How does the town's spending stack up?

By Nick Grabbe
Staff Writer

Published on April 25, 2008

With Town Meeting starting Monday and beginning its review of all town spending, a team of Bulletin reporters set out to compare Amherst's spending with Northampton and other communities. Frequently, it is difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons. The presence of the University of Massachusetts and the two colleges introduces numerous caveats into comparisons, especially in public safety spending. In many instances, Amherst and Northampton calculate the many categories of public spending differently.

But there are many areas where the comparisons can serve as useful measures of what Amherst places value on in the present and can help determine where the town wants to go in the future. In places where salaries are mentioned, benefits are excluded, as they are separate line items in the town's and city budgets.

A special report on their findings is here, and in the two stories below.

<h4>Police</h4>

The Amherst Police Department will spend about $5 million this year, with $3.3 million of that coming from local taxes. It has 50 full-time employees and one part-time employee in its budget.

The Northampton Police Department will spend $4.68 million, with $3.6 million coming from taxes. It has 68 full-time employees (63 officers) and eight part-time employees.

Although the Northampton police logged more calls and larcenies, there have been many more arrests in Amherst.

Amherst Police Chief Charles Scherpa explained that the officers have had to put in a lot of overtime making sure celebrations after Red Sox and Patriot playoff games don't get out of hand. In addition, he said, there have been two officers out of work for the last eight months. The actual staffing is closer to 44 officers because of injuries and retirements, he said.

Town Manager Larry Shaffer reduced police staffing by two positions last year and did not recommend reinstating any in the coming year. Scherpa said the police are stressed out and their morale is suffering.

On April 10, Finance Committee members expressed regret over the level of police staffing in the upcoming year. "We want to express our discontent at the level that department is not being funded and the repercussions that may occur," said Brian Morton, chairman of the committee.

Scherpa said officers have been doing their own correspondence and there are documents building up and waiting to be filed. "We're really on a shoestring," he said.

But Shaffer said, "I'm not going to raise the flag that we're dramatically understaffed. There are times when we could use more help."

It's difficult to compare the two departments because both deal with a substantial non-resident population. In Amherst, there's a large on-campus student population that is handled by campus police as long as the young people stay on campus, but once they venture into town, they become the town's responsibility. Northampton is more of an entertainment hub, and 46 percent of the people the Police Department arrest don't live there, said Chief Russell Sienkiewicz.

Serious crime in Northampton was up by 10.5 percent in 2007 compared to 2006, Sienkiewicz said. In Amherst, the number of burglaries was up (228 in 2007 compared to an average of 154 the previous four years) but the number of assaults, 66, was slightly down. There were 24 reported sexual assaults in Amherst in 2007, compared to a previous average of 14. The number of calls for help from the Amherst police in 2007 was up by 15.7 percent from the average of the previous four years. The number of Northampton police calls in 2007 was up by 3 percent over 2006. "If you take our budget, how much is it per call?" Sienkiewicz said. "The cost is just over $100. That's cheaper than a plumber or a mechanic."

In one way, the Amherst Fire Department's staffing is easier to compare to Northampton's, because both provide fire and ambulance service to the campuses. But it also provides ambulance service to several surrounding towns, and emergency medical calls are taking up a growing percentage of firefighters' time. The Northampton Fire Department provides ambulance service only during weekdays.

In 2007, Amherst had 3,780 ambulance calls, up from 3,055 in 2000. The total calls were 5,131, up from 4,253 in 2000. The Northampton Fire Department responded to 3,293 calls in 2006. A comparison of staffing is difficult because the Amherst Fire Department has, in addition to 45 career professionals, 22 members in its "call force." This group, many of whom have other jobs, are almost on a par with the career firefighters but can't staff ambulances, said Fire Chief Keith Hoyle. In addition, the department has a "student force" of about 30 volunteers.

If you consider just the career firefighters, and count the student population, Amherst's staffing looks quite anemic, according to Hoyle's numbers. It has 1.25 firefighters per 1,000 people, by far the lowest of the 30 Massachusetts towns with populations between 28,000 and 40,000. Northampton, with 60 career firefighters, has 2.07 per 1,000, which is also lower than average. Holyoke has 3.1 firefighters per 1,000 residents.

