Robert David Sullivan 2

New Bedford heading south again?

Steve Urbon of the Standard-Times has a succinct but awfully bleak assessment of how New Bedford is doing in the current recession. Opening sentence:

Unemployment has hung like a dark cloud over New Bedford almost from the city's beginning, baffling and confounding nearly everyone who has tried to understand it and eliminate it.

Perhaps the most discouraging angle in the story is that New Bedford (photo of historic district by Mark Morelli) did seem to make progress earlier in the decade, getting its unemployment rate down to 6 percent, but Urbon reports that it's now 12 percent, or double the state average:

"Two decades worth of improvement, shattered in a matter of months."

That is the blunt verdict on SouthCoast's unemployment problem from Clyde W. Barrow, director of the UMass Dartmouth Center for Policy Analysis, as he surveys the wreckage caused by the recession.

"The most discouraging part for me is that we seem to have reverted to the old pattern of being double the state average unemployment rate through the trough of a recession," he said. "Over the last two business cycles we seem to be moving away from closing the unemployment gap."

Haverhill City Council prefers to live at-large

Haverhill gets into the debate over at-large versus district city councilors, but change doesn't seem to be in the air. The Eagle-Tribune's Shawn Regan reports that most of the current nine at-large councilors -- all of them white -- aren't inclined to make room at the table for colleagues elected from specific neighborhoods:

Several councilors including Michael McGonagle said they prefer the at-large system because they enjoy representing the entire the city and all its residents.

"This is looking for diversity for all the wrong reasons," McGonagle said of Donahue's proposal. "I ran to see if my personal experience could make the city better. I don't care about the race or sex of a candidate. I look at a person's record. Diversity for diversity's sake is a quota, and I'm against that."

But another councilor, William Ryan, says that it's "almost impossible for new faces to win" citywide:

Ryan said he could not recall a councilor ever being elected from the Acre area of the city and only one previous councilor from the Mount Washington neighborhood. Those areas are where most of the city's low-income residents and minorities live, Ryan said.

Historic mill on the chopping block in New Bedford

New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang wants to tear down the 187,000-square-foot Fairhaven Mills building, but local preservationists aren't convinced. According to SouthCoastToday.com's Joe Cohen, a developer interested in the site says the building isn't worth renovating (and there aren't enough state historical tax credits available to change his mind).

Lang says he would "rather honor the river than the mill," by getting rid of the building and providing better public access to the Acushnet River. (That does raise an interesting preservation question. Should public access to a river, harbor, or mountain ever take priority over saving a building, now matter how architecturally significant? Nature does have the prior claim, after all.) The mayor also reeled off instances where he was on the side of the preservationists:

"My administration fought for Cliftex, Victoria Riverside, Wamsutta, Whaler's Place, the Casa da Saudade, Ingraham and other schools, the whale oil refinery on the waterfront and the ice house at Revere Copper," Lang said. "We've done as much or more than anyone in the city" to fight for preservation in recent years.

Green opportunities for Gateway Cities

Will vacant land end up saving the economies of Lawrence and New Bedford? Catherine Tumber writes in the Boston Review that smaller cities that were once industrial centers (such as the Gateway Cities in Massachusetts) offer some unique advantages in a new green economy. In "Small, Green and Good," Tumber points out that many of these cities have large parcels of land suitable for the development of new energy sources:

Alternative energy technologies are in various stages of development, but one thing is already clear: if they work, they will require space that dense metropolitan areas cannot provide. Solar power, which among alternative energies has come closest to achieving grid parity, can make use of rooftops and awnings in big cities, but offers far greater potential when staged on ground mounts on polluted brownfields, suburban greyfields, or open land.... Wind power, unless sited offshore, also requires large tracts of land.

For similar reasons, Tumber writes, smaller cities could be instrumental in developing "local, sustainable agriculture" that is closer to population centers and thus costs less energy to transport. Regional agriculture could also help to supply increasingly popular farmers' markets in major cities, as well as Boston's hypothetical public market. (Tumber cites Holyoke as a pioneer in the urban agricultural movement, and CommonWealth wrote about that city's farming community in 2006; see sidebar to "A Tale of Two Valleys.")

Choosing between cops and library books in Springfield

The quote of the day, from Urban Compass: "I had to choose between keeping police on the streets, and books” -- Springfield Mayor Domenic Sarno

Sarno announced the layoffs of 89 city employees today. The greatest number (44) are in the Department of Public Works, but the city's library department seems to be getting the deepest cuts. The Valley Advocate's Maureen Turner has the numbers:

Faced with deep cuts in local aid, the Sarno administration is looking to cut more than $4.5 million in city spending over the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends June 30. While the cuts are spread across city departments, the Library Department faces the highest percent cut: 10.76 percent, for a total of $455,000. The majority of other departments face cuts of less than five percent....

