NEW BEDFORD MAYOR Jon Mitchell is making another bid to do away with the city’s residency requirement for nonunion management employees, saying the three-year-old ordinance has put the city at a “major competitive disadvantage.”
The ordinance was approved by the New Bedford City Council over the mayor’s veto in 2020. It requires several high-level department heads to live in the city and imposes a 10 percent salary reduction on other nonunion management employees who choose to live outside the city unless they have been a city employee for a decade.
“The desire to hire residents cannot come at the cost of protracted department head vacancies, disruptions to municipal services, and ultimately a less qualified management team,” Mitchell said in a letter sent on Monday to the City Council. “And, in the case of top management and highly technical positions, it is simply not realistic to think that a sufficient talent pool exists within the city’s borders. For precisely these reasons, most other cities have abolished their own residency requirements, and it has become time for New Bedford to do so as well.”
Mitchell said the residency requirement was the chief reason why the position of personnel director remains unfilled and why the positions of chief financial officer, city auditor, and city treasurer were vacant for multiple years. He said the position of associate city solicitor was vacant for two years because “non-resident candidates were unwilling to accept the 10 percent pay reduction.”
The mayor raised similar concerns in 2020 when the ordinance was originally approved and again nearly a year ago. At the time, the City Council was concerned about disparate treatment of employees. Union workers were required to live in the city and police and fire employees had to live in the city for a minimum of 10 years; nonunion management employees, by contrast, were required to live in the city but that requirement was waived for a number of workers.
The City Council voted 10-1 in November 2020 to do away with the waiver process and imposed a 10 percent pay cut on employees who chose not to live in the city and didn’t have 10 years of employment with the city. The council overrode Mitchell’s veto by the same 10-1 vote.