EASTHAMPTON – The city is set to hire six new school personnel, two public works staffers, a police officer, a firefighter and an emergency dispatcher after the City Council on Wednesday approved the mayor’s $39.33 million budget.
The budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 represents an overall increase of 3.11 percent compared to this year’s figure of $38.13 million.
While officials universally lauded the smart fiscal management that allowed new hires, City Councilor Jennifer Hayes voiced concern over the amount of information Mayor Karen L. Cadieux provided in the budget document – prompting a tense exchange between the two and impacting Hayes’ votes.
“For the first time since I believe 2008, our budget didn’t shrink,” Councilor Daniel D. Rist said. “You may wonder if a pot of gold was discovered.”
City officials said the favorable fiscal picture resulted from a small increase in state aid and the reorganization, restructuring and regionalization of various departments.
“This is no windfall,” Cadieux said. “This is three years of extreme financial planning and frugality.”
Public safety spending is up 3 percent at $5.2 million. The budget calls for the hiring of a new police officer, firefighter and dispatcher.
Fire Chief David Mottor said the new dispatcher will soon be even more important to an already spread-thin emergency call center. Currently, 911 calls from cell phones are answered by state police and then transferred to local departments. But in the near future those calls will be automatically routed to the appropriate local department based on the caller’s GPS location.
He pointed to the example of the fire last week on Clark Street as proof that call volume will increase dramatically for Easthampton dispatchers.
“State took over 20 911 calls from that fire,” he said. “In the future all of those will end up in Easthampton.”
Police Capt. Robert Alberti said hiring a new officer will help relieve the workload of the city’s detective bureau, which currently consists of two officers.
School spending is up 2.01 percent at $16.52 million.
The budget calls for six new positions: a second-grade teacher and speech and language pathologist’s assistant to work at the Center/Pepin School; a world language teacher and a part-time reading specialist for White Brook Middle School; a design technology teacher at Easthampton High School; and a behavior analyst to work throughout the district.
“We’re optimistic that it’s the beginning of a growth phase of the Easthampton Public Schools,” Superintendent Nancy Follansbee said. “We put back positions that we believed were the most essential at this point.”
The public works and facilities budget is up 4.95 percent at $1.69 million.
The budget will allow the DPW to hire two new staffers, one in the Highway Department and another in the Water Department.
“We’re just thrilled with the budget,” Department of Public Works Director Joseph I. Pipczynski said. “We’re thrilled with the numbers.”
Pipczynski also provided an update on the city’s paving projects. In the coming fiscal year, the department plans to pave the entire lengths of Plain and Strong streets, he said.
The human services budget is up 9.78 percent at $623,396.48. The budget calls for added services at the Council on Aging’s Enrichment Center.
That includes van service being extended to destinations in Northampton. And the COA director plans to open the center on Saturdaysbeginning in July on a trial basis, Cadieux said.
The council considered the budget in a series of 10 votes. Councilor Salem Derby was absent. Approval was unanimous for schools, debt and interest, employee benefits, community preservation and enterprises. Hayes abstained from voting for general government, public safety, human services, culture and recreation and public works.
After the meeting, Hayes told the Gazette that the abstentions stemmed from Cadieux’s responses to her questions at the beginning of the session. She said she only voted when she felt she had adequate information about proposed spending.
Hayes asked the mayor why the budget document did not include a year-to-year percentage change on each line item. Such figures are common in municipal budgets and were included in Easthampton’s spending plans for 2015 and 2016. The 2017 budget includes figures from prior fiscal years which allow for the manual calculation of variances.
Cadieux said that the absence of the figures was a result of the budget being made available for the first time in electronic form, something that Hayes pushed for last year.
“This budget is in PDF form and this is the way that you requested it – so this is how it’s on there,” Cadieux said. “It has the exact amount from year to year. If you wanted to figure out the percentages, I’m sure you could.”
The exchange reached a breaking point when Cadieux chastised Hayes for not attending the Finance Committee budget hearings earlier this month.
“It just would have been nice if we had those variances in it,” Hayes said.
Cadieux replied: “It would have been nice if you attended the budget hearings.”
Rist said that he disagreed with Hayes’ opinion because the council did not specifically request that percentage variances be included in the document.
Councilor Peg Conniff said that it was a “worthy conversation” to have and one that officials should engage in before the next budget is drafted.
After the meeting, Hayes agreed that she would have benefited from attending the budget hearings. But she said variance figures are an integral part of a transparent municipal budget because they allow spending to be analyzed without performing manual calculations on each line item.
“I abstained from voting on some of the sections because I didn’t feel like the city budget (document) was comprehensive enough for me to be able to make thoughtful and intelligent decisions,” she said.
Hayes said Cadiuex sent a signal that her questions were not welcome because she did not attend the earlier budget hearings.
Chris Lindahl can be reached at clindahl@gazettenet.com.