The polls don’t open until September 14th, but the race for State Senate in the Middlesex and Essex county district (which includes Malden, Melrose, Wakefield, Stoneham, Reading, and Lynnfield) is already heating up. Here’s a closer look at your two candidates: Katherine Clark, Craig Spadafora and Mike Day.

  In March 2008, Katherine Clark was elected to represent Melrose and Wakefield in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. She has fought hard over the years to gain support for small business owners in the area, and she said this remains a top priority, as the state struggles to regain economic stability.

  “Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, and we need to make sure they have the capital they need,” Clark said. Particular attention, she added, needs to be placed on health insurance.

  “I heard of one [employer] whose insurance went up 68% in a single year.” The bottom line, she said, is “small business owners are trying to insure their employees, and trying to do the right thing, but the rising costs are breaking them.” Clark is fighting for programs that allow small business owners to work together to bring these costs down, as a group.

  Spadafora said he would like to see a stable tax environment for all corporations and businesses, as well as certain tax credits for companies that are here, to encourage them to stay in the state.

  “We need to have incentives in place if we want companies to stay here,” he said. And if they stay here, they will, of course, hire more workers and ultimately decrease unemployment across the state.

  “Foremost on my mind is the economy. We need to keep the companies that are here from leaving, and then we have to work on attracting more companies to the area,” Spadafora said.

  Attracting companies may be the first step in the process, but it’s not the biggest issue. Companies do come here, but once they begin to get really large, they tend to leave because the state taxes make it too expensive to grow here, he explained.

  “You have to create a stable tax environment. You can’t cut taxes two years and then raise them the third year,” Spadafora said. “Companies want the ability to see at least five, six, or seven years into the future, and if we continue to go up and down with the taxes, it’s not sustainable for them.”

  Another hot topic of discussion for both Spadafora and Clark has been the Chapter 70 legislation. Both candidates recognize that the individual needs of local cities and towns differ.

  The legislature has continued to push down cuts to the local town managers and city mayors. Malden alone lost $10 million in local aid.

“The state has to change how Chapter 70 funding is allocated,” Spadafora said.

Clark agreed. She said the state needs to look at two things: meeting individual community needs while also looking at the historical inequities engrained in Chapter 70.   “All of our schools could, of course, benefit from more funding. We have to look at a few different things. For one, when we have an opportunity for more revenue services, we have to make absolutely sure those opportunities benefit things like our education system,” Clark said, adding that this issue is one of the main reasons she’s running for State Senate.

  “In this economic climate it is more important than ever that we focus on making it a priority to fund our public schools. We have to look at ways to make it equal across the communities while keeping in mind the different student bodies that they serve,” she concluded.

Spadafora said Reading and Stoneham have been hit particularly hard by Chapter 70 and believes the issue must be fixed at the state-house level. He wants to see equal funding to all of the towns and cities.  

“It’s not just about education though, it’s about local aid in general,” Spadafora said.

“You also have to look at health insurance. You have to control health care costs. Malden, for example, has 10 or 11 unions—you’ll never get them to all agree,” he explained. “Nobody has fixed it yet. It’s the same debate everyone’s been talking about for three and a half years. They know it’s broken, and they know how to fix it, they’re not fixing it.”

(The Malden Advocate apologizes to candidate Mike Day due to deadline constraints but will be reached for comment in a future edition prior to September’s election.)

Beacon Hill Not Offering Much Relief to Cities and Towns

By Sen. Richard Tisei

  The Legislature passed a long-awaited “municipal relief bill” last week, but the proposal that is heading to Governor Patrick’s desk falls far short of its original stated goal.

  After three straight years of local aid cuts, cities and towns have been looking for a comprehensive package of cost-saving reforms to help offset state aid reductions and preserve essential municipal services.  Instead, what they’ve been given is a bill that settles on a band-aid approach and offers mostly minor fixes that won’t amount to much actual “relief,” particularly in the short term.

