22News InFocus featuring Paul Bockelman

From the 22 News Plus Studio, this is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Barry. Hello everyone, and welcome to this edition of In Focus. I'm your host, Patrick Barry. We're here in the 22 News Plus Studios. This is going to be a fun conversation because it's about the town of Amherst. I know very little about Amherst other than it has Massachusetts flagship campus, University of Massachusetts there. They've got the Drake, they've got a wonderful downtown, but I'm very happy today to be joined here in the studio by Paul Backelman. He is the Amherst town manager. Paul, thank you very much for joining me. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to learn more about the, I was about to say wonderful small community of Amherst, but Amherst is like the sixth biggest town in Western Massachusetts. There's almost 40,000 people there. I had no idea. Yeah, it's the biggest town. Biggest little town? It is the biggest town in Hampshire County. It's a little misleading though because half the population are students. As you may know, UMass, the flagship campus is in Amherst, but also Amherst College and Hampshire College. So it's three of the five colleges are located in Amherst, which adjusts its population accordingly. So let's talk about the town. That is an interesting balance. I live in Westfield, so we have Westfield State University, but you have three major campuses in your town. How does that, does that really affect the way you govern the town of Amherst? Sure, it really does. So I went to Hampshire College, full disclosure. So, and so I fell in love with the town when I got there and just always appreciated the town, the academic flavor, the kind of downtown that it had, the commitment to social justice and to sustainability, all those things really attracted me to the town. In terms of the town, about a third of our total property is not taxed because it's either in Hampshire County or in Hampshire College or Amherst College or University. So that puts a real strain on the remaining taxpayers. Another third is in open space or reserved for agricultural preservation or conservation areas. I didn't realize that. So it really squishes the taxpayers. So you must hear that all the time. We certainly do. And also, you know, the students have an outsized role in the community and have an impact on how we staff our fire department, police department, things like that. So how long have you been town manager back? I'll be 10 years in a few months. 10 years? So did you, so after you graduated Hampshire College, between that and 10 years ago, when you became town manager, what'd you do? Oh, I first moved around a little bit and then settled in Eastern Massachusetts and worked for the city of Cambridge. A lot of college graduates do the same thing. My daughter's one of them. Yeah, yeah. And so, and then wound up working for the historical commission for Cambridge and then recognized that that's not where I wanted to be. I went to graduate school and got a master's degree and then started working for the town of Manchester by the sea on the North shore. And then after a few years, about 13 years doing that, we had kids and town government's sort of a nocturnal activity. So I was out pretty much every night and my partner said, why did we have children? So I went to the MMA and worked at the Mass Municipal Association. And I want to talk to you more about what the Mass Municipal Association is, but how long were you at MMA before coming to Amherst? So I was at MMA about 13 years as well. Oh, wow. And then came to Amherst almost 10 years ago. So is a town, you know, I live in Westfield, it's a mayoral, and we elect, vote for our mayor every two years. Is town manager, are you an elected role? Are you an appointed role? Yeah, it's a really good question. So there are two forms of government that are available to cities. So Amherst is now a city, even though it's called the town of Amherst. It's officially called the city known as the town of Amherst and there are other communities who are like that as well. So you either have a, in a city form of government, you have the town council or city council is your legislative body. And then the town manager or the mayor is the executive. So in between those, that's how things fall. The executive is either a appointed town manager or an elected mayor. And the town under the council manager form of government, which is the most prevalent form of government in America, most communities have a council manager, they have an elected body, then they hire a professional manager who has experience managing towns to run the day-to-day operations of the town. So, I mean, you've been doing it for a while, so you must enjoy it. Yes, I do. It's incredibly fun. So not being an elected official, it's interesting because whenever I have an elected official in here, in this day and age, I always ask them, why, why would you ever seek public office? It's just, it's one of those roles nowadays. It's just, it's a thankless job, it really is. And you put yourself and your family in the crosshairs of a lot of angst and anger, but you've kind of a different, you're not elected. So you're really, and correct me if I'm wrong, your real role is just to, like a business. Like you look at the town of Amherst as a business. You've got departments, you've got expenses, you've got income. So you're just managing it as a business, correct? Very much so, and also very similar to a superintendent of schools. You know, the same type of thing. You have an elected body, school committee, and then