My Mind’s On My Money and My Money’s On My Mind
Recently, I saw a pretty in-depth examination of the School Committee candidates on Reddit – pros, cons, etc. The person was skeptical of my take on the CPSD budget. And that made me realize that yup, there’s a piece missing in my communications.
So here we go:
One: I sure am conscious of the budget – no lie, that’s the truth. 100% correct. I do think we’ve overleveraged our bond rating as a city, partially as a result of the past 10 years of building (aka capital investments – not operations) known as the Innovation Agenda. This means that we spent more than we should have while building the upper schools, and we have risked our credit rating.
I am particularly sensitive to this situation because I grew up in Cleveland. I’m married to the son of two Union auto workers, also from the Rust Belt. I know what a bankrupt city looks like. And we originally moved to New York City – another city that almost went bankrupt – because at the time, there were no jobs in Ohio.
Historically, if there are no jobs or businesses to offer jobs, there isn’t any investment in public education. If there’s no investment in public education, folks who can afford to pull their kids into private school will put their kids into private school. Public school teachers won’t get the kind of pay or benefits that they deserve. Kids with learning differences – which accounts for about 20% of the population – are less likely to get screened or receive appropriate services. (And thanks to the Trump administration’s federal policies, there is going to be less and less oversight to hold public schools to account.) Hungry kids are less likely to have access to free breakfast or lunch. And if you are hungry, if your learning style is not fully served, if your teacher is burnt out and overstretched, you are more likely to have worse educational outcomes. And let’s not even get into the almost certainly diminished capacity to provide an appropriate education to multilingual learners.
So, to be blunt: my lived experience is the origin of my municipal budget sensitivity. And my budget sensitivity isn’t because I want us to be more efficient for efficiency’s sake.
It’s because I want CPSD to keep and expand the services that we should already be offering, and offering well.
Two: I hear a lot of “Cambridge has a lot of resources!” (Definitely more than Cleveland in the 1990s, I’ll tell you that.)
The follow-up I hear less frequently – and would like to hear more explicitly – is “Cambridge always cries poor during union negotiations!” And I’d agree with that statement, and furthermore, I’d call that negotiating in bad faith and with poor strategy. When you cry wolf like that, why would anyone trust you? Why would anyone extend grace to you in difficult times? What happens then?
So that brings us to “difficult times.” Are we, as a city, about to have them?
Some already are. There’s a reason why A Better Cambridge’s affordable housing reform platform has so many proponents – because to quote the great Jimmy McMillan, “the rent is too damn high!” And recent Medicaid cuts affect both the well-being of Cambridge’s population and its revenue sources.
I’m quoting from the City Manager’s FY 2026 Tax Rate Letter, which was shared with the City Council on Oct. 6, 2026:
“In FY26 we are beginning to experience tangible impacts of a changing macroeconomic environment and federal policies…throughout the FY26 Budget process there was discussion regarding unfavorable macroeconomic trends facing the region and the city that may impact the City’s fiscal health, including declining values in the commercial real estate market and a slow-down in development. Federal actions have added further uncertainty to our economic outlook. To address these concerns, we established targets to moderate budget growth for FY26, as well as 2 future years. These targets were set in recognition of the relationship between budget growth and projected increases in the property tax levy that are required to support the budget.”
For a little context: About 72% of the City of Cambridge’s revenues derive from taxes. 91% of that amount is based on real property tax, mostly commercial with some residential. And the CPSD budget – that’s 28% of the City of Cambridge’s annual operating budget, for a total of about $280M – is funded by those mostly commercial property taxes, with a top up from the state of Massachusetts via Chapter 71 revenue sources (mostly funded by the recent-ish millionaire’s tax).
Here’s a quick and dirty look at the right-now health of the FY 2022 top tax payers in the city.
NSTAR Electric aka Eversource: how’s your energy bill? Does it hurt?
Akamai Technology: Stock value has dropped 35% over the last five years.
NSTAR Gas aka Eversource: see comment re pain & energy.
Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research: The Swiss-based company’s stock value rose 54.24% over the last five years. (Observation: possibly a little more shock-absorbent than U.S.-based companies after the Trump administration’s cuts to federal funding.)
Millenium Pharmaceuticals/Takeda Oncology: Recently exited cell therapy. In 2024, there was a “wide-ranging $900 million restructure.” 22.91% stock decline over the last five years. Hmm.
Kendall Green Energy (owned by Vicinity Energies): In Cambridge, it provides energy to commercial buildings, specifically healthcare. See comment re Trump cuts to federal funding; Medicaid.
Amgen: Might be stable in terms of its revenue? It recently started selling pharmaceuticals directly to consumers.
Lumen Technologies: Fiber optic and cloud computing company, starting to get into AI. 31% loss of stock value in the past five years.
Verizon New England: Is Verizon.
bluebird bio: The one-time makers of the most expensive drug in the world, they were recently acquired by a hedge fund and rebranded as Genetix Biotherapeutics.
That’s a lot of corporate volatility in less than five years.
And while, yeah, we can raise our traditionally very low residential tax rates, it’s just not a very large chunk of a very large budget. And, finally, you can’t raise commercial taxes on only the part of the economy that’s making bank. Because it…kinda doesn’t work like that. It’s all in or all out.
So. To my mind, the best path forward to get us things we want – stuff like better pay for aftercare workers, an actual living wage for all paraprofessionals, follow-through on advanced learning programming, universal aftercare for universal pre-school, appropriate staffing for the transportation and communications departments, and the expansion of the HSEP program into middle school – is to be…
…budget sensitive.
Sensitive, in this instance, having two meanings:
1) quick to detect or respond to slight changes, signals, or influences.
2) (of a person or a person's behavior) having or displaying a quick and delicate appreciation of others' feelings.
More soon,
–amc
