Fish, fishing poles, and Medford’s per capita spending
In canvassing door to door for votes, my pitch usually ends in "If there's anything on your mind about living in Medford, I'd love to hear it!" Naturally, the things on residents' minds are often features around their own property. For example:
On Main Street, a slab of sidewalk that used to house a tree which was no longer there. Instead, there was just a piece of missing sidewalk, overgrown with grass. The residents living in front of that slab reported it to the city, and — going just by their side of the story — the city had marked it as fixed without doing anything about it.
A man in the Hillside area showed me a tree outside of his house that had, for the past ten years, been breaking his garden wall. He explained that the city had chosen to plant a Green Lindon — a cheaper option than, say, White Oak — which had roots that spread outwards instead of down.
Two women who lived near two different privately owned roads that were, at one time, riddled with potholes, who wanted the city to maintain them.
An 81-year-old man in West Medford, using a cane, who explained that he had been complaining about the state of the sidewalk around his house since the 1980s and had never been able to get the city to take it seriously. He often tripped and fell.
A woman near Tufts Alumni fields whose backyard was permanently flooded by the work done there.
A man who called me up and asked what was being done about the many potholes on Golden Avenue. He'd heard from a few past councilors that money had been allocated for that — and nothing had yet happened.
In deciding where to put resources, there's a balance between cost, demand (including how many people a project affects), and need. For instance, to investigate the Golden Avenue situation, I ended up calling a traffic engineer in city hall to ask. The engineer explained to me that that money was allocated to replace a gas pipe and that the road — or parts of it — would be replaced incidentally during that project. It was scheduled to be finished in the next year or so. They preferred to dedicate resources to gas leaks because those can explode. If I had as few resources as Medford does, I, too, would direct them towards making sure things don't explode.
There are 351 municipalities in the state of Massachusetts. 96 have a population greater than 20,000. Going by 2022 numbers, Boston is the biggest, with a population of 650,706; Worcester is in second place at 205,319; Medford is in 16th place with a population of 65,399. If you take the revenues and receipts data from the state's website and population data from another source, these numbers make Medford stand out in an interesting way among the larger municipalities. Medford's total receipts from the last fiscal year were $219,971,391; its population in 2022, again, was 65,399. If you divide these two numbers, you get $3363.53 spent per capita in Medford. For context, Cambridge (population 118,488) had $952,669,261 in receipts, giving it a ratio of $8040.22 per capita; Somerville (population 79,762) had $390,074,479, giving it a ratio of $4890.48 per capita; and Malden (population 64,712) had $230,724,600, giving it a ratio of $3565.41 per capita. Of the 96 municipalities in Massachusetts with a population greater than 20,000, Medford's per capita spending is third from last, ahead only of Bridgewater (population 28,780) and Amherst (population 40,059). Among all municipalities in Massachusetts, we rank 302 out of 351.
So, Medford is uniquely underfunded, especially for a city of our size, and this translates into a low-capacity city hall. The more I talk to people, the more it's dawning on me that city hall doesn't have the resources to handle every construction project outside every house that needs them, at least in the short term. So, knowing this, in these conversations, I'm careful to not promise residents that I'll fix their specific problem. It bugs me that I can't. But truly addressing the cause of these problems requires increasing the capacity of city hall, which requires more funding, and so I try to tell residents that we need to plant the seeds now — to invest — so that we can have a better local government in the future.
I'd heard, once, that a well-meaning piece of advice had been given from an older city councilor to a younger city councilor: you shouldn't try to pass an ordinance about something that can be handled with a phone call to the right person in city hall. I've thought about this tidbit a lot, and I think it represents an outdated way of thinking. During the ORM endorsements forum, School Committee Member Paul Ruseau complained that city councilors need to get away from the practice of doing one-off favors for people they know and focus on building workable systems that residents can then use to address their issues. It's better to tell people about a system for reporting potholes and then try to fix the flaws in that system when it fails, than it is to ask the city to repair a pothole for a friend because they called. Put another way: it's better spend $500 on fishing poles than $500 worth of fish.
This is, in large part, why we’re in the financial position we're in: past politicians in Medford have chosen to sell off fishing poles, then use that money to buy residents more fish. This contrasts with Somerville, which has a fishing pole factory in Assembly Row. Cambridge, which is already full of fish, chose to build its own factory in Kendall Square.
So, when talking to individual residents, I'm trying to divorce myself from the well-meaning idea that, if I were elected, I’d need to fix their individual problems in a one-off fashion. Instead, I’m trying to think more broadly about why the systems in place failed them. Don’t get me wrong — when people call me, I will help them, but with the intention of finding out why the system is so broken that they needed the personal help of an elected official in the first place. Going forward, council needs to think at a bigger scale and address the cause of the problem, not the symptoms.
