We also find it very odd that while all this criticizing and bashing is going on, no one is offering up any solutions. Also of interest is the fact that when Mr. Medeiros was asked — In a town where over 80% of the total budget is labor and benefits, how do you ever control the budget without labor concessions on all contracts, he never did answer this question, no matter how many times it was repeated.

The tax cap has become a “me, too” affair, with claiming it as an objective to stay beneath it. Unfortunately, for most of the people involved in local government it’s sort of an abstract goal; they aren’t willing to take any of the steps that would ensure that the budget does stay within bounds. Actually, we can probably combine the “steps” into just one: ceasing to give in to the union demands that have left public sector unions with higher pay than their private-sector counterparts and stratospheric benefits.

Mr. Goncalo, for example, is getting a 2.65% raise, to $86,127, and his administrative assistant is going up 4.04%, to $37,454. The town clerk is budgeted for a 3.5% raise, to $51,899, with another $4,864 going to her clerical staff, plus another $800 for longevity bonuses in the office.

The town solicitor gets another $25,000 for litigation; the municipal court clerk gets another $538; the building/zoning official gets $508 more and $1,000 of new vacation coverage, with $894 more for clerical; the town planner goes up $1,014, plus $996 for clerical. The tax assessor’s office sees $1,300 more for personnel services, another $1,537 for clerical, and $1,000 in office longevity bonuses. Similarly, the treasurer gets $1,853 more and $2,189 more for clerical. The part-time tax collector loses $645, but the clerical staff gains $1,535.

In the fire department, the 32 firefighters’ salary line items are only going up $2,281, but the chief gets $1,125 more and the clerk gets another $1,643. Moreover, overtime is budgeted for an additional $20,000, and longevity takes another $9,043.

The police department, by contrast, is seeing an overall $3,673 decrease in salaries, including drops in longevity, holiday pay, and overtime. One should note, though that the chief is getting an additional $2,101, the two records clerks are splitting $8,529, and the secretary gets another $965. The animal control officer also sees a $994 increase.

Elsewhere in town government, a new harbor master assistant is getting $2,400. The public works superintendent is getting $1,466 more, and his clerk, $996, while the eight maintenance workers are collectively costing only an additional $1,283. The two landfill workers are only seeing $306 more, albeit with $600 more in sick time. The town’s maintenance foreman gets $1,394, and custodial personnel, $859. The senior center director’s raise is 5.4%, to $46,305, and the assistant director’s 6.48% to $16,190.

And none of this takes into account that insurance benefits are budgeted to cost the town another $198,159.

These increases in personnel costs would clearly not be exorbitant in normal times, and I don’t mean to suggest that any particular employees don’t deserve every penny of additional money even during extraordinarily difficult times. The point is that there’s a reason the budget committee has had to take a scalpel to the budget just to get it under the levy increase, even as local taxpayers make up for projected decreases in state aid.

It would certainly be reasonable to argue on behalf of that exchange of taxpayer dollars over the cap for increases in personnel costs, but it’s an argument that has to be made. Those who wish to increase taxes by double-digit percentages can’t just badmouth those of us on the other side and pretend that the budget numbers are akin to a force of nature that we simply must accept.

Astonishingly — and I really mean that adverb; it’s not just a flourish — nobody has brought up the legal ruling that affirmed the East Providence School Committee in its decision to implement unilateral employment terms to save money. Honestly, even if nobody on the committee has any intention of doing such a thing, as a simple matter of negotiations, that possibility should be mentioned. That it has not been (and will not be) illustrates the erroneous approach that these local committees take to negotiations.

On top of that omission, the committee is discussing whether an error resulted in the district’s not getting all of the money from the town to which it was entitled. Speaking about stabilization funds, Superintendent Bill Rearick stated that he thought additional funds were supposed to go directly to the district. Once again, everybody in the room is simply ignoring the fact that the financial town meeting explicitly required all additional money to flow back to the town.

7:42 p.m.

Nothing resolved. Rearick’s going to put together a detailed list of the horrors that will face the schools if the district doesn’t get the budget it wants, because apparently facing down the unions scares the committee even more than decreasing services and opportunities for students.

8:05 p.m.

Wide-ranging discussion about Department of Education-related topics. They’ve now turned toward teacher evaluation and performance compensation. Apparently, RIDE hasn’t been able to find a pay system anywhere in the country that suits their needs and will building one of their own.

1. Justice Silverstein emphasized that Rhode Island law forbids teacher contracts from extending beyond three years’ duration.
2. When a contract has expired it has, well, expired and has no legally binding force.
3. Rhode Island law requires school districts to maintain balanced budgets, and the remuneration of employees cannot be presumed to take precedence over other expenditures.

