by Michael Graham
DNN Staff -EXCLUSIVE!
Monday, Apr. 26,2010
Mayor Menino, you’re not going to win this fight relying on your good looks and soaring rhetoric.
No, to stop the spending monster unleashed by an arbitrator on Boston last week, you’re going to need a crucifix and a wooden stake. Or, at the very least, an angry, pitchfork-wielding mob.
More on them - or should I say “us” - later.
There are many terrifying numbers in this fiscal horror story.
$74 million - the money it will take to raise the pay of Boston firefighters by 19 percent over their 2006 salaries.
$30 million - the gap between the money Boston had set aside for raises and the actual costs.$3.5 million - how much more this pay hike will cost next year alone.
But the numbers that will keep the mayor and council up at night are 44 and 55.
The Boston firefighters union’s budget-busting deal is just one of the 44 contract negotiations the city has to handle. Which means there are 43 other government worker cabals waiting to be fed. Now they smell blood.
And 55? That’s the age at which Boston firefighters can retire on their generous pensions and benefits - often while going on to another full-time career. Maybe a full-time government career.
Double-dipping: It’s not just for bureaucrats anymore . . .
So now take the salaries of firefighters like Messrs. Maloney, Little and Mason, for example - names I picked at random from bostonherald.com’s excellent “Public Records Database” and who each earned well over $100K last year. Now increase those six-figure salaries by 19 percent (give or take, depending on overtime or special duty) and then multiply the cost to taxpayers, not just for the length of their fine careers, but for 30 years after.
Now keep retiring more and more of these well-paid city employees year after year, all living longer and longer, and you can see why Menino looked so pale in Tuesday’s paper. He had seen the fiscal horror show awaiting all of us.
I don’t blame the firefighters for gloating. Menino asked for arbitration so they get to have their cake and hit him in the face with it, too.
But a 19-percent pay raise in this economy is more than a chance to mock Menino. It’s a punch in the gut for every city taxpayer.
I have a question for the cowardly Ed Kelly, the union president who was spotted running from reporters as recently as yesterday. Ed, how many of your neighbors who work in the private sector are earning 19 percent more today than they did in 2006?
Actually, we have an idea. U.S. incomes went down an average of more than 3 percent last year. And according to MSNBC, metro Boston lost still more jobs in 2009.
But these workers, these taxpayers and these (for the moment, at least) homeowners now have to pony up millions today, and hundreds of millions more over the next decade. All to pay benefits for government workers that far exceed what they’re getting from their own jobs.
Which brings us back to that torch-waving mob.
When it comes to confronting government unions, the City Council isn’t exactly Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They’re more like Igor the clueless but obedient lackey.
We are the townspeople. There are a lot more of us than there are union thugs. Individually we’re not as scary, but as a group we can bring down every elected official in the city.
Tell your city councilor to forget the union, you and your fellow taxpayers are lighting the torches.
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