Medford ballot Questions 7 and 8 will determine whether the city can collect an additional $7.5 million in personal property and real estate taxes to fund the public school system and infrastructure repairs. Questions 7 and 8 are two of three local ballot questions Medford residents will vote on this Election Day.
Question 7 asks whether the city of Medford should be allowed to access a $3.5 million override in real estate and personal property taxes for fiscal year 2025. Of the $3.5 million, $3 million would fund essential costs such as teacher salaries and facilities maintenance for Medford Public Schools. The remaining $500,000 would fund a permanent Department of Public Works crew for roads and sidewalk infrastructure repair.
Question 8 asks whether an additional $4 million in real estate and personal property taxes for fiscal year 2025 should be approved to support the future growth of Medford Public Schools’ arts and vocational programming. It would also increase the school district’s ability to bargain for competitive teacher and paraprofessional salaries relative to neighboring communities.
According to city councilors, underfunding in Medford’s public school system, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic and increased living costs, can also be attributed to Massachusetts Proposition 2.5.
Proposition 2.5 limits the tax revenue a municipal government can levy from personal property taxes each year to 2.5% of the full cash value of all taxable property, which prevents municipal budgets from keeping up with inflation, which averages at about 3%.
Ninety percent of Massachusetts communities have attempted an override of Proposition 2.5, according to Leming. This election will be the first time since 1980 — the year Proposition 2.5 was enacted — that Medford has put an override on the ballot.
Supporters of a “yes” vote on Question 7 argue that the override is necessary to prevent layoffs of 35–45 teachers and address the backlog of over $60 million in infrastructure repairs.
“It’s something that should have been done a while ago because, right now, we have one of the lowest per capita operating budgets in the entire state of Massachusetts, and that shows with the rankings of the Medford Public School system,” Medford City Councilor Matt Leming said.
According to Leming, the school committee revealed in a presentation last spring that schools were about $2.7 million short of funding, even after proposed staff cuts. Medford Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn made budget cuts and reallocation efforts to compensate.
“We actually did some hard work last budget season, and we cut $2–3 million from the school department. I did my best to cut on this, probably about $1.5 million on the city side — so the hard work can be done,” Lungo-Koehn said.
“That’s cuts to people, because school budgets are 80% people,” Erika Reinfeld, a Medford school committee member, said.
The budget after reallocations “included $1.75 million from the city’s savings account, our free cash, which is not something we’re supposed to do regularly,” Leming said. “But we did that with the understanding that we would go for a Proposition 2.5 override.”
Free cash reserves are unrestricted funds remaining from a community’s previous fiscal year. The issue with putting them toward the school budget, according to supporters of Questions 7 and 8, is that free cash reserves are meant to act as a stabilizing budget for one-time emergency costs as opposed to teacher or DPW salaries.
“You cannot use free cash to balance a budget,” Lungo-Koehn said. “It will catch up to you in the coming year or two or three, to the point where you would have to then make the devastating cuts.”
The recommended free cash reserve is 3–5% of a municipality’s annual operating budget. Medford currently has $34.2 million in free cash. According to Lungo-Koehn, some of that money has already been allocated to a $6 million emergency stabilization account, a $5 million capital improvement stabilization fund, a $2 million capital water and sewer stabilization account, and $3 million for Massachusetts School Building Authority design work, among other costs.
“We put $5 million into a capital improvement stabilization account that was done and up and running July 1. The city has had either overages on bids or emergencies of almost $1.2 million just since July 1,” Lungo-Koehn said.
Advocates of a “no” vote on Questions 7 and 8 fundamentally disagree with the idea that the city is unable to use free cash to support the public school system and fund infrastructure repairs.
“There’s an option. Let’s use the free cash and then revisit and override together, so we wouldn’t divide our community and use the children as a pawn, [and] use the schools as a pawn. Because if you look at other overrides — whether it be Belmont, whether it be Arlington, whether it be Melrose — they use the fear tactic of the children and the schools,” City Councilor George Scarpelli said.
Opposers believe the overrides would needlessly harm residents who would be unprepared for property tax increases starting in January. The proposed alternative solution, according to Scarpelli, is to use free cash for the initiatives proposed in both ballot questions, while covering emergency costs with additional Massachusetts Water Resources Authority grants.
“I’ve met with financial directors across the Commonwealth. I’ve talked to different state entities. It’s not recommended ever to use your free cash to balance your budget, especially your operation costs. But in Medford’s case, when you have an [one-time abundance of] $34 million, they actually recommend that you use that money down because it’s too much money,” Scarpelli said.
“Even as someone who supports this and put it forward, I’m not happy that there are people who feel like … this is going to really impact their ability to stay in our community,” City Council President Zac Bears said. “I wish that those tax laws were different. I wish that there was a possibility of trying to do more to protect people, but 75% of our budget comes from the property tax levy, and the [Proposition 2.5] laws are really strict, and this is the only way that we can do this. There is no better way.”