Number 1, it seems to me, means that the union’s gotcha, last August, by which it claimed that it didn’t need to renegotiate its contract for this school year (and, moreover, avoided higher health care coshares) had no basis in the law. If the district’s attorney, Stephen Robinson, wasn’t aware of this consideration, then he should be replaced at first opportunity. If the school committee opted not to pursue it, then that decision should be added to the evidence that they should all be replaced, as well.

Combining numbers 2 and 3, the lesson for Tiverton is that the financial town meeting (FTM) can set the district’s budget and empower the school committee to unilaterally extract the required savings from the unions. To put it bluntly, in ongoing negotiations, the School Committee should take the Budget Committee’s recent vote to place a leveled budget on the docket for the FTM as a reason to require a 5-6% reduction in the salary/health benefit line items of its contracts. If the union does not agree, and if the FTM does not produce a much larger pool of money for the schools, the School Committee should declare negotiations at an impasse and impose the necessary savings.

If the School Committee agrees to a more conciliatory contract prior to the FTM, it will be evidence that its members wish to lock the town into giving teachers’ pay priority over services, programs, and facilities. All of the talk about taxpayers’ attacks on kids will be so much vile rhetoric, because the committee will have been the one to determine that the students should be squeezed to compensate for revenue shortfalls.

Paradoxically, I found this image clarifying not because it correctly identifies the problem that TCC has been seeking to address, but because it’s not really a fair representation of that problem. Any senior at Tiverton High School would hopefully spot the first problem with the chart — namely, that the scale of the secondary axis is artificially constrained to make the drop in enrollment look much more precipitous than it has been. Making the axes more comparable renders thus:

That’s still not quite representative, though, because the appropriation isn’t adjusted for inflation. Correcting that omission yields this final picture:

The point of this exercise isn’t to deny that Mr. Caron has correctly identified a problem or that the town’s taxpayers would be justified in demanding that school budgets cease to increase as enrollment decreases. The point is that the imbalance has been gradual, and adjustments can be so, as well.

Yes, the School Committee was utterly reckless in jumping into the recession up to its shoulders by approving a huge retroactive raise for teachers. Yes, Superintendent Rearick should have recommended using federal “stimulus” money to create a buffer for future shortfalls, rather than recommending that the district spend it. Those are very good reasons to change the makeup of the committee and turn around the calculation that perpetually rewards adults while squeezing programs and resources that benefit the students.

However, the nearly two thousand Tiverton children currently in the system will never have another childhood. What we offer them provides the only collection of memories that they’ll ever have of “my hometown.” We’re not only defining the Tiverton community, for them, but the very idea of community itself. Like it or not, we have a responsibility to take that into account, and we shouldn’t weight it lightly.

A flatlined budget doesn’t teach elected officials and administrators a lesson. It creates factions. It divides the town into those with school-aged children versus those without (and those who send their children elsewhere for schooling). Tiverton, the state of Rhode Island, and the United States of America face a dire need to redefine elementary and secondary education, but it must be done with the understanding that we’re not changing the production of widgets in a factory, but providing a crucial, one-time-only service to growing generations.

If the teachers’ union fails to acknowledge the inequity of its remuneration in combination with the state of the economy, then the financial town meeting should adjust downward accordingly. If the school committee and union seek to bind voters’ hands with another reckless contract, then level funding would be an appropriate response. In any case, factionalism shouldn’t be the defining characteristic of the docket with which we start.

Reducing total compensation (salary and benefits) across the board by four or five percent from this year’s level and making some investments in facilities, technology, and programs would result in a budget increase of one or two percent. It would also begin to turn the community’s approach to education around, rather than splitting it in two.

But that’s just my opinion.

The School Committee and the National Education Association-Tiverton had a mediation session Thursday and set dates for three more this month, but any details of what transpires will be kept under wraps until the two sides come to a contract agreement with the 191-member union or reach an impasse.

“We agreed that as long as there is progress being made we will not make any statements,” School Committee Chairman Jan Bergandy said. “If an agreement is reached or if there is an impasse, then both sides are welcome to say what happened.” …

“Basically there’s a temporary blackout,” Bergandy said of the halt to postings on the School Department Web site during this mediation period.

It’s the way of the world, I guess, that promises about continual flows of information are always contingent upon nothing really delicate being included. Officials tend to look at such provision of documents more as a tool for their own use than a service to taxpayers.

The real unfairness lies in the imbalanced rights provided to union membership, as I described in a video blog, back in September (fast forward to 3:10 for a description of the process):

Essentially, the complaint is that the full union membership gets to vote on the contract and, as reporter Marcia Pobzeznik put it in the quotation above, “come to a contract agreement,” before the taxpaying electorate is brought into the fold. Especially with an unpredictable financial town meeting rapidly approaching, the impression of planning against voters is a real danger. The school committee meetings at which town residents finally have the opportunity to opine on the contract always have the feeling of futility — with the committee merely allowing townsfolk to let off some steam before voting as they’d agreed during mediation and discussed during executive session.

