The straight talk Mayor Bill Scanlon delivered to Beverly voters Monday night should be heeded by their fellow citizens in every city and town in the commonwealth.
Simply put it's that current revenues, including state aid, cannot sustain the current pace of municipal spending, particularly in the area of health insurance and other employee benefits. And if things don't change the only recourse municipal chief executives like Scanlon will have is to reduce the number of people on the payroll.
It's nothing he nor anyone else likes to contemplate. Even with increased productivity, a loss of city workers usually means a reduction in the quality and quantity of services. But the fact is that contracts negotiated in better times under different circumstances than the ones cities and towns face today, are no longer sustainable.
"Historically," Scanlon declared, "the subject of sustainability is annually raised during difficult budget resolutions," only to be "quickly forgotten once the immediate crisis has passed."
According to the mayor, it's not easy "making the painful decisions necessary to ensure long-term sustainability (but) we can no longer shy away from that difficulty."
He's right. Take health insurance, the cost of which has been steadily increasing, sometimes by double digits, each year. Paying the city's share of those premiums now consumes a whopping 15 percent of Beverly's $100 million-a-year budget.
How generous are the city's benefits? According to Scanlon's calculations, for some 150 employees covered by a family plan, "the lifetime cost to the city for health care will exceed the total lifetime salary paid to that individual."
Indeed, salaries are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to municipal personnel costs. Add health insurance and pensions and the burden is, as Scanlon asserts, unsustainable over the long term at the current rate of taxation.
So it's either pay more in taxes; continue to reduce personnel and see traditional services like public safety, recreation and road repair suffer; or address the current pay and benefit structure to make it more affordable. Voters need to elect people to state and municipal office who are willing and able to make those difficult choices.