they hire someone who has a professional background in education. Here, you hire someone who has a professional background in management and municipal management in particular. But I know what it feels like. 13 years, I was on the elected school committee member for the city of Somerville. It's a really different role because you are there sometimes as an advocate for your constituents, whereas a manager has to make decisions about what's best long-term for the town. Wow, you really have your work cut out for you. So I guess how big a budget is Amherst? Amherst is about a $100 million budget. Well, it's a pretty good sized budget. And so again, I think about how revenue in our communities is generated. It's generated through tax base. So you have a $100 million budget really coming from only a third of the property size. Yeah, I mean, there's also state aid, there's local receipts, you know, motor vehicle excise tax, things like that, but primarily it comes from the property tax. When we're coming up on our first commercial break, but when we come back, I wanna dig into a little bit of how you manage a town, its budget, and then how the Mass Municipal Association plays a role in that. All right, we'll be back in just a moment. Stay with us. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Welcome back everyone to today's discussion here on In Focus in the 22 News Plus studios. Sitting across the desk from me is the Amherst town manager, Paul Backelman. Paul, thank you for joining me. I'm familiar with a mayor council form of government because I live in Westfield and a lot of our major cities are the same way. So I really haven't been exposed much to a town manager. So who, do you as town manager, similar to a mayor, create the budget and then present it to the council? Is that form of, is that still the same? Exactly the same. And there are others. I mean, city of Worcester has a city manager, city of Cambridge has a city manager. Worcester has a manager? They have a mayor, but it's more the person who chairs the council meetings. We have a president of the council that's chairs the council meetings. So it's not an executive form of government as city of Lowell has a city manager, city of Chelsea has a city manager. So there's a lot of communities in Massachusetts who also have better cities that have managers. So, but it's your role to create the budget for the community, present it. How difficult has it been over the last few years creating a budget that not only operates your community, but is satisfactory to the residents? So the town council, every fall we present a status report on where we are financially. Then town council spends a couple months developing goals and they have financial guidelines. And they say, we don't want to go for an override. We want to have a priority on this or that. We want to add more firefighters or whatever it is. And so then I take that guidelines and I develop a budget that tries to meet their guidelines as best as we can. And it's been really hard this year, especially as a very, very hard year for everybody. I think I'm mostly driven by health insurance. You know, the one thing I always say to people when they get frustrated with taxes specifically, you hear probably way more than I do is we need to cut more taxes. We need to cut more taxes. My immediate response to that is if you want to cut taxes, what services do you want cut? Because that's where a community gets its revenues from taxes. So, and there are things you can't control like health insurance. You know, your town employee health insurance must be through the roof and continues to go up. So you say it's gotten more and more difficult. How do you manage? How do you create a budget that everybody's happy with? Or, well, not everybody's happy. No, I mean, the expenses, the costs are going up. I mean, the problem for local government is that everybody likes everything local government does. Federal government's different, you know, state government's even less so, but everything that we do is tangible. People feel it and they like it. They want their roads plowed. They want their roads paved. They want a good school, quality school system. They want public safety. All those things are really important investments. They want good planning in their town so that they know what's going on in their neighborhood. So the key challenge, I think, for me, it's about headcount. I mean, when you add a body, you add a new position, it adds additional responsibilities for the town, for retirement, for health insurance, and the costs. So we've been extremely disciplined about adding staff. We've been really disciplined about that unless the council said we wanted to add a new department or we wanted to, so for DEI or community responders, or we want to add more firefighters, things like that, then we have to figure out how to incorporate those new expenses into the budget. You know, it's interesting you talk about adds to staff. You know, people say, you know, I'm not just arbitrarily throwing out a number. Maybe it's a $60,000 a year salary, but it's all that other stuff. That might cost you $150,000 a year, even though it's because of all the other things. And then that just compounds year after year after year. And cutting staff has to be one of the hardest things you have to face. And that's where we are right now. We're looking at everybody's budget and asking them to look at a budget that would look 10% less than what they have now. And you have to do it with people. There's very little fluff in our budgets, and that's one of the biggest challenges. And the schools