City Council votes to approve $234M municipal budget for FY2025

Finance Committee chief: Challenges remain for immediate future with gap between revenue, expenses

By Steve Freker

Another challenging set of financial hurdles was cleared in this year’s city budget process, but more and potentially larger ones remain on the horizon for Malden. Malden Councillor-at-Large and Finance Committee Chair Carey McDonald told his colleagues that while the budget gap between revenue and city expenses was filled this year, it will take a lot of work and attention to do it again next fiscal year.

Councillor McDonald’s assessment came just before the City Council voted unanimously, 10-0, to approve a $224 million municipal budget appropriation for Fiscal Year 2025 at Tuesday night’s regular meeting. Voting unanimously in favor of the city budget appropriation for FY25 were Peg Crowe (Ward 1), Paul Condon (Ward 2), Amanda Linehan (Ward 3), Ryan O’Malley (Ward 4), Ari Taylor (Ward 5), Chris Simonelli (Ward 7), Jadeane Sica (Ward 8) and Councillors-at-Large McDonald and Karen Colón Hayes. Councillor-at-Large Craig Spadafora was not in attendance Tuesday night.

The Council’s vote Tuesday was the culmination of a several weeks’ process of review of the budget proposal from Mayor Gary Christenson’s office from the mayor and his financial strategy team. The review was conducted by the Council’s Finance Committee, which is chaired by two-term Councillor McDonald.

“Here we are with one of the most important [tasks] we have as a City Council each year,” Councillor McDonald said. “We have had great conversations with various department heads and gotten some very good feedback from them as well as good questions from the public, particularly on the school budget, which is the biggest single part of it.”

McDonald said one boon to this year’s budget is that “we [the city] have negotiated new contracts with almost every union [in Malden] and all the salary increases are already included in the budget,” MacDonald said.

The second-term Councillor said Malden is in the same boat as nearby communities when it comes to the rising budget crunch, both this year and in the future. “Like every other city, we are seeing costs [of everything] going up, and revenue sources are flat,” McDonald said.

He noted that Malden used one-time stopgaps of $4 million from the last of Malden’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds and another $2.5 million spent to fill a gap in this year’s budget from the cash reserves fund.

McDonald, who drew high marks for his handling of the budget review process last year, as a first-term Councillor, was in the same seat for this year’s process.

The $224 million city budget represents an increase of about $10 million, or some 6%, from the FY24 budget of $213.9 million. The largest expenditure in the approved budget is the $93,380,000 budgeted for the Malden Public Schools, followed by $24.9 million for the Human Resources Dept., primarily for employee benefits. As in the City of Malden side, where no jobs were cut this year, there are no projected layoffs on the School Department side. McDonald did note that the Malden Public Schools did opt to wipe out a potential $1 million-plus shortfall in its budget by leaving a number of its unfilled positions empty. Other big ticket items are $15.4 million for retirement pensions, $14.15 million budgeted for the Malden Police Department, $12.86 million for the Malden Fire Department and $8.5 million for the Malden Department of Public Works.

Councillor McDonald said that this year’s budget discussions were similar to this year’s review since the same issues remain, regarding finances. “We have the same issue with disproportionate Chapter 70 [state aid to schools] funding as we had last year,” he said.

There was action recently, as McDonald noted that a working task force is now in place to study strategies and actions that could be taken to work toward a goal of getting more of a Chapter 70 funding share to Malden. “We have required minimum spending for the students,” Councillor McDonald said. “These required minimums eat up almost all of the new revenues as the gap continues to grow.”

McDonald also noted that Councillors are now working on a new Master Plan for the city and in the course of discussion has involved talks of potential zoning changes that could possibly jumpstart development that could potentially generate more property tax revenue. “But the reality of zoning changes that actually lead to development is that it takes years for it to actually happen and it is not likely to affect our community financially in even two years from now,” the Finance Committee chair said.

“If we are in the same place next year come budget time, we could be staring at much, much harder choices,” McDonald said. “It would be a question of whether we choose them, or they choose us.”