Town Meeting
For those of you who care about such things, below is the url for the upcoming Town Meeting.
http://www.framinghamma.gov/Weblink8/DocView.aspx?id=17740&&dbid=0
And the Special Town Meeting on May 5th.
http://www.framinghamma.gov/Weblink8/DocView.aspx?id=17820&dbid=0
The report from Finance Committee
http://www.framinghamma.gov/index.aspx?NID=1377
With 65 new TMM's, many of whom were recruited by Herb Chasen of Save our Schools, one might expect some serious debate over such things as the deal cut with the unions of heath care costs. It now stands at 16/84, which should be rejected. It's way past time for organized labor in this Town to live like the rest of us and pay more for their heath care coverage. There's the meals tax of over a million that may go to schools.. or maybe to where it was intendid, the stabilazation fund. A choice between town emplyees as bus drivers or to privatize... could save big time. The SC seems to indicate that school choice would only save 300,000 or so and may present problems with segragation and all the poor kids at one school. With 6% uneployment in thsi Town, there's plenty of poor kids to go around.
There's still rasies planned for many, and I think it's a bad sign that any raises are being considered. Then there's the question of 5 million in OT for cops and fireman.
And much more...
I'm open to any or all comments, suggestions and resonable debate on any or all of the warrant articales. But the biggest savings this Town can see will be in the Heath Care contract that should be rejected.
posted by Jim Pillsbury @ 10:06 AM
19 Comments
19 Comments:
All those 65 new Town Meeting members will show up for school budget votes and nothing else, mark my words. And if that is the case, they should be prevented from voting. You are a town meeting member for all town issues, or you are not a town meeting member. You don't get to pick and choose what nights you are willing to put your time in. I hope someone raises that issue.
You asked so I am replying. No raises for anyone and unions have to pay the same as the rest of us for their insurance, 50% of the cost. Fair is fair.
No everyone who lives in precing 6 is non-union. I am a town employee and I ask that you vote to accept the offer on the table for the split in health care costs between the union and the town. You represent me, so you have to listen to what I say as well as all these people against the town employees, so how are you going to handle that?
WE are not against Town employees and for that matter, there are a few that go above and beyond the call of duty. One.. who will remain anonymous, did his job so well, that I wrote to his bosses and instructed them to use him as a role model for other Town employees.
WE who are not in unions have been forced to pay huge increases in our health care costs, no raises and have even had pay cuts, just to keep our jobs. Then there are those who are older and have lost their jobs and can't get any employment and are forced to pay fines or huge insurance payments for mandated health care.
Fair is not what the current contract is to ALL of us in this Town. But feel free to write to me with your name, address and phone number so I know your in my hood and I will count you as a vote for the contract.
jimpillsbury@verizon.net
FR... what you speak of has happened for years and years. 10 to 20% of TMM's leave at 9PM.
This year may be different. I believe that the newbies understand if they want level school funding, they will have to stay the coarse and make decisions on the entire budget.
I have hope.
The same faces at the microphone speaking the same rhetoric every single town meeting is keeping us in this mess. You want to level fund the schools? Fine with me, as long as you don't want to up my property taxes to do that. I don't have kids in the school, I don't want to pay more across the board for a service I don't use when you may be talking about cutting services that every resident of town does use. It has to be fair.
I fear the lack of attention the citizens of Framingham are paying to the issues facing this town. A mere 13% of registered voters turn out in a year where so very many issues that are going to impact all of us are in play. To those of you who could not be bothered getting to the polls, don’t bother complaining about the state of things in Framingham. When you had the chance to do something about it, you didn’t. Your lack of interest means you don’t get to complain. The rest of us should be making sure our representative for the town meeting knows our concerns and our views. If we don’t speak up for ourselves who will speak for us? These nutcases in the Save Our Schools group make it sound like we are throwing our kids to the wolves if we don’t level fund the schools. We are not! We are saying the schools are NOT efficiently run, and we expect them to fix those inefficiencies and spend those savings on educating our kids. Don’t try to make this an emotional issue. I have kids in Framingham schools, and I do not think we need to increase the budget the town has stated is the school budget. Cut salaries, cut these ridiculous half days for teachers to have an afternoon to catch up. Teachers don’t spend 8 hrs a day in a classroom for the most part, so let them spend that extra hour they are paid for but don’t work catching up. Every single business in this country has had to learn to run leaner, why don’t we expect our town businesses to do the same?
