unfunded share of things. Good luck pushing for an operational override, a new school override and a new senior center override without capitalizing on all sources of revenue first. Look around, people are still getting laid off or having salaries and benefits reduced. I actually can’t believe I’m taking this position but if the Town does not use all available means to generate revenue then we may have to set up speed traps at the borders, although we may catch the Town employees racing out of town at night in unmarked town vehicles.

The taxes we should have

I’m still trying to catch up with what’s going on in town since coming back to work in the best state in the nation. I may have missed it but I feel like one of those people that says’ I love you to someone and there is no response. I’m talking about Martha White and those two words I long to hear “it’s just” as in the override is just another $135 a year. I finally have a chance to hear those words used in a sentence and used appropriately. I’m of course referring to the meals tax. If you read the only newspaper in town that covers Natick you’ll see the article about the vote the other night. In the comments section people were saying that they will no longer eat in Natick because of the tax. One person said it’s the principle not the money, he’ll show us. Then I read this morning that Town Meeting voted against the hotel tax. Now I don’t know about you but I eat where the food is good. Anyone that’s ever eaten at Luigi’s, JJ’s, Agostino’s or Casey’s knows there is a good chance you’re going to stand in line to get in. People will still patronize their favorite place no matter where it is. People will still come to Natick to eat even if it cost a few more cents. The same goes for hotels, when I travel I’m looking for a place that’s close to my destination, is clean and has certain amenities. Then I look at the room rates and if I can’t afford to stay close I have to weigh the option of convenience of location and amenities over room rate. I’ve never really looked at the tax because in most places outside Massachusetts there’s a state tax, local tax and they tack a gratuity onto the bill. I’d really like to meet the owners of the hotels that were at Town Meeting. Were they little old gray haired people or investors in suits and ties? Natick was once a tourist destination when trains were powered by steam and horse droppings were on the unpaved roads. Do you think they had a pooper scooper law back then? Anyways I wonder why town meeting would pass one tax but not the other, I know the votes were close but these two should have been no brainers. I doubt they would bring in as much as they think but it wouldn’t hurt.

The New Natick High $chool

With all due respect for the School Committees hired gun, Mr. Sanchioni, he really has to stop saying “Building the high school now would save money because the recession has slowed the construction industry”. That was a quote from the newspaper today. I have read other such quotes from him and various members of the school building committee. The truth is the school will be built at prevailing wage and all the profit that the law allows. Construction material costs have not gone down despite what you see at Home Depot. Large buildings are not built from suppliers like that.
It’s pretty much a done deal that we will be building a new school. There will be a special town meeting where it will be explained that we have spent millions on designs and we’re on a short list and there will never be an opportunity like this and the existing school is in such disrepair. And true to form town meeting will rubber stamp it and then it’s off for a vote by the fine citizens of Pleasantville that can’t acknowledge that there is really a recession going on outside their borders. So please stop saying we are going to save money, this is going to come in higher than estimated.
We can’t wholly blame the current school committee for the condition of the high school. For that we have to go back to 2000 and all the committees from then to the present. They’ve all refused to spend any money on real capital improvements in hopes that a new school would be built during their reign. It’s been musical chairs over whose name would be on the plaque since then. Well let me be the first to congratulate the present school board for winning. I would suggest that the plaque instead list every resident and business owner that will be paying for this for the next twenty years.
Now bring on the new senior “community” center for all the seniors that are going to want to retire here and pay for all this new building. I hope it has a pool.

Who’s J. Spitz

At times I take great delight in lampooning our local politicians. I personally like all of them even though I may not like the direction they’re taking us. I have been looking for quite a while for a second home to retire to and in my searching I have found that I’m already there. I was born here, more or less, I’ve lived here my whole life and I’m gonna die here. The first thing I check when looking at other places is what the tax rate is and what the town services are. Then I check to see what the commercial and retail base is or in some cases how far away they might be. There really is no place that has a relative lower tax rate to services than Natick. That’s not to say it won’t change if we keep tearing down buildings and putting up new ones but that’s another piece. We are centrally located to everything. We can walk downtown to get just about anything or a 5 minute ride to get to one of the biggest retail areas in the state. Not to mention the train into Boston. We may not have the retail diversity of downtown Waltham or Framingham in our town center, but we can drive to those towns if we need to. It may appear that we roll up the sidewalks at 10 o’clock. That’s because we do and that’s not a bad thing because we can go to one of the surrounding towns that has establishments that stay open later. That would be the proximity appeal without having to deal with the problems that sometimes arise with late night revelry. A touch snobbish but that’s why we are on the list. Natick is small enough that you know most people by name or at least by sight and they still say hi to each other. You can’t do that in the larger communities. And in the smaller ones like Dover or Sherborn they’re pretty spread out and have no town centers to speak of. The utility bills are also cheaper in Natick, if you don’t count the added fee on our electric bills to bury the overhead power lines someday, which is also a plus, someday. The reason for this is it’s always a bit cooler in the summer and bit warmer in the winter than the surrounding towns. That comes with having a charmed existence.
We have art galleries which is pretty cool. With the exception of Floral Ave. we have good roads that are well maintained and plowed better than any road anywhere. We have no real crime to speak of due in part to the police involvement with our kids and parents that really do talk to each other about their kids. Speaking of kids we have all kinds of sports and other activities for them. I could go on but I won’t. I’ll let you. And if you have trouble trying to figure out who J. Spitz is, she’ll be the person walking down the street that looks like a rolly polly bug with legs.

