Candidates take aim at mayor
by Richard Weir
DNN Follow-up
Thursday, Apr. 9, 2009
It was open season yesterday on Mayor Menino’s $2.4 billion budget plan with the Hub’s three mayoral hopefuls blasting his fiscal blueprint as lacking vision and failing to provide a thorough overhaul of wasteful government spending.
“I would say it is void of reforms,” said City Councilor Michael Flaherty, who aims to unseat the incumbent mayor should Menino run for re-election this year. “This budget cuts employees who provide critical services to our citizens while at the same time it keeps overpaid consultants on the payroll.”
City Councilor Sam Yoon, also a mayoral challenger, criticized the mayor for his “take-it-or-leave-it” wage-freeze bid that will result in the axing of 212 teachers and classroom aides by July, and possibly 67 cops in October, if their unions don’t yield to his demands.
He also faulted the mayor for not reigning in police and fire department overtime, which soared to $17 million and $5 million over their respective budgets. “This year’s budget looks like last year’s budget, which looks like the previous year’s budget,” Yoon said.
Another mayoral candidate, businessman Kevin McCrea, also attacked the mayor’s hard line, saying Menino is punishing the unions that don’t accept his wage-freeze. “Instead of making value judgments about which programs need to be prioritized, the most severe cuts are directed at the unions who have not caved to his demands,” McCrea said, noting that the school department represents 34 percent of the budget but bore 60 percent of the overall cuts.
In outlining his $2.4 billion budget yesterday, the mayor, who has not announced whether he will seek a fifth four-year term, called his proposal a “responsible plan for Boston’s future” that would maintain library hours and trash pickups, repave 42 miles of city streets and expand or add six K-8 schools.
“Most of us have never seen an economic downturn so severe and so far reaching,” Menino said, adding that this was “the toughest budget” he’s ever had to assemble with 565 city jobs being eliminated to plug an initial $140 million budget gap.
The mayor said that while some city departments bore 7 percent cuts, the school department’s budget was trimmed by 1.9 percent, the police department’s by 2.4 percent and the fire department’s by 4.7 percent.
He defended his tough stance with the reluctant unions, particularly the teachers’, noting that 22 other city unions accepted a wage freeze to avoid layoffs.
The big tax and spender in the past, Mayor Menino, takes
out his fiscal problems on the city's workforce, who
are the ones that keep his city running each day. (DNN
staff photo shows Menino lashing out on city unions.)
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