You are all a bunch of lunatics if you think the unions in this town will give up anything. Why should they, what is the motivation for them? Are you going to stand up to a cop and tell him you are going to cut his salary by increasing his required contribution to his health care costs? If you do, he will make sure you cover that cost in the number of tickets you get for speeding, parking too far from the curb, going through a yellow light, not having your trash barrels in the right location. They will take it out of your hide.
Health care costs are killing this town. We need to cut those costs or cut the budgets for salaries for every department in town. We talk about level funding the schools. What about level funding the Town of Framingham?
People do not move to Framingham because of the schools. They move to Framingham because of our location, easy access to major highways, and affordability. If we make our property taxes so high we are no longer affordable, no one will want to move here and buy those empty houses all over town that have been foreclosed on.
Fire the school superintendent and don’t replace him. Fire all assistant principals. Require all teachers to teach all day, not have down periods. Fund no athletic programs, each kid pays his own way. That ought to save the schools enough money to live within the budget dollars the town has allocated to them. Have the selectmen oversee the shools in the absence of a Superintendent.
If the unions hold out for this split in health care costs, then in a very short time they will be working for a bankrupt town in receivership and then they won’t be getting these ridiculous benefits. So suck it up now or get sucked up later. Either way you are going to lose that gravy train.
We bitch about the unfunded mandates from the state. What about Framingham’s own unfunded mandates? Where are we going to get the money from to fund the retirement and health care costs going forwarded?
Town employees are a valuable asset. They deserve a decent healthcare plan. Take a survey of all municipalities in the state, what percentage they contribute to health care costs for their employees. Get the average of all those communities. Pay 2% over that average to the employees of Framingham. That puts them in the enviable position of contributing 2% less of their salary towards their insurance than ½ of their counterparts in this state. Sounds like a good deal to me.
Screw Save Our Schools. Someone needs to organize a group called Save Our Town.
I negotiated lesser pay raises to keep those health care benefits. Are you going to give me the raises I did not get if you increase the precent I have to contribute towards my health care costs?
none of us negotiated pay cuts, insurance increases or no over time.
The self entitled have had their way with tax payers to long. We haven't demanded our employers do anything and hope we are still employed at the end of the year.
We work in a competitive world, employees at the will of our employers and against other employees from around the world that will do our same job for nickels on a dollar.
We have to justify our performance every year, write a short story on our accomplishments and shorfalls. Whether we met our projected goals. We are judged on how many sick days we took, how we managed our budgets and how much we cost the company to the revenue we produced. How many customers we made happy or a discovery of a new compound.
I MUST and gladly pay my property taxes for the general benefit of all who live in our community. All I ask is that the money be spent wisely on things and people who make this community thrive.... and it's not the self entitled.
As a senior citizen faced with giving up my house because I can not afford the increase in heating oil, electricity and taxes, I say we need a Save Our Seniors organization.
Tough times require tough decisions. We have a fixed income in this town based on taxes and revenues. We can not continue to spend more money than we have. So we either increase revenue streams by increasing property taxes and food taxes, or we increase the number of properties paying taxes by decreasing the number owned by the town, allowing new building, or making it an attractive location for people to buy the forclosed properties in town putting them back on the tax role, or we decrease the budgets in town to live within the constraints applied due to income. I don’t have my PhD in economics, but it does not seem like rocket science here. You spend what you have, and you don’t spend more than that. You increase revenue where you can, and then you cut expenses to live within the income. You got a better idea, throw it out there.
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