  I voted against the bill, in part because it does not include the one major cost-saving reform that cities and towns have been clamoring for: health care plan design.  Giving communities more flexibility to design their own health care plans for municipal workers could save $100 million a year, but this provision is nowhere to be found in the bill.

  Ironically, on July 15 – the very same day the Senate voted on the municipal relief bill – the Boston Globe ran a scathing editorial calling on the Senate to “scrap the bill” because “proposals that might have helped cities and towns cut costs [have] been weakened almost to the point of irrelevance.”

  “The most important thing the Legislature can do to help cities and towns is to give them more control over the design of employee health plans,” the Globe noted.  “But efforts to do so went nowhere in the face of stiff union opposition.”

  There are some positive reforms in the municipal relief bill, but none that would produce the immediate and long-term cost savings associated with municipal health care reform.  For example, the bill establishes a statewide mutual aid agreement to make it easier for cities and towns to share resources during a public safety or public works-related incident, along with other regionalization options to encourage the sharing of resources among multiple communities.

  The bill also contains provisions for a temporary tax amnesty program at the local level, which is modeled after a similar Republican-sponsored program that has been successfully implemented at the state level through the Department of Revenue.  The measure allows for communities to waive portions of the penalties and interest due on unpaid local taxes as long as the principal tax amount is paid within a specified time period.

  One of the provisions being touted by supporters of the bill is language authorizing communities to offer an optional early retirement program for employees with at least 20 years of service.  But a number of communities have already offered similar incentives in recent years, and for many the savings generated by a new early retirement option would be negligible.  Also, it’s questionable how many eligible employees would even participate, given that they must agree to relinquish all of their accrued vacation and sick time without any additional compensation.

  Supporters also point to a provision in the bill allowing cities and towns to extend the date by which they must cover their unfunded pension liability by another 10 years.  Currently, municipalities are required to have enough money in their pension funds to cover all employee retirement benefits by 2030.  The municipal relief bill would extend that deadline out to 2040.

  Giving communities additional time to meet their unfunded pension liabilities will offer them more financial flexibility in the short term, but all it really does is put things off for another day without implementing the real reforms needed to address the underlying problem.  The Boston Globe agrees, noting the “dangerous combination” of denying communities “the tools to reap meaningful savings today, while giving them the option to push off their costs deep into the future.”

  The biggest flaw of the so-called municipal relief bill is its failure to deliver health care cost savings to cities and towns.

  Over the last 10 years, municipal health care costs have jumped by 150 percent, while spending on other municipal services has increased by just 30 percent.  Communities across Massachusetts spend $2 billion a year on health care costs, which now accounts for an average of 15 percent of total municipal spending each year.

  It’s unthinkable that the Legislature would try to pass something off as a municipal “relief” package without addressing the one crucial area where reform is most needed, and without providing the one tool that would allow cities and towns to realize real savings year after year.

  The Beacon Hill Institute estimates the statewide savings associated with plan design could spare the equivalent of between 1,070 and 1,630 teachers, firefighters and police officers.  That’s the kind of relief cities and towns are looking for, not the minor tweaks the bill offers.

                   Malden High School Alumni Homecoming set for Sunday, October 10

  Malden High School alumni are invited to the 3^rd annual homecoming luncheon on Sunday, Oct. 10, 2010.

  Hosted by the MHS Alumni Association, the Columbus Day weekend event will be held from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the cafeteria where alumni will gather to reminisce about school days and enjoy a delicious luncheon. The cost will be $25 per person.

  Reservation forms will be available soon.

  Class years holding their own reunions are invited to link their events to this affair or to the rededication ceremonies Nov. 14 for the renovated Jenkins Auditorium, also hosted by the MHSAA (www.maldenhighalumni.com).

  For further information, contact Patty Kelly at 781-665-2543 or at pkelly6385@aol.com.

Malden Police Department Arrest Log