are in the same boat. You know, their expenses for regional transportation and for special education are just really hammering their budgets. And so, but they, you also want to pay your employees well. You want to be competitive and to attract the best people to work for the community. So it's a real conundrum for us. This is a perfect transition into the Massachusetts Municipal Association. Explain to me what that is. The Massachusetts Municipal Association is also known as the MMA. Some people, and it's a lobbying group in a certain way. And some people say MMA means more money always, because they're always at the state house asking for more money for cities and towns. There are 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts. 349, I think, are dues-paying members. And it really is the voice for cities and towns at the state house lobbying for more money for schools and for cities and towns. Because you can't make it to the state house every time there's an issue. So they go on the behalf of all the cities and towns. Right, and then they communicate back to us. There's a lot of, there's a big, there's a training component that they do. So if you're new in the position, they have training sessions for you. But also, you know, they communicate back what's going on at the state house. It sounds like an extremely valuable resource to all the cities and towns. It is, it really is. And I think there's power in numbers. And every local official lives in one of our communities. And so they know what's going on in their own community. And they know the sort of trials and tribulations that we're facing at the local level. So how is the MMA set up? Are there, they're a Boston-based organization, I'm assuming based on the way you describe it. But do they have people like members or employees or whatever spread out across the state that feed them information? Mostly they have a big committee structure with people like me or counselors or mayors on it and select board members. They're based in Boston. They need to be within walking distance of the state house because they're up to state house all the time. And then they, but their members are, it's a member-driven organization. So I serve on a committee and they'll say, what do we think about this public works issue? And we'll weigh in from our perspective. And then we all, there'll be 20 people who weigh in and they'll craft a policy based on that. So they don't provide you or all the, now you say you, I mean Amherst or any community, they don't provide you money. They just help fight for the funds to help you manage your budget and do the day-to-day operations. Right, so they're our group that we pay a dues to and we say lobby at the state house to get more money and provide other services, help share information, best practices from other communities, things like that. So, and you mentioned you're on one of the committees and you were a former employee of the MMA. Employee, I was also on the board of directors at one point, yeah. Okay. When you were part of the MMA, did you do a lot of traveling? Like, do they come out here or do they really rely on their members from out here to give back information? They're on the road a lot. A lot of their trainings are spread out throughout the state. You know, it's hard for people in our area to get to Boston. It's sort of not just hard, it's annoying to have to go there. A lot has gone online, but they do go throughout the state and do legislative breakfast where they invite local legislators to meet with their local officials and they do that two times a year. So I think they did one in Greenfield recently. And so they'll do a couple out here in Western Mass. Very good. We are up on our second commercial break. We've got plenty more to talk about with Paul Bachman. He is the town manager of Amherst. So stay with us. We're back in just a few minutes. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Hello again, everyone. And welcome back to this edition of In Focus. We're here in the 22 News Plus studios sitting across the desk from me from the town of Amherst is their manager, Paul Bachman. Paul, thank you again for joining me. I appreciate you giving me some of your time to talk about Amherst, the great things that are going on up there. You know, we talked a moment ago before the break about the challenges of any community. What are some of the challenges that Amherst may have that another community doesn't have, or maybe some of the challenges that other communities have, but in Amherst, it's a much bigger challenge. So many communities are doing the same work just in different areas geographically. So one of the biggest things is recruiting qualified candidates to work for the town because our salaries typically don't keep up with the private sector, and that's where we're in competition with. Also, we're in competition with the university who is also hiring many of the same skillsets as we are. You know, we have 100 miles of roads that we have to maintain. There's never enough money to maintain them. With the weather we're having this winter, it's particularly hard because it's the freeze-thaw cycle that makes the potholes, and we're about to experience that this week because there's gonna be a lot of warming and freezing and those potholes- It happens every spring in New England. Pop up, and it's hard to address them all because it has to be dry to be able to really fill a good pothole. So it's those things that we're all facing, and keeping up with our roads is a big investment that we're looking to make. You know, it's interesting. When my daughters were