Cycles of misinformation in the override campaign
Misinformation is an inevitable part of any political campaign. That's doubly true for Medford's upcoming ballot questions, in which voters are going to decide whether or not to put money towards Medford Public Schools, a new Fire Headquarters, and a permanent road repair crew in the Department of Public Works. The reason we need these overrides are complex, and when attempting to explain the ins and outs of municipal finance, a difficult-to-understand state law from 1980, and how both the long-term financial management of Medford and lingering effects of COVID put our schools in a fiscal crisis — there's a lot of opportunity to jump in and add confusion.
The misinformation in this campaign has been cyclic. From what I've been seeing, somebody brings up a point that is wrong but sounds factual and repeats it ad nauseam; then supporters research the point and push back on it; the bad actor finds something else to say; and the cycle repeats. (This cycle often happens in the confines of Facebook echo chambers, sometimes creeping out into the real world.)
Why does this happen? While there are always downsides to a tax increase, the reality is that they're massively outweighed by the benefits the override would bring. The City needs better schools, we need to repair our roads, our fire headquarters is 60 years old, 90% of cities in Massachusetts have had an override, and Medford spends less per capita than the vast majority of mid-sized Massachusetts cities. We need to prevent teachers from being laid off so that children in Medford will have a good education. And an override vote is supposed to happen: when Prop 2.5 chokes a city's budget too much, the framers of Prop 2.5 intended for an override vote to fix that. Medford's just behind the curb.
The truth is that there's just not a good, honest reason to vote against these ballot measures. And when facts don't line up to support an opposition argument, the best strategy is to just make things up. It takes very little intellectual effort to mischaracterize a complex topic and market it as a soundbite. It's easier to tell a simple lie than a complex truth.
It’s generally bad practice to give airtime to this sort of thing, but I’m trying to illustrate what’s going on. To offer a few examples, these are three of the most egregious pieces of misinformation I’ve seen so far in this campaign:
Misinformation: The city is refusing to be audited!
Short answer: No, we have an audit.
Long answer: This came up over the summer, and it’s sometimes repeated to insinuate financial wrongdoing. The sole member of City Council who voted against placing the overrides on the ballot was frustrated that he couldn't table them on his own (as he related, a lawyer had told him that he could, but he never produced a written legal opinion). So he wrote a complaint to the state attorney general and the state auditor. The state auditor gave him a response that said, while they didn't usually audit cities, they could if the City Council and mayor voted to approve it. The city would just have to pay for it.
The problem with that is that the City already gets an outside audit every year. The results are online. (Google “Medford MA audit.”) A redundant audit would be a waste of money. As a result, we voted it down.
Misinformation: We don't need the override — we can use free cash!
Short answer: No. No, we can't.
Long answer: If yearly tax revenue is the city's paycheck, free cash is like the city's savings account. During COVID, the federal government gave everyone a $1200 check. They gave cities some money as well. The amount in Medford’s bank account spiked post-2020, so we’ve had more than usual the past few years. But the deficits in the school budget are mostly staff salaries, and the idea that salaries can be plugged with free cash instead of an override is like me saying I don't need to look for a job because I have $1200 in the bank and that'll sustain me for another two weeks — so why bother looking now?
As an aside: this free cash bit goes deeper because the city did, in fact, used to run with almost nothing in the bank, even going negative some years.
Medford's certified free cash since 2004. Source: Division of Local Services, MA Department of Revenue
That's not good fiscal management. For context, here’s a graph of every other MA city in 2004, with their free cash as a percentage of their operating budget.
Cities are supposed to generate 3-5% free cash every year (from money unspent from the budget — positions that couldn't be filled, underestimations of revenue, and so on) so that we can fund one-time expenditures. Again, if you are making money, you put some into your savings account. Teacher and paraprofessional salaries need to be paid every year. If we put free cash towards those, we'd have an empty bank account in a few years, just like we used to.
What should free cash be spent on? Capital costs and one-time expenditures. And that’s what we’re doing. We spent it on a $3 million study for the new high school; stabilization funds (which most cities take for granted but which Medford only instituted last year) that, more recently, went towards capital projects like a new water heater at Brooks Elementary and replacements for the 40-year-old street lights near City Hall; two new firetrucks; $1.75 million to plug the school’s budget prior to the override; and the air conditioning system for the middle schools. Not all was spent because it's best financial practice to keep some in reserve, since that helps the city get better interest rates when we borrow later.
Misinformation: The tax impact calculator is wrong
Short answer: The calculator is the best estimate given the data provided by the state.
Long answer: This is a weird one that's cropped up more recently. The Invest in Medford website has a property tax impact calculator that can take someone's address as input and tell them how much their taxes will go up if all three ballot measures pass (the average is $37 a month). It takes in data published by the state of Massachusetts and offers the exact same calculation that the state puts on its own official calculator.
The complaint here (I think) is that the calculator is not using FY25 property tax rates, which is impossible because those rates have not been set yet (because it’s not the future). There was a back-and-forth about it at the last Council meeting.
Anyway — the list goes on, more will crop up, and Invest in Medford's FAQs page has attempted to address these as best as anyone can. The points I discussed above were just egregious misstatements, but other issues that regularly crop up aren't misstatements so much as red herrings, and still more issues just reduce to political disagreements between different factions within Medford.
At the end of the day, it’s all a distraction. Medford is massively underfunded, we’re at a fiscal cliff, and those campaigning to oppose these initiatives have never offered an actionable plan, because they have no plan to offer. Only one actionable plan has been offered: implement an override to fund our roads, schools, and fire department, thereby addressing immediate shortfalls; overhaul the City's zoning to aid the long-term development of Medford; and support staff as they modernize our municipal government. And that’s what we’re doing.
