Mayoral hopefuls weigh in on key issues facing city

Globe Staff Photo/Yoon S. Byun

The candidates at Thursday night's debate.

Whether the four-term incumbent keeps his job or is replaced by one of his three rivals, Boston’s mayor faces a host of challenges the next four years. To assess them, the Boston Municipal Research Bureau and Pioneer Institute have teamed up to identify key issues for the city and ask the candidates how they would respond.

Each day this week, MetroDesk will highlight one of the issues and post the responses by Mayor Thomas M. Menino, City Councilors Sam Yoon and Michael F. Flaherty Jr., and South End developer Kevin McCrea.

The issue: Spending on city employees

The context: City government is labor intensive. Spending for city employees and benefits represents 67 percent of Boston's current operating budget and continues to grow. This presented a major financial challenge to the City as it strove to balance its fiscal 2010 budget in the face of cuts in state aid.

These spending trends are expected to intensify in the upcoming years, further challenging the City’s financial situation and its ability to sustain current employee levels. Over the past five years, 1,209 positions have been added to Boston’s workforce. Personnel spending for salaries and benefits has increased by 31 percent, for an average annual increase of $78 million.

Of the 1,209 positions added, 88.1 percent of these positions were in the School, Police and Fire Departments. In the past year alone, the workforce grew by 1 percent, or 165 positions.

The question: As a candidate for mayor, what do you think is the best way to control the growth in employee compensation and ensure a sustainable workforce?

The answers (alphabetically by candidate):

Flaherty: We shouldn’t have to choose between having a quality workforce and bankrupting our city. Tackling Boston’s fiscal crisis and escalating personnel costs requires strong data-driven management and the adoption of innovative technologies that make government run more efficiently and responsibly.

My administration will adopt CitiStat, a management program that tracks government activities, providing real-time data for each city department. To date, CitiStat has saved cities like Baltimore millions of dollars by identifying and cutting wasteful spending.

Sweeping annual performance reviews will also be conducted to pinpoint areas for improvement, consolidation, or elimination in all departments, services and programs. At the same time, we will reduce personnel spending by joining the state’s Group Insurance Commission and enrolling city retirees into Medicare.

This commonsense and proven solution is a win-win initiative for everyone since taxpayers will no longer have to foot the city’s expensive health care bills and city employees will have access to quality health insurance. By running a more efficient government and trimming wasteful spending, we can achieve meaningful savings that can be redirected towards maintaining appropriately staffed schools, police force, fire department and other critical services that have been compromised by funding gaps.

McCrea: I’ll implement the Finance Commission report recommendations, and perform a comprehensive audit of city hiring, raises, overtime, pensions, and benefits. Eliminating patronage hiring, out-of-line salaries, top-heavy staffing, double-dipping by retirees, unlawful bonuses, out-of-control overtime and pension abuses, and bringing employees into the GIC health plan, will dramatically reduce costs and improve services. No $100,000 a year administrative assistant jobs to family members.

I will analyze the work done by each department and eliminate those providing marginal benefit. I will institute zero-based budgeting; every position and salary will have to be justified yearly in public hearings. I will redirect department budgets, notably at BPS, from administration to core services. I’ll eliminate the BRA, and recover the land and revenue that they control for the taxpayers of Boston.

I will publish on-line all the revenue and expense of the City, including the actuarial statistics of the long term debt obligations of the City. This honesty and transparency will give the City, the citizens and the unions the information necessary for long term planning, and negotiating fair contracts.

Menino: My administration focuses on improving schools, strengthening neighborhoods and developing our economy. Having an efficient and effective city workforce is essential for this task.

We’ve made the tough management decisions in good times and bad. Consequently, we’ve been able to continue investing in constituents’ priorities, while reducing our headcount by over 1,000 positions since FY 02, cutting residential property taxes for two straight years and earning the highest bond rating in the City’s history.

We will continue to:

-- Pursue smart reforms. Every year, we review all operations for opportunities to streamline and improve government. This year we expanded single stream recycling citywide, restructured the Fire Department, modernized printing services and reduced overtime spending.

-- Negotiate prudent contracts. We have a strong record of negotiating both union contracts and health insurance plans. The current union contracts, for example, contain provisions that lowered the City’s contribution to health insurance premiums, saving taxpayers millions.

-- Focus on long-term fiscal health. The city focuses on managing its current head count and long-term obligations. We will continue to balance our priorities in the near term and work at the state level on reforms that control long-term costs.

Yoon: This is a math problem. We have to manage our resources to balance the budget and we cannot ignore our growing responsibility to pay for the health care and pension costs of city retirees.

Last year, our taxpayer-funded watchdog the Boston Finance Commission outlined management reforms that if adopted would have saved $74 million. Out of this report, I advocated that the city manage personnel costs by 1) curbing out of control overtime costs in police, fire and public works and 2) eliminating unnecessary high-end six-figure jobs. But the city refused to even consider those reforms as part of our budget process.

We need a total overhaul of our budget process and we have to move to a performance based management system to evaluate optimal staffing levels in every department. There are many efficiencies to be achieved which will actually improve delivery of city services. A thorough top to bottom review of departments and personnel spending will be a first order of business as mayor.

Even more importantly, the real savings can be found in the millions of dollars changing hands behind closed doors at the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

Coming Tuesday: Measuring performance.