graduating college, and they were job hunting, and we would talk about municipal, state, or federal employment, and I would tell them, I go, listen, you're never going to make a lot of money working for one of those entities, but you have stability. You know, the town of Amherst isn't going away. You know, the federal government's not going away, but you have lifelong benefits. You know, you might not make a lot of money on an annual basis, but as we were talking earlier, there's so much more that goes into an employee than just that annual salary. So if I can encourage anyone to apply for a municipal job, I would say to do that, because they are great jobs. You know, you're helping your own community. Are there specific roles within the Amherst government that you're running the town? I mean, schools, fire department, police? Yeah, so we're really- Yeah, fire, police, wastewater treatment, oddly enough, if you're an engineer, or want to get into that field, that is a lifelong profession. You know, I met with our water superintendent today, and he's like, he got into it. He started as a summer laborer and just came up through the ranks and is now running the entire water division. You can grow in a city, and that's really exciting. He started when he was in his 20s. He grew up in town and just stayed. And it's unique opportunities for that. And it's also really important work. And he's like a scientist and a operator and, you know, supervising people. And it's just a remarkable story. It's funny you share that story, because when I was in high school, I worked for the Westfield Wastewater Treatment Plant, right? And I did it for two summers. And I learned those guys, you know, people think of, you know, they have this perception of what DPW workers are, whatever, but the wastewater treatment, they're scientists. They, there's, I mean, they're treating our waterways. So it's not just, you know, working a job. I mean, there's chemicals that need to go into our waters to protect it. And it's funny, I had a conversation once, a little bit off track, but not really, with a bird specialist. And we were talking about the amount of bald eagles we're seeing in our area nowadays. And he goes, you know what, the number one reason for that is our waterways are cleaner. Wow. Because they have to eat, you know, and you put one and one together. So, you know, kind of coming back to the wastewater, long way around the wastewater treatment plant, but these men and women, they're scientists. They have to make sure that all of our waterways are clean for the fish and for so forth. But that's STEM education. That's all that is, you know, you know, in every school district in the state, I know, I don't know about the country, focusing on STEM education. I can't imagine Amherst is any different. No, absolutely true. And I think, you know, that education also being adjacent to the University of Massachusetts, where a lot of engineering students come out and they can, you know, intern in our wastewater treatment plant. There is a laboratory in our wastewater treatment plant. They are doing analysis all the time. Because what we put, our ethylene goes into the Connecticut River, but it has to meet a certain standards for us to continue to pump it into there. And that's where those scientists do what they do best. They meet those standards that are set forth, I think by the federal government, right? Any additional challenges Amherst faces throughout the year? You know, maybe it's this year, the years past, maybe some things that you've faced and you've kind of beaten? So, yeah, I think one of the things, one of the challenges right now is we have a lot of things that are nice to have in our community. And those things are gonna be difficult to maintain because we're holding on to being what we must do. And that's public safety, it's roads, it's school, it's education, it's water and sewer. I mean, the two things that you probably care about most is making sure when you turn on the tap, water comes out that's clean and drinkable. So all those things require significant investment. And we haven't made the investment over the last, you know, several decades in our infrastructure that we should have. And we're starting to do that again. We're building a net zero school for one school that will replace two fossil-fueled elementary schools. We're building a new library that will be really a stellar library in the center of town. And we need to build a new DPW, a new fire station. Are you also, you struggle with, because you have some open space, you know, some of it's protected, but some of it's not, you know, farmland and whatnot. Do you battle the idea of development? You know, I have to imagine, because it adds to the tax rolls, you know, I have to imagine that's an ongoing struggle in Amherst because you have some open space. Yeah, a lot of the open space is protected that you see. And that's one of the things that people ask when I came back after being in college many decades ago, they said, what's different? I said, it looks pretty much the same because the town did a great job at preserving fields and farms and things like that. I think, you know, it's a beautiful community for that reason, but it doesn't generate taxes. Exactly, fields don't generate taxes at all. Paul, we are up on our time, but I want to thank you so very much for joining me today. It was great learning more about you and what the role of a town manager does. And of course, what's happening up in Amherst. Good seeing you. Thanks for having me. Thank you. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry.