By Linda Scott
Watertown Resident
PART 1: Watertown’s Days of Plenty
Over the last few years, there’s been a sort of “Boom town” attitude toward what we could afford here in Watertown. Despite the folks who said,”Don’t you think that we should slow down here? We’ve been here before, and this bubble is likely to burst sooner than later.” Those voices were drowned out and ignored. As one worried resident said, “When the downturn comes, it’s going to get ugly around here!”
You know when you have an uneasy feeling? Call it what you like … intuition, sixth sense, foreboding, “the jitters.” Well, lately I’ve been feeling uneasy and unsettled about the potential financial and policy direction of our City. Apparently, others share my angst. When I read Bruce Coltin’s Blog, I started to be able to identify some of the sources of that unease. I contacted other Watertown residents, some of whom had been involved in City government in the past to see if they shared my concerns. I ascertained that I was not alone.
I’ve just seen the statement made by George Proakis, Watertown’s City Manager, at the March 6th meeting of the Committee on Budget and Fiscal Oversight. When speaking