Beverly Meeting Digest

Beverly can stop raising its pension payment

Deficit Reduction Committee · Monday, September 14

Beverly has been putting an extra 4.5 percent into its pension fund every year, closing the gap between what it owes retirees and what it has set aside. That increase is one of the real structural pressures on the city budget, and it was scheduled to keep climbing.

Massachusetts requires every municipal retirement system to be fully funded by 2040. Beverly is not aiming for that. Its own schedule, approved by the state and reset every two years, gets there around 2032, well ahead of the deadline.

Strong investment returns over the past two years mean the city can now ease off that yearly increase and still hit its own target. The finance director described it as significant relief in the budget every year from here on.

It is worth putting a rough size on that. Under the current schedule, the step up from this year to FY2028 is about $700,000. If the increase stops, that is broadly what the city does not have to find next year, while revenue carries on growing. The exact figure depends on the revised schedule the Retirement Board is still working through with its actuary, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a number the city has committed to. In a year with very little good budget news, it is one of the more consequential things to come out of this meeting.

What a city-run electric utility would involve

Deficit Reduction Committee · Monday, September 14

The reason this is on the table at all is rates. Municipal light plants across Massachusetts generally charge residents less for electricity than the investor-owned utilities do, and one councilor has been asking neighboring towns that run their own about a feasibility study. The appeal is savings for the city, and possibly for the household bill as well.

Most of Monday went to an invited guest from Marblehead, which has owned its own electric utility since 1894. He walked the committee through what running one actually takes: about 20 staff, 10,800 meters, a $20 million budget split evenly between buying power and capital work, and around 21 cents a kilowatt-hour on the full bill.

Asked what it would cost Beverly to build its own, he was blunt that nobody could say without a study, then scaled Marblehead's system up to a city Beverly's size and landed on $100 million to $150 million, which he described as a very rough calculation. The precise number is unknown. The order of magnitude is not: this would be a project north of a hundred million dollars.

No proposal is on the table. The committee was gathering the sizing and feasibility it would need before one could be.

Paid parking, and the range it might raise

Deficit Reduction Committee · Monday, September 14

A member of the committee has been working through what paid parking could raise, and came back with two versions. The simpler one costs the city almost nothing: doubling the existing dollar-an-hour downtown rate, using what is already in place, would bring in roughly $400,000 a year. Start charging on Lothrop Street as well, at $3 or $4 an hour, and the total climbs toward $1.5 million. Which number the city lands on is a question of what it decides to charge, not of what is possible.

What it costs to set up depends on how far the city goes. Sticking with the phone app already in use would, he told the committee, cost very little and be enforced relatively simply. Adding the kind of kiosks that stand downtown is a different proposition: those run about $14,000 to $15,000 each.

One practical wrinkle came up. Charging residents less than visitors would mean issuing stickers and having somebody walk the street checking for them, which the committee thought clumsy.

What changing the health insurance split would save

Deficit Reduction Committee · Monday, September 14

Beverly pays 80 percent of employee and retiree health premiums. Moving to 75 would save about $1.4 million, shared between the city and school budgets. Moving to 70 would save $2.8 million, and increase what plan members pay by 50 percent.

It is not a switch the city can simply throw. The finance director explained that contribution splits are not covered by the section of state law Beverly normally operates under. Changing them would mean adopting a different section, which brings with it a committee made up of representatives from every union, bargaining as a single bloc. That is a negotiation with trade-offs, and he was careful to say it does not necessarily arrive as pure savings.

Members also pushed back on what a change would mean for people who have already retired, most of whom are on the current split. One member argued it would break an understanding those retirees made their plans around.

Worth knowing alongside all of this: Beverly insures itself rather than joining the state pool, and the finance director defended that choice at length. Holding its own reserves has let the city cushion the sort of premium jumps that have hit state-pool communities by fifteen or twenty percent in a single year.

Regional dispatch, and an argument for going the other way

Deficit Reduction Committee · Monday, September 14

Regional dispatch means routing a city's 911 and emergency calls through a center shared with neighboring towns, rather than each community staffing its own around the clock. The argument for it is straightforward: several towns splitting one operation costs each of them less than running their own.

Beverly looked at it and concluded it does not work here. The regional center has no room to take a city this size, and moving would mean giving up locally staffed dispatch, a difference councilors measured in seconds of response time.

A councilor made the opposite case instead. Beverly's own dispatch center was built with capacity for a smaller community, which could be sold as a service rather than bought from somebody else. Another member pointed out that capacity has never actually been used.

Two union agreements ratified, by name

School Committee, special meeting · Wednesday, September 16

The School Committee held an extra meeting on Wednesday evening, fully remote, lasting eighteen minutes. Ten of those were in executive session. It came back into open session and ratified agreements with two groups of staff, the clerks and the cafeteria workers, each by a roll call vote of seven to nothing.

Because the meeting was remote, every vote had to be a roll call, so the record is unusually clear about who voted. Voting yes on both: Mayor Michael Cahill, Geraldine Cahill, Catherine Frost, Madeline Lennox, Kimberley Coelho, Kaarin Robinson and president Lorinda Visnick. Lindsay Harnden and John Taylor were not present.

