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— Quincy Massachusetts News by Quincy Quarry News – News, Opinion and Commentary
The old shell game …
Image via the Margaret Street Church of Christ
At Monday night’s Quincy City Council meeting financial griftings were flying fast and furious as well as one under the radar.
The featured financial spin at the council meeting was over the Koch Maladministration’s ask for a $157 million dollar further debt authorization to arguably throw more good money after bad spent on his long foundering plans to redevelopment Quincy Center. That and also more than double the size of a redevelopment district that has not seen any new development in almost six years as well as do so at cost to be provided “later.”
Needless to say, Quincy Quarry News will be addressing these machinations shortly via yet another hard hitting to stones Quincy Quarry News exclusive exposé.
“I’ll soon be in the money!”
Image via danieldervartanian.com
In the meanwhile, this Quarry story addresses a compensation study which was foisted to justify a raise for Quincy’s peerless mayor and slipped in after the main events last night.
As per standard practice, the Koch Machine relied on an outside consulting firm to score the outcome it wanted.
In this case, a presentation by Midwestern firm posed that $295,000 or thereabouts was the appropriate comparable salary for a (municipal) “Chief Administrative Officer” in the Greater Boston area.
Clearly, this out of state compensation consulting firm did not understand the lay of the land in Massachusetts.
Out of town Koch drinkers
Image via New Line Cinema
Specifically, how in the Commonwealth a municipal chief administration officer is a professional manager who is typically someone with serious professional management experience, an appropriate education — say, a master’s degree in administration — and typically various professional certifications to be considered for hire as the business manager for a municipality.
A mayor, on the other hand, is elected and thus no such valid criteria are mandatory to become a mayor.
Also not in place in Quincy are on the job performance criteria for a mayor as one typically has to met as an employee.
The Mayor of Quimby MA wears a dress but does not wear army boots
Matt Groening/Fox Broadcasting Company image
In this instance, Quincy Quarry New’s ever-growing legions of loyal readers should thus consider how Mayor Koch has a long and expensive history of koching-up big ticket local projects,
In fact, in Quincy about the only major city projects that are completed reasonably close to on time and/or on budget are the building of new public schools as such new school construction is very tightly as well as expertly overseen by the Massachusetts School Building Authority as it typically subsidizes half or thereabout of the cost of building new public schools in the Commonwealth.
What all too happens to Quincy taxpayers. tax money
Image via cheatsheet.com
Case in point, the overwhelmingly funded locally without any state support or oversight and long under construction given the City of Quincy’s sole mismanagement DeCristofaro Learning Center is looking to end up costing at least three times more than the Koch Maladministration’s original project cost.
That and the also running years late. Many years late.
In turn, such repeated cost overruns as well as others have greatly increased City of Quincy spending and so fueled outsized local property tax increases.
“Look, it all works out in the end.”
A Koch mailer image
Specifically, city spending went up by an at least recent decades record breaking 10% in Fiscal Year 2024 per a proper adjusting of arguably cooked books.
In turn, this massive spending increase gave rise to an also arguably record setting 8.3% increase in local residential property tax bills this year so as to primarily cover the nut, record-breaking property tax increases that Quincy Quarry accurately predicted months before the tax rate increases were officially set last December.
Also note that these spending and tax increases are both half again more than were typical in many other Massachusetts municipalities.
Even worse for long-suffering local taxpayers, similar outsized increases are expected to continue for at least the next few years but more likely for many years.
Other mayoral shortcomings are so numerous that the Quarry will limit their listings to but pointing out how so many Quincy streets are such woeful messes that even Weymouth’s streets are in better shape.
From the Quincy Department of Public Works with love to locals ,,,
A Quincy Quarry Citizen Photojournalist image
Arguably way better streets than in Quincy.
Even so, the compensation study did address one positive.
The positive: that better pay should result in scoring better mayors as was asserted is the case with sourcing chief administration officers.
On this front, the City Boston pays its current mayor $207,000 and she has a Harvard undergrad degree as well as is a Harvard Law School graduate.
The City of Quincy, on the other hand, pays its mayor $151,000 and for this Quincy has a mayor who is Quincy College dropout.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu on an official field trip inspection
A file photo
Granted, one can say what one may about Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu as well as Harvard, her $207,000 a year salary is short money for a city with a roughly seven-fold greater population than Quincy as well as considerably even more commercial operations.
In fact, an easy case — if not a wicked easy case — could be made that Quincy Mayor Koch deserves a pay cut instead of scoring an outsized pay raise that will also dramatically increase his high three years when the time comes to determine his anticipated pension.
Since he’s being paid, he’s being overpaid.
So many points to make but here are a few:
1. Gallagher is a professional compensation firm – they were hired to review all salaries but not the Mayor’s? Why?
2. Our Director of Finance references a report he conducted which led to the hiring of the 2nd firm. Where is this report?
3. The firm that was hired, is actually two professors from the Director of Finance’s alma mater, WVU, NOT a compensation-focused company. Their own website and the report makes this clear. Why didn’t they go back to Gallagher? The Director of Finance’s report claims that Gallagher didn’t have the information. What? They are a professional compensation company.
5. The Mayor’s last raise was 23% in 2016. Does he not also have a car as well as a car allowance? Let’s look at his salary holistically.
6. Why does the Mayor not have yearly raises – i.e, 3% as most other city employees received this year? If he did receive a 3% COLA raise annually, he would have seen an 18% raise over the last 6 years…reasonable. However, we are looking at the possibility of his seeing a 60% or even greater raise. CEOs of public companies do not receive such outsized raises.
7. From the consultant’s report, a very small survey (which the firm didn’t conduct), less than 20% of respondents were from the Northeast. The report picks Boston and Cambridge arbitrarily. Doesn’t show any other cities. Those budgets and staff are exponentially larger than Quincy. How can you compare Quincy with Boston and its $4.3B budget. (So, they did not do the work – they extrapolated data from a 2019 Survey).
8. Why would the city move forward with recommendations from a firm that is not known as compensation consultants, that simply took a small survey from 2019 to ‘prove’ the Mayor is a CAO (a stretch). And, the conflict of interest is obvious with the firm that was chosen.
This is just the start….
Mayor Koch, always reaching for the stars… or should I say, the stacks of cash? It seems like every time we turn around, there’s another scheme to inflate his paycheck. Who needs a golden parachute when you can have a diamond-encrusted one, right? Keep reaching for those lofty salary goals, Mayor Koch, because heaven forbid you should ever have to live on the same planet as the rest of us mere mortals.