GREENFIELD — The Mayor’s Office will run with $15,000 less over the next six months to help balance the city’s books in time to set the annual tax rate.
“(Some city councilors) wanted it to come from the mayor,” said Mayor William Martin. “Maybe this is punishment to the mayor? I don’t know, but this is what we did,” Martin said. “Now we can move toward the tax rate.”
The money will come out of salaries and wages from the four-person department, which includes Mayor William Martin.
“We will do the best we can to maintain all the services and constituent work we do out of the Mayor’s Office,” Martin said.
At the moment, the mayor isn’t positive where exactly the money will come from, but said it will result in a reduction of staff, hours and job specification. The department includes Martin, Mark Smith, the director of general administration who oversees union contracts, Lindsay Rowe, who runs communications and constituent services, and Karen Friedman, executive assistant.
Overall, $20,000 was taken from departments to balance the books. While $15,000 came from the Mayor’s Office, the other $5,000 came out of the budget of the department of economic development. The money offsets a deficit the city had, which it had to balance because of state laws.
At November’s City Council meeting, legislators agreed to use about $420,000 between departments to offset the deficit in the operating budget, 83 percent of which was supposed to come from general stabilization. Instead of taking a proposed $365,000 out of this account, the council, led by councilors Isaac Mass and Brickett Allis, asked to take $20,000 of it from the mayor’s department, which ultimately became $15,000.
During that November meeting, which Martin was not present at because of a family matter, a handful of councilors lashed out at the mayor’s financial decisions on a range of topics.
Councilors Isaac Mass and Brickett Allis said the $20,000 should come out of the Mayor’s Office budget, as a response to their views of how they saw he managed bonding and borrowing in the city the past year.
“This puts some tiny amount of accountability on the executive for this terrible, terrible decision,” Martin said.
“I think we all agree with the way the mayor has withheld information from us and the way there were mistakes month after month after month,” Councilor Sheila Gilmour said. “The mayor knows we’re not happy with this.”
Councilor Dan Leonovich said in his three years on the council, “it’s remarkable how many times we’ve been put against a wall” to make a crucial financial decision.
“You cannot manage a town, a business, anything with this much crisis all the time,” Leonovich said. “This at least sends a modicum — a small smidge of a message.”
A simple majority, made up of five “yes” votes from councilors at that November meeting, approved the request to ask the mayor to come up with $20,000.
This all acted as a reminder to the mayor about his uncompetitive salary rate, which he has been lobbying to be raised for the past few years to no avail. He makes about $79,000 a year, and notes its not on par with mayors of other cities in the region. Martin pushed that it should be raised before the election for a new mayor in November 2019.
“Aside from being morally or verbally undervalued at council meetings, it’s undervalued as a position,” Martin said about the position of mayor in Greenfield.
You can reach Joshua Solomon at:
jsolomon@recorder.com
413-772-0261, ext. 264