The chair also explained why the meeting existed at all: business had been moved off an earlier agenda and had to be squeezed in, which is why next week's meeting is a heavy one.

Planning Board takes up a 24-hour McDonald's

Planning Board · Tuesday, September 15

The board was scheduled to consider a change to a 1998 site plan decision that would let the McDonald's at 230 Elliott Street operate 24 hours a day, up from its current 6am to midnight.

A crypto vote, and $20,000 for the Human Rights Committee

City Council · Monday, September 21, 7:00pm · City Council Chambers, 191 Cabot Street · carried on BevCam

The ordinance banning cryptocurrency kiosks passed first reading nine to nothing on September 8. Massachusetts ordinances need two readings, so tonight is the one that settles it. It sits on the agenda as Order #187, under Motions and Orders, marked final passage.

Two committee reports also come up, and both carry items residents have already turned up to speak about. Committees can step out to confer, but they report back in the chamber and any vote is taken there, in front of the room and on the recording. The agenda says the Council is likely to act on what they report, unless a matter is held in committee.

Finance and Property takes up Order #213, Councilor Houseman's request that the Mayor raise and appropriate $20,000 for the Beverly Human Rights Committee. He filed it on September 8 and it went straight to committee, which is where it has been since. Two of the three residents who spoke that night argued for it, framing it as a way to carry on the work of the city's diversity, equity and inclusion director post, which was cut earlier in the year.

Councilor Feldman chairs the committee it goes to. Council President Flowers sits on it, and so does Houseman, who filed the order.

Legal Affairs reports on the Flock camera order, which asked two committees to meet jointly and examine the city's contracts for automated license plate readers. Tonight is procedural. The review itself is on October 19.

On top of that, six public hearings run back to back from 7:45 to 8:45, covering a $25,000 transfer to replace the motors on a harbor patrol boat, the Community Preservation Committee's proposed budget for the year, and four National Grid petitions. Four of the five public comment slots were taken by the time the agenda was posted. Public comment comes near the start of the meeting and is not set up for back and forth with councilors; the committee reports come later.

The Council is hiring its own budget analyst

Budget and Management Analyst Screening Committee · met Sept 14 and 16, meets again Thursday and twice on Monday the 28th

The Council is taking resumes for its budget and management analyst, a post it has had for about thirty years. It was created after a stretch of financial trouble, on the reasoning that councilors are not trained in municipal finance and needed someone reading the numbers for them rather than for the administration. The charter protects the job from exactly the pressure you would expect: the line can never fall below half of what the city provides for the finance director's office, because the mayor writes the budget and a future mayor might be tempted.

It is paid out of the Council's own budget, and that line was cut in June. On a motion from Councilor Houseman, seconded by Rotondo, the Council voted nine to nothing to reduce it from $79,869.75 to $59,869.75. The analyst backed the cut and said he could make it work. The city solicitor advised it was within the charter because he is paid per diem rather than on salary, and his rate, treated as an annual figure, already clears the fifty percent floor. The job runs on the smaller number this year.

One thing has not been said at any public meeting: why the Council is taking resumes now. The analyst who has held the post for the last ten years has not announced that he is leaving, and nothing in the June budget meetings or the September 8 Council meeting explains it. He is engaged per diem rather than salaried, so this may be a routine re-advertisement rather than a departure. The screening committee will put three candidates in front of the full Council either way.

The committee is Councilors Rotondo, Spang and Houseman, and it has been working since last Monday. Its first meeting, on the 14th, was largely in the open: it elected officers, settled how many candidates to put in front of the full Council, and agreed confidentiality rules and a common set of interview questions. On the 16th it began reading applications.

From here it moves quickly. Thursday morning it finalises the questions and fixes interview dates. On Monday the 28th it interviews from nine until three, breaks for lunch, and reconvenes that evening to choose finalists.

Most of that happens in executive session, which the Open Meeting Law specifically allows for considering and interviewing job applicants, and three of the five meetings will not return to open session at all. There is nothing irregular in that. It does mean that for most residents, the first news of this hire will be the appointment itself.

Further out through October 26

• Sep 23School CommitteeFinance and Facilities, then Committee of the Whole. A heavy agenda: business was pushed here to make room for last week's special meeting.
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• Sep 24Contributory Retirement BoardCarried over from August: review of additional pension funding schedules from the board's actuary. The board's own notice calls this date tentative.
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• Sep 28Budget analyst interviews, then finalistsThe Council's screening committee interviews candidates 9am to 3pm, and reconvenes at 6pm to identify finalists. Both sessions are closed.
• Sep 29How state money reaches BeverlyRep. Bowen, 6 to 8pm at the Farms branch library. Hosted by the representative's office rather than the city, so it will not appear on the city calendar.
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• Oct 5City CouncilFirst Monday.
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• Oct 19Flock cameras: Legal Affairs and Public Services, jointThe joint committee meeting on the city's automated license plate readers, 6:00 to 6:55pm, before the regular Council meeting. Venue may change because of the City Hall move.
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• Oct 20Deficit Reduction Committee, first public presentationThe committee presents the full list of revenue and savings ideas it has researched since July, and opens public input. Time and place not yet set.
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• Oct 26FY2028 budget recommendations duePer the Deficit Reduction Committee's own published timeline.