The Legislature and the City Council helped to bankrupt Springfield. The Legislature allows towns to zone out the poor, and pay not local taxes to provide services for them. The Legislature and the City Council has allowed the cities tax base to be eroded without complaint.

The Legislature defines laws, and decides what to do with those who violate them. But the police fall under the city budget. So the legislature keeps expanding the definition of an offender and places more repeat offenders on the street. The city is then faulted for rising crime that the legislature helped to create.

Studies were done that said that Springfield had more police than Worcester, a city comparable in size to Springfield. The Finance Control Board then hired more police in response to rising crime, committed mostly by graduates of the Republicrat revolving door criminal justice system. The Republicrats literally get the tax payer coming and going.

Yet Springfield has not addressed some other issues. Special duty jobs remain exclusively for full time cops, not auxiliaries. Every other town can make the auxiliary system work but Springfield. State cops are paid from the city budget despite the state’s contribution to the costs incurred by the state’s failure to deal with criminals.

The Finance Control Board has been just another irresponsible refuge for Republicrat hacks marginally better than the City Council.

While the Finance Control Board has been quick to say that people who work in Kitchens and maintain school buildings get paid too much, money is lavished on bureaucrats in the form of high salaries, milage payments for their daily commute from their home to Springfield, and payments for lodging at high priced hotels. They do not economize when it comes to spending money on themselves.

I think we could have applied the same principle in outsourcing the Finance Control Board. We all knew that some departments were overspending. It did not take a genius to figure out that Springfield’s crime is out of control despite its spending on police. But all the FCB did was throw our money at the problem, and themselves at the same time.

The Finance Control Board ( FCB ) helped balance the city budget largely by getting a “loan” from the state which the city may not be able to pay off anyway. The main thing wrong with the FCB are the people on it. They never addressed the failure of the state to fulfil state functions that cost the city money.

The city budget has been drastically affected by the closure of state hospitals, reform schools, and a failed system of justice. These things have affected state services. The poor get sent to Springfield because it has housing and public transportation. Some of the FCB members come from towns whose homeless program is a cruiser ride to the nearest city. The state pays somewhat for housing for the poor, but the people in those houses will require services and no jobs are created by housing.

the Republicrat program of creating unemployment in the United States to favor well heeled investors largely goes unmentioned, even though it is the cause of the destruction of the tax base.

I would complain about all of these things to the Legislature and Congress. The harsh reality is that is about all a city councilor can do about it. Unfortunately most of the City Council is concerned with personal promotion within their party and they d not want to irritate the party leadership. Since I am not a Republicrat I have nothing to gain by pleasing them.

	Enpañol
	Robert Underwood
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