The NIMFY’S

The NYMFY’s ( Not In My Front Yard ) across from the High School have to come up with something better than a little surface drainage problem to stop the new school from being built where it should be built. Like the current school building the existing drainage system has suffered from neglect. All those years of puddling were caused by a lack of maintenance to the structures and pipes along with the usual settling you would get over time. This is not a deal breaker to locating the new building next to the old one where it rightfully belongs. Of course for a few dollars more we could take down the football stadium put the new school there and when the old building comes down we could build a new sports complex with a swimming pool, a skating rink and room for a pony on that site. Wouldn’t that look better. Oh but wait, the water table is higher at the ball field than at the school. No problem we’ll just bring in all kinds of fill, run pumps continuously and design a foundation with no basement that will support the building. One more thing though, don’t forget the landfill under the golf course. There is a very good chance that contamination from the landfill has migrated under the ground in that high water table. But hey Clean Harbors has to eat too and at prevailing wage they could be eating lobster.

The canoe

I got the inspiration for this piece watching my wife and mother in law in a canoe. They were facing each other so they could talk and row at the same time. It was entertaining to us on shore. They were moving but they weren’t getting where they wanted to go. It made me think about the article in the MWDN about the financial presentation given on the 16^th and what’s going on in our Town.

We are going to be short 3 million and change in 2011and that’s a conservative estimate. We already have an operational over ride that was good for 2 years meaning there will probably be another coming soon.  Our reserves are shrinking to nothing as they are being tapped to balance the budget. The Town Administrator says we should be investing more in repairing and replacing buildings and equipment so they do not deteriorate and cost the Town even more. Where was she 10 years ago during the first incarnation of renovate versus replace the High School. If the Town had followed the recommendations of that first engineering survey and renovated in phases the building would have been done a long time ago. It is obvious that the Town has done nothing in the way of capital improvements to maintain the building in hopes that it would fall down on its own.

The article mentions rising health care costs as part of the budget problems. Why isn’t this being addressed during contract negotiations? Most of us that have jobs have them because our companies told us we needed to share in the burdens of keeping them going. Giving up fuel allowance, matching 401 payments, paying a portion of our health insurance. Anyone that has any sense of loyalty to their employer or any sense at all in this economy would be more than willing to share the burden. To do less is shortsighted and mercenary. If the Town administration is worried that the employees will quit then maybe they’ve been in the public sector to long. Other towns have real hiring freezes and for every job that comes available in the private sector there are100 over qualified people applying for it.

And in case you haven’t noticed, Natick is not the hot bed of real estate activity it was 2 years ago. Houses are sitting on the market longer and they’re selling for a lot less than what they are assessed for. So keep on hiring, keep on driving Town vehicles home at night, move full speed ahead on a new school. Just like the canoe we’ll be moving, just not where we want to go, and unlike the canoe it’s not comical.

The Hiring “Chill”

A while back I managed to catch a short piece of the Selectman’s meeting. It had to do with hiring an extra person for I believe the payroll department. The Town Manager used the phrase ” hiring chill”. As I recall her justification for using the phrase was that the Town has a hiring freeze except that with the approval of the Selectmen we can hire people so it’s not really a freeze but a chill. A fine piece of verbal gymnastics. The justification for this particular hire was that it would save money down the road. Well the Chairman, Mr. C., put on a good show by strenuously opposing it but approved it anyway. I bring this up because I saw in the paper that my daughters former future father in-law and since the last election my former friend in ranting about the evils of Natick, Jeff Silverstein, met with the Fire Chief to discuss staffing at the Fire Dept. Due to the hiring freeze there seems to be a shortage of men to adequately staff each shift. At this point some people would say things are tough all over Blah Blah Blah. But part of the operational over ride was specific to the Fire Dept. and quite frankly public safety and the safety of the people that perform these duties is a serious thing. I’m curious to know if the “hiring chill” applies to Town Hall only or can it be extended beyond those four walls to other departments, especially ones that had funding voted for it?