It’s the gift that keeps giving, the evergreen story that gets repackaged every so often and then met with varying degrees of outrage, some sincere and others as phony as a Boston City Council vow to serve as an independent counterweight to mayoral authority.
The byzantine world of Boston’s municipal residency requirement for city workers got a good going over in yesterday’s Globe. City Hall reporter Andrew Ryan didn’t have to work hard to find scores of city workers, including top officials in the police department, school department, and inspectional services office, who live outside the Hub of the universe in apparent violation of the city’s residency ordinance. Among those featured in Ryan’s front-page story: Willie Gross, the number two man in the city police department that is charged with enforcing laws. Hypocrisy, of course, is the mother’s milk of journalism.
But what if the residency law — and all the handwringing about it — has it all backwards? Maybe the best course of action would be a reverse residency law that requires that city workers not live in Boston. It’s not a campaign platform anyone is likely to run on, but that doesn’t mean it’s without any merit.
Ryan reports finding “at least 50” municipal workers living outside the city in violation of the ordinance, but says “there may be hundreds more.” Finding them appeared to be about as hard as shooting fish in a barrell, with Ryan relying on city-provided payroll records showing the workers’ addresses. If this were a fight of reporter vs. scofflaw city workers, the ref would have stopped it. A Little League game? The slaughter rule would have been invoked.
Amended with more and more exemptions over the years since it was adopted in 1973, the residency law has more holes in it than the Red Sox infield. Time and again, mayors have bargained “away” residency rules covering various employee groups in exchange for other contract terms.
The argument for the residency rule made sense, at least viscerally, when the city was bleeding middle-class residents. The problem today is more one of whether middle-class families can afford to stay in Boston, and so the fervor for the residency law has slackened considerably since the days in the early 1990s when Savin Hill activist Rosemary Powers championed the cause under the banner of the group “Save Our City.”
Mayor Marty Walsh claims to support the residency law, though he floated an unsuccessful effort himself only weeks ago to relax its requirements for his top hires. The argument against the law, as Adrian Walker writes today, is that it inhibits what should be the city’s paramount objective: to hire the best person for each job.
But here’s another argument for doing away with the regulation: It might help improve the performance of the city workforce while also restoring some vigor to city politics and municipal elections. City workers make up an outsized share of the electorate in municipal elections, which have dramatically lower voter turnout than those of a generation or two ago. That means city workers are essentially in charge of hiring their own bosses. Forgive the comparison (or not, as you wish), but this is an inmates-running-the-asylum situation that would fit nobody’s idea of good management. Having fewer city workers vote in Boston elections could, in theory, bring more accountability to job performance and more vitality to elections and viable challenges to incumbents.
In 2011, the last non-mayoral city election, 63,000 voters showed up out of a total of 275,000 active registered voters on the rolls. Yesterday’s Globe reports that, despite all the exemptions in the residency law, about two-thirds of the city’s 18,000 workers, or about 12,000 employees, nonetheless live in the city. Assume that they have a strong interest in who is elected to city office, and assume that each city worker has, say, two family members in the city who share that interest. Those 36,000 voters connected to the city workforce represent a solid majority of the turnout from the 2011 race. Over the long period of Tom Menino‘s reign, this was the core of his unbeatable electoral machine. Over time, this will become Marty Walsh’s army as well.
The role of city workers in low turnout elections confuses the lines of accountability that should be in place. City workers who live outside Boston, on the other hand, are solely accountable for their job performance, with no direct say in who oversees their hiring and performance.
Nobody is actually proposing a reverse residency ordinance. But if someone did, the idea isn’t as completely crazy as it sounds.
—MICHAEL JONAS
BEACON HILL
The federal Probation trial is crawling with hostile witnesses, writes the Globe‘s Milton Valencia.
A new state law aims to tackle the rampant problem of natural gas leaks, which are costing consumers millions of dollars and pose potentially grave safety threats.
MUNICIPAL MATTERS
Longtime deputy fire chief Joseph Finn will be named Boston’s new fire commissioner today, the Globe reports.
NATIONAL POLITICS/WASHINGTON
Governing looks at three gubernatorial candidates around the country, including Martha Coakley, who have suffered debilitating losses only to rebound and become frontrunners in their current races.
Despite the trade embargo that has banned travel to Cuba from the United States since 1963, more than 100,000 Americans are visiting the communist island each year since President Obama eased some restrictions on “people to people” trips.
Washington state issues licenses for recreational marijuana sales.
ELECTIONS
Massachusetts has very few contested primaries for state legislative seats.
Secretary of State William Galvin makes a campaign ad buy.
Super PACs on both sides are poised to spend millions on an anticipated rematch in November between US Rep. John Tierney and Republican Richard Tisei, the Gloucester Times reports.
Former US senator Bob Smith came in first and former US senator Scott Brown finished third over the weekend in a New Hampshire US Senate straw poll.
BUSINESS/ECONOMY
You know the state’s film tax credit is working when Quincy stands in for Santa Monica, California, as it is in the Whitey Bulger biopic Black Mass that’s filming around the state.
EDUCATION
The Pioneer Institute‘s Charlie Chieppo and Jamie Gass say new state regulations on charter schools that will limit their growth in Worcester, Lowell, and other cities are setting back the cause of educational excellence and opportunity for low-income students. CommonWealth broke the story of the changes in charter school regulations in April.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy spotlights the Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL) program, one of several nonprofits around the country that try to boost low-income children’s math and reading skills that traditionally erode during the summer without school.
The treasurer of an elementary school parent-teacher organization in Plymouth is the latest in a growing number of people accused of embezzling from the groups in the South Shore area.
HEALTH CARE
The New York Times weighs in on the deal between Partners HealthCare and Attorney General Martha Coakley, calling it a “dubious bargain” and suggests that other states “look more carefully” at proposed hospital mergers than Massachusetts did. Meanwhile, the Health Policy Commission plans to add its views on the deal during the public comment period.
ENERGY/ENVIRONMENT
Gov. Deval Patrick reaches out to people protesting the Tennessee Gas pipeline expansion in western Massachusetts.
Hundreds of Lynn homeowners and businesses will have to buy flood insurance that they never needed before, but if city officials fail to adopt the new federal flood zone maps, no one in the city will be able to purchase insurance.
CRIMINAL JUSTICE
The ACLU has filed suit against the state to try to stop the practice of civilly committing drug- and alcohol-addicted women to MCI-Framingham if beds at treatment facilities aren’t available.
In the wake of a recent spate of shootings in Lowell, Mayor Rodney Elliott is asking the police department to enforce the city’s 1994 ordinance that sets an 11 p.m. curfew for juveniles.
(NO) OLYMPICS
Dan Shaughnessy joins the chorus of those saying a Boston 2024 Olympics is a very bad idea that needs to be put to rest.
