Posted by: jimfior02 on: January 13, 2009
Mayor Thomas M. Menino is expected to warn of drastic budget cuts in his State of the city speech this evening.
Menino is expected to reveal that Boston faces a whopping 4140 million budget deficit. The deficit, according to Boston officials, is far to large to meet without layoffs, probably including layoffs in the public safety [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: January 8, 2009
Recently, Governor Patrick warned cities and towns that the economic downturn was having a dramatic effect on State tax revenues. The Governor, who cut $1 billion from his budget in October, announced that he would be forced to cut another $1 billion in January or February.
The Governor has asked the legislature for permission to cut [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: July 29, 2008
Our contracts with our unions provide that if an employee needs time off for union business, then they can do that on city time and we will pay them for the time. If we have to fill the spot with another employee, we pay that other employee time and half. All of this is standard [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: July 13, 2008
The Eagle Tribune wrote a story recently on our efforts to control overtime and sick leave in the city budget. There were some errors in the story, some very minor, some not so minor. The overall gist of the story was correct: we have a problem with sick leave and we are working hard to correct [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: June 2, 2008
Take home vehicles for employees are a small part of our budget, but a big part of our headaches. Here are some numbers:
a. We have a total of 230 vehicles in our fleet, including police cars, fire trucks, snow plows police cruisers, etc.
b. Of those, a total of 55 are take home vehicles. Most of the [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: March 25, 2008
Friends,
Tomorrow night at the city council I am unveiling my plans for performance oriented government. Since you are kind enough to read this blog, I thought I would give you a heads up.
Performance measures in government have been quite the rage for the past ten or 15 years, ever since the publication of “Reinventing Government.” [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: February 14, 2008
I watched the city council meeting and heard a good deal about the roof at the Tilton School.
I wanted to see for myself, so I spent a good deal of the day at the Tilton School inspecting the roof. I went with our maintenance people, climbed up on the flat roof that appears to be [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: February 10, 2008
Together with the other regional Mayors, I went to the Eagle Tribune editorial office recently to plead the case for cities.
We have been meeting on a regular basis to formulate plans to deal with what we all see as a long term, sustained budget crisis for cities. We have introduced regional purchasing in an effort [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: February 7, 2008
Monday night, I’ll be meeting with councilors to outline our budget problems, and to give some possible solutions.
I’ll first outline how this is a State wide problem, not a city one.
We are fortunate, in a way, that the steps we took earlier to reform health care (saving $1.5 million a year) and improve our tax [...]
