GOV. MAURA HEALEY looked around New Bedford Fire Station 9 at midday Monday taking stock of the state of the firehouse that was built in 1934. Her assessment wasn’t convincing.
“Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s, yeah, it’s good,” the governor said with firefighters, union officials and the area’s elected state officials surrounding her. “It’s functional, right?”
The 92-year-old fire station had been slated to be closed this fall as New Bedford, like numerous communities all over Massachusetts, contends with a local budget deficit. The governor traveled to the South Coast to highlight the section of the $2.24 billion supplemental budget she filed last week that would provide New Bedford with $1.3 million that the mayor has committed to using to keep the station open instead.
“If you think about this location, you’ve got four grammar schools, one middle school, a high school – it’s so important. It was really important to me that this station stay open and that it stays staffed,” Healey said. “Public safety is job one in government.”
Fire Station 9, which covers a portion of the city’s North End neighborhood, had been billed for closure this fall as part of a round of city layoffs and program cuts intended to resolve what Mayor Jon Mitchell has said is a $32 million budget deficit for the city. Mitchell had said the city would need to do away with 58 unfilled positions and lay off 34 workers, in addition to closing the fire station.
The New Bedford Light reported that Mitchell’s planned cuts were met with fierce resistance from city firefighters and their union. The outlet said Mitchell wanted the union to agree to reduce staffing levels from four firefighters per truck to three and said the closure would be necessary without such an agreement. Mitchell did not attend Monday’s event with Healey.
In a press release last week, Mitchell said the governor’s inclusion of the $1.3 million request followed weeks of discussions between the city and state.
“To be sure, the long-term financial challenges facing the City, driven by unrestrained pension and employee health insurance costs, remain with us, but my hope is that the additional state aid buys us time for compromise with our local public employee unions, members of the City Council, and Retirement Board,” Mitchell said. “Everyone should take advantage of the opportunity this funding creates for putting City finances on a stronger footing.”
If the Legislature approves Healey’s request, the state money will be used to provide additional local aid to New Bedford through the the Executive Office of Public Safety & Security’s Municipal Public Safety Staffing (MPSS) Program, the city said. Mitchell has committed to using the funds to keep Engine 9 in service for now “with the promise of continued operation of Engine 9 should MPSS grant funding come to be included annually in future state budgets,” the city said.
The mayor’s office said Mitchell has been arguing since at least 2018 that “New Bedford has been unfairly denied access to this important state assistance for local fire and police departments.”
In 2018, Mitchell wrote to the city’s delegation on Beacon Hill to point out that eligibility for the program created in 2010 had been “limited only to localities that had submitted grant applications in past years,” which cut off access to the program for cities like New Bedford that were eligible but had not submitted applications previously. The state has said there are 10 municipalities that are eligible for MPSS funds.
“The stated purpose of the Municipal Public Safety Staffing program is to restore or retain laid-off police officers and/or firefighters, or to provide additional overtime funding for those departments. It is ironic (and inequitable) that wealthy jurisdictions such as Newton and Framingham continue to receive allocations under this grant while others do not,” Mitchell wrote in 2018. He largely repeated the same argument in a letter to the delegation this spring.
Healey said she is “confident they’ll take swift action” when asked about the prospects of the Legislature approving the New Bedford money, which appears in section 168 of the 196-section bill. Joining Healey at the firehouse Monday were state Reps. Antonio Cabral of New Bedford, Mark Sylvia of Fairhaven and Steven Ouellette of Westport.
“The way I look at it is, we’ve got to deal with some short-term funding problems right now, which are real across the state. You know, a lot of our cities and towns are struggling right now with their budgets. The cost of healthcare has gone up across the country … that’s one of the things that’s impacting municipal budgets, along with other things that have raised costs in our economy,” Healey said. “So it’s a short term – what do we need to do right now? To me, it was very important to come up with funds to keep the station open and support the work out of Engine 9, but we’re looking at what are long-term things we need to do to make sure that all of our fire departments across the state are well resourced and well funded.”
The governor said her administration has “increased the amount of funding” for municipal public safety grant awards that will be announced soon, and she also said she wants to develop a financing structure for municipal pubic safety buildings modeled on the Mass. School Building Authority.
“Massachusetts, we’re an old state. We’ve been at this for a long time and some of these stations are as old as Massachusetts, it seems,” she said. “So we got to look at that. Obviously, money doesn’t grow on trees and there’s only so much we’re working with … and that’s why I like the financing mechanism that would allow us, through our bonding capacity, to maybe go out and build more and new public safety facilities around the state.”