Northampton has a minimum of 10 firefighters on duty and a maximum of 15, while Amherst has a minimum of seven and a maximum of 10, while serving a smaller population, Hoyle said. Holyoke has a minimum of 25 on duty for only a slightly higher population, Hoyle said. Amherst's population, including students, is 36,000, while Northampton's is 29,000.

Amherst's emergency response to the far southern part of town has been less than sufficient for some time, Hoyle said, prompting calls for a third fire station that have been going on for more than 15 years. The Northampton Fire Department claims an average of 5 minutes response time to fires and claims that 80 percent of its ambulance responses were in under 7 minutes. Amherst's response times were unavailable by press time.

"We're always living on the margin and I'm very uncomfortable with it," Hoyle said. He said he's worried about increased reliance on student firefighters when several of the ambulances are on call. "We have 19- to 20-year-olds on a fire truck and expect them to perform like career firefighters. My fear is that sooner or later we'll end up with a student force arriving first at a major incident and making life-or-death decisions on how they deploy until other firefighters arrive. That's what makes me nervous."

<h4>Jones Library</h4>

The Amherst library system loaned 560,189 books, CDs, magazines and DVDs last year, the most of any town in Western Mass. except for Springfield. Northampton's two libraries loaned 402,641 items. The Jones Library's current annual budget is $2.1 million, with 20 percent of that coming from its endowment. That figure includes employee benefits. Northampton's two libraries have a combined budget of $1.2 million.

Adding up all the fractions of positions, the Amherst libraries have the equivalent of about 32 full-time employees, 16 of them full-time, 13 part-time with benefits, and 20 part-time without benefits. Northampton's two libraries have the equivalent of about 27 full-time employees, 16 full-time and 21 part-time.

Officially, Amherst has a higher population than Northampton, 34,049 to 28,592. But there are 26,000 students at Amherst's major state university or two colleges, whereas a smaller proportion of Northampton's population are college students (the Amherst town clerk had no figure for non-student residents). All the campuses have their own libraries.

Amherst's libraries had more loans per hour open, more average weekly visits and more meeting room uses in 2007 than Northampton's. The Jones Library sent almost twice as many materials to other libraries as Northampton.

The Jones Library has an endowment of about $8 million, while the Forbes Library in Northampton's is $3 million. The Forbes' annual budget of about $140,000 for materials (Amherst's spends $240,000) comes from endowment income and gifts.

The town of Wellesley's libraries have about the same annual budget as Amherst's for a slightly smaller population (26,987). They have the full-time equivalent of about 39 library employees, said director Janice Coduri. But Wellesley libraries loaned more items in 2007 (575,868) than Amherst, and had a much higher average number of loans per hour open (189 vs. 107). The Wellesley libraries were open fewer hours a week (65 vs. 100 in Amherst).

<h4>Public works</h4>

The Northampton Department of Public Works is bigger than its Amherst counterpart. It has 82 positions and spends $17 million a year, in contrast to Amherst's 62 positions and budgets totaling about $11 million.

Although Amherst has a higher population, Northampton has 165 miles of paved streets to Amherst's 120. While Northampton has a landfill and two transfer stations (one at the landfill), Amherst has only one transfer station. Both departments cover roads, water, sewer, wastewater treatment, snow removal, parks, cemeteries and recycling.

Northampton's highway department has 19 employees and spends about $1.5 million a year. Amherst's has 13 employees and spends $521,000 a year. But Northampton includes its mechanics and tree crews in the highway department while Amherst puts them in separate budget groups, said Guilford Mooring, the Amherst superintendent.

Northampton spends about $6.5 million a year on water whereas Amherst spends about $5 million. That's largely because the city has a new treatment plant with construction and setup costs as well as debt service, said Mooring, who used to be Northampton's assistant superintendent.

Amherst has three water treatment plants, five wells and three surface water sources, while Northampton has two water sources and two wells, he said. Northampton spends $4.3 million a year on its wastewater treatment plant, compared to Amherst's $3.6 million, with both paid for with fees, as is water distribution. Northampton's landfill budget is $3.1 million, while Amherst's solid waste budget is only $625,000.