Sarno told the Advocate last week that he values the city's library system—just not more than other departments, like police and fire. In his budget recommendations, Sarno suggested cuts of 2.35 percent and 2.38 percent, respectively, from the Police and Fire departments. In both cases, those cuts would come almost entirely by leaving vacant positions unfilled.

"I do believe libraries are important," Sarno said. "But in these dire times, I have to make priorities. And my priorities are public safety."

Turner notes that a disproportionate reduction in the library department's budget could jeopardize the city's eligibility for funds from the Mass. Board of Library Commissioners, which would make a bad literary situation even worse.

Worcester's trial balloon: Tax dorm rooms

Like almost every other Massachusetts municipality, Worcester is starved for revenue, and one city councilor has come up with a new source of tax dollars. From the Worcester Telegram's Lisa Welsh:

[City Councilor Michael] Germain suggested at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting extending lodging taxes to dormitory rooms as a way to raise revenue. City Solicitor David M. Moore was asked to report back on the legality of the issue, which Mr. Germain expects to happen on Feb. 17.

“Whenever we talk about the budget it’s the police, fire, DPW and teachers that are targeted,” Mr. Germain said. “Everybody is going to feel the hit here — the city services, the people who work here, the taxpayers. I thought there’s got to be a different way to approach it.”

If the tax goes through, Worcester (the "City on the Move") would become the first city in the US to, in effect, put up a tollgate for people from outside the area who decide to continue their studies there. 

Springfield budget cuts hit 311 phone line and CitiStat program

There's a widespread belief (or hope) that tough times can offer a "golden opportunity" for government reform, but things may not be working out that way in Springfield. Urban Compass explains that the city may gut spending on an effort to determine more efficient ways of spending city money:

According to a report in today’s Republican, the city department seeing the biggest percentage cut, at 15.7 percent, will be the new CitiStat department, which includes the new 311 Citizen Service Center. The cut amounts to about $100,000, which in dollars is less than cuts other departments are facing, but as a percentage of the whole department could represent half the four-person staff, unless the cuts are shifted somehow to operational or personnel costs for maintaining 311 services.

In a presentation in March last year before the control board, ironically, CitiStat director Paul Foster said one of the key functions of CitiStat was to monitor municipal finances, examining how current spending matches up against the budget, and where there may be potential deficits.

This probably does not bode well for a 311 line in Boston.

Tough negotiations with firefighters' union forecast in Haverhill

Here's another example of municipal officials trying to save money vs. public sector workers trying (like everyone else) to preserve their incomes in a tough economy. From the Eagle-Tribune's Shawn Regan:

He may have been the last person Mayor James Fiorentini wanted to find on the other side of the negotiating table.

A fire captain who has publicly feuded with the mayor and who is suing the fire chief in federal court on charges of harassment and retaliation is now representing the city's 90 firefighters as their union president.

Acting fire Capt. Paul Weinburgh took over last week as union president. He defeated former union President Tyler Kimball in a union election last month.

The biggest bone of contention is overtime:

Fiorentini said the Fire Department has already used 90 percent of its overtime budget, with five and a half months left in the fiscal year. In January alone, the department has spent $120,000 in overtime, he said.

One reason overtime costs are up, the mayor said, is that firefighters who are held at work past 8 a.m. while they wait for a replacement have demanded they be paid at least two hours of overtime, even if they were required to stay only for five or 10 minutes. Weinburgh said that provision is guaranteed in the current contract. But he also said the union is willing to talk to the mayor about changing the overtime provision.

New Bedford city councilors are not "complementary" potted plants

City politics in Boston are still pretty quiet, but there's plenty of bad blood in New Bedford, according to SouthCoastToday's Jack Spillane:

Mayor [Scott] Lang recently described the council as existing primarily to "complement" his agenda, and five councilors returned the insult by writing a letter calling him incompetent to craft a city budget.

The mayor is certainly right that the New Bedford council doesn't have the immense, budget-setting powers of Congress or a state legislature. But he is wrong to describe the council as existing simply to complement his government. And he would be ill-advised to approach the council that way.

From the simple standpoint of accomplishing his own agenda, it's dangerous for a mayor to go to war with a council that retains significant power.

Spillane has more to say on his All Politics Is Local blog.

Worcester wants struggling artists

Despite the bad economy, Worcester is apparently proceeding apace in its bid to become a magnet for the creative class (or, in Michigan lingo, a cool city). The Daily Worcesteria notes that the renovated Hadley-Burwick Building on Main Street, once a furniture store, is now advertising for tenants on craigslist. The ad makes a pitch for "artists, creative types, entrepreneurs" and touts the "cool, loft feel" of the rent-controlled apartments. Not much mention of nearby amenities (it's 15-minute walk to the commuter rail), but urban pioneers can't limit themselves to Whole Food neighborhoods.