We all know what comes next: Rhode Islanders, generally, and Tivertonians, in particular, are certainly familiar with the argument that contract terms are “locked in” and unavailable for change should voters determine that they need their money more than the town should.

One might suppose her words are directed towards National Education Association Tiverton leadership, for their role in slow rolling the current Teacher contract negotiations through numerous State Labor Board Complaints and petty squabbles over ‘ground rules’. Instead, it is the School Committee Ms Pallash seeks to caution from engaging in such behavior, and instead, “find rational middle ground”. While Ms Pallash is thoughtful and well intentioned, there is more we must be aware of.

According to NEA/Tiverton Union President Amy Mullen, NEA Assistant Director Patrick Crowley has filed complaints with the Rhode Island State Labor Relations Board regarding the posting of information about contract negotiations on the Tiverton Schools’ web site. This posting is mostly basic budget data describing Tiverton’s School Budget. It contains, among other things, over a half million dollars for pay raises and almost $300K for increases in health benefits. Yes, an INCREASE of over $800K over the previous contract. Instead of accepting this generous offer, despite desperate economic conditions, the NEA has taken to filing grievances. I do not believe ‘middle ground’ is what Mullen and Crowley are after. They want more, and they want it out of the public’s view. This sounds like the force, bullying and disrespect to which Ms Pallash refers; from the union towards the school committee, the town and ultimately the students of the Tiverton Schools.

Taxpayers have funded this generosity for too long. Taxpayers are angry at government that will not control spending, while allowing students to suffer with less. TCC supports the preservation of current student programming, holding the line on taxes and reduction of labor costs through contract reform. Any 2010 spending increases must be kept well below the Tax Cap.

Unbelievably, the tone deaf NEA feel big salary increases combined with generous health and retirement benefits are a right, not a privilege, and ignore the needs of our community. To pay next years’ $20 million in labor costs the School Committee is contemplating cutting funding for books, pencils and paper for heavens sake! Do you want your town officials to allow this?

Had enough? Create Change, become a candidate for Tiverton public office. Email us at info@tivertonCC.com.

On January 27, 2009, the school committee approved a largely retroactive contract for teachers that ate up about $300,000 of that year’s budget, added approximately $150,000 to the current year’s, and is contributing more than that to the $600,000-plus increase in salaries and benefits budgeted for the next fiscal year. At a November 2008 meeting, Ms. Pallasch argued for approval, saying, “Let’s start working on the new one, and give ourselves a little bit of room to refocus on the classroom and away from the adults.” The argument was that we should resolve the running dispute while there was still time to negotiate the subsequent contract amicably.

At the time, I spoke up to predict that the union would not negotiate. Rather, it would wait out the recession based on the obvious reasoning that it could avoid concessions during hard economic times and — as we’ve taught its members to expect — receive retroactive raises when times improved. I also handed out a chart showing that there had been no abatement of the increases in teacher salaries and benefits in the past decade. Indeed, the per-pupil dollar amount had gone up more (54%) than the same number for the state as a whole (40%). Over the same period, the chart showed that most other expenditures had hardly moved.

Well, negotiations did not resume with an amicable tone. Indeed, in August, the union pointed out a clause in the contract extending it for another year. The school committee had somehow missed the trick that it was supposed to notify the union of its intention to negotiate the next contract a full month before the previous one was actually approved. Changes in healthcare copayments for which the committee had budgeted went out the window. So did negotiations.

Now, a year after its ill-considered vote, the school committee is talking about cutting supplies and classroom technology. They’re approaching the town’s budget committee with numbers that will require double-digit tax increases. ‘And here’s Deb Pallasch: “Let’s realize that we’re all in this together …Let’s work through the process that we have, which is collective bargaining. Let’s go to mediation. If we need to go to arbitration, let’s go to arbitration.”

By way of reply: First, a hard line, including zero probability of retroactive raises, must be part of the collective bargaining process if a reasonable balance is to be struck. Second, Pallasch’s assertion, in her letter, that I’m suggesting “$750,000 or more of cuts in salaries and benefits” is simply not true. Most of the amount necessary to close projected deficits could be achieved simply by freezing salaries and benefits at their current rate. It wouldn’t even be a “concession,” because the union currently has no contract. (Again, why would they negotiate if the committee behaves as if there’s a contract in place regardless?)

Third, Pallasch’s accusation that my suggestion would incur legal fees is a silly ploy in light of her willingness to go through the processes of mediation and arbitration, which also require lawyers. In the meantime, our students are suffering by their lack of proficiency in math and science and by the ever decreasing amount of programs and resources available to them, even as well-paid adults reap rewards at a pace with no correlation with the economy.