Fireworks and Frustration at Town Meeting

I felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.  For nearly three hours.

Last Thursday Spring 2011 Town Meeting’s Session #2 spent all night talking about less than half of the held budget lines.  And although we ran though multiple departments’ budgets, the questions were always the same.

The theme of the night was two somewhat obscure benefits received by many town employees: sick incentive and longevity.  Our guide on this path to micromanagieral insanity was Representative Steve Wetzel of Precinct 7.

Mr Wetzel has a problem with these two small components of town employee’s salaries.  They are components that not all employees receive and they are earned only when they have excellent attendance or for years of loyalty to the town.

Before we get to Mr. Wetzel’s one-man filibuster, here is what we are talking about:

Sick Incentive

If an employee does not call in sick for a sustained period of time (details were not provided), that employee gets paid $500 or $600, depending on the union.

Longevity

When an employees passes certain milestones in their career with the town, they receive a one-time longevity payment, according to the following schedule:

•  5 years of service, $784
• 10 years, $1827
• 15 years, $2610
• 20 years, $3393
• 30 years, $3500
• 35 years, $3800

Fred Libatore (6) asked the question, what’s the total amount of the sick incentive and longevity benefits?  Staff did not have that answer on hand because even the Town Accountant couldn’t add it up for all 585 town employees fast enough.  But some rough math came up with a number in the neighborhood of $3M, or around 2.5%.  So for what it’s worth, that is real money.

Now, before I go on, I want to make it clear that I don’t have a problem with Mr. Wetzel questioning these benefits.  That’s the taxpayer’s job is to question if he or she is being governed or taxed fairly.  And it’s especially a TMR’s job.

My problem, however, is the manor and arena in which he chose to raise this question and his insistence that the answers we was being given by staff (and other TMRs) were inadequate.  Moreover, he hijacked Session #2, monopolizing air time and repeating his point over and over and over again.  He refused to be satisfied until TM voted to erase every dollar of sick incentive and longevity pay from the rolls.

Here are some highlights from the Steve Wetzel Show:

• Spoke a total of 10 times at the microphone.  Last Spring the highest number of “participations” was 13 by three TMRs.  Mr. Wetzel spoke 8 times over all 5 nights in 2010.
• Asked the same question (how many people under a union contract?) for every department a he held a budget.
• Had staff, the Moderator, the Town Clerk, and Town Counsel scrambling for chapter and verse of the personnel bylaw and other documents while TM sat and waited for minutes at a time.  By the way, credit Michael Moore of the Finance Committee for adeptly finding digital copies and displaying the sections requested by Mr. Wetzel on the PowerPoint so everyone could see.  Mr. Wetzel proceeded to read the publicly-available document at the microphone while the rest of us waited, hoping to catch staff in a “gotcha” moment.
• By the 7th or 8th time at the microphone, he was clearly winging it, making up questions to buy more face time.
• Vaguely accused staff of acting in their own self-interest (see the quote in the Lowell Sun story by Evan Lips).  Town Manager John Curran “took exception” to that comment.
• Said curtly into to microphone, “That’s not appropriate!” to someone on the Finance Committee while making angry statements about the Quinn Bill.  I was sitting about 5 rows from FinCom and I did not hear the comment that prompted this outburst.
• Became visibly emotional and agitated at the microphone as the show went on.  Also said several times, “This is a great discussion we are having,” to which TMRs in the audience audibly groaned after hearing it 5 or 6 times.

Mr. Wetzel made two motions:

• To cut the longevity benefit from the Town Accountant’s salary.  The timing of this motion was bizarre.  Paul Watson, the Accountant, had been frantically fetching information to answer questions Mr. Wetzel asked about other departments.  When he needed to defend his own department’s budget, Mr. Watson was standing alone at the podium not 20 feet away from him when Mr. Wetzel looked him in the face and moved to cut over $1800 from his pay.  Mr. Watson has a good poker face, but I can only imagine the, er, unhappy feelings has was having at that time.  How emasculating for him.  Other TMRs (led by Bernie Duggan (5)) said it was unfair to pick on one person in this way.  The motion failed.
• To refer the matter to a committee that doesn’t exist.  He proposed to make a brand new committee.  It would have 13 members — one TMR chosen by caucus from each precinct plus one Selectman and a Town Manager designee.  Town Counsel said the committee would be an advisory committee only and therefore would have no power.  I was thinking that there is already a committee for these sort of things, and Michael Moore got up and said it for me.  That includes his own group (the FinCom), the personnel committee, and the BOS.  This motion failed, too.

And now some of my favorite ironies from this pointless exercise:

• So wait, I’m confused.  I thought the stereotype of lazy government workers is that they bang in sick all the time even when they are healthy, and now we are upset that they are not calling in sick?  Which is it?
• The entire discussion was moot because these benefits are embedded inside negotiated union contracts, a tiny piece of which cannot be undone by a vote of Town Meeting.  Contracts that were approved by: you guessed it, Steve Wetzel and the rest of Town Meeting several years prior.  As Madeline Sargent (5) said, we promised to pay this money, and now we are obligated to pay it.
• There would be no conceivable way to populate a new 13-member committee (see below).

If you are smacking your forehead in frustration now and you’re asking why the Moderator didn’t put a stop to this madness, here’s why: he can’t.  Any TMR has the right to approach the microphone as many times as he wants and to ask any question or make any short comment he wants.  That is his right.  I could pull all 240+ budget lines next year and tell the same knock-knock joke at the microphone each time.  (That would make only a slightly bigger mockery of the proceedings than the Steve Wetzel Show.)

I am glad that Mr. Wetzel is thinking about these things.  Hey, the guy might save us $3M some day!  But TM is not the place to get this done.  It isn’t a brainstorming session.  Instead, he should have spend an afternoon at the library, a night a FinCom meeting, or 30 minutes on the phone with the Town Manager collecting facts before storming completely unprepared into Session #2.

This would have saved us 3 hours of wasted debate time.

The Committee to Form Committees Committee

Bob Casey (1) told TM about a sign on the student government office door when he was in school: “I was naked and hungry and you formed a committee.”  Voters routinely snipe at government, red tape, bureaucracy, and the like.  And here we have a citizen — Mr. Wetzel — who wants to do what many criticize government for: form another committee.

Why don’t we concentrate on the committees we already have?

Let’s start by trying to come up with some people who may want to serve on those committees.  According to a legal ad in the May 5 edition of the Minuteman, there are some vacancies.  OK, that’s an understatement.  There are a show-stopping 118 empty seats on about 3 dozen committees.  (Two of these committees had the number listed as “several,” so the actual number is even higher.)  That includes openings on some important ones, like the Finance Committee (4 plus one alternate), the Conservation Committee (2) and the ZBA (2 plus one alternate).

We need fewer committees, not more.  We just had an election with 13% turnout.  If people won’t even vote, how are we going to lure them into trading a free evening for sitting in a meeting once a month?

Which brings me to my final point.  Those of us who are not retired yet and and may have children at home do not have a lot of time outside work to just give away.  I have complained in the past that  younger people simply do not participate at Town Meeting (the median age for TMRs is 55 and their most common profession is “retired’).  After witnessing the Steve Wetzel Show, can you blame them?  When the town’s most important governing body spends an entire night having moot arguments on live TV, what fool would watch that and think that’s worth his or her scarce free time?

In Town Meeting is going to survive, we need smart-phone toting young people to replace the “civic generation” when they go.  And right now that is not happening.  TM has to be more efficient, or the YouTube generation is going to completely tune out.