What's wrong with this picture? The Peabody Municipal Light Plant says it doesn't have the money to continue funding energy conservation projects in the city's schools, yet hands out over-the-top raises to its employees.
Talk about your bad PR. Ratepayers in Peabody, many of them struggling to get by, ought to be outraged by the latest PMLP contract, which granted workers an 11 percent increase, much of it retroactive, over three years. Negotiations on a new pact are about the get under way because this one expires June 30. Hold onto your wallets.
The municipal utility has always been able to claim it offers among the lowest rates in Massachusetts. But those rates are going up, and so, perhaps, should the level of public scrutiny to which it is subject.
The PMLP, which pays no taxes, used to be able to boast about the money it returned to the city and the grants it made to the schools. But that's been going down in recent years to the point that the School Committee recently saw fit to dispatch a letter expressing its concern.
Most outrageous is the fact that the most recent raises — and the likelihood of a rate increase — were known to the elected light commissioners well before incumbents Thomas Paras and Robert Wheatley ran for another term last November. Indeed, PMLP General Manager Bill Waters — who makes $166,000 a year — acknowledged as much when he told reporter Matthew K. Roy that the pay increases had been on the table for several years and "you can't go back once you start negotiating." Yet the contract, rather too conveniently, wasn't ratified until after the election.
The utility's employees will have to pay a greater share of their health insurance premiums — 15 percent, instead of 10 percent — as a result of the new deal. But raises of 4, even 3 percent, annually are excessive given what's happening in the economy.
Unfortunately, that's what happens when public agencies operate with little oversight and virtual autonomy. Scant attention is paid to the light commissioners' race when it appears on the ballot ever other year.
Perhaps it's time for a restructuring so that the PMLP manager, as in Danvers, reports directly to the city's chief executive rather than a virtually unknown board.
But then you might have to give the mayor a raise. He only makes $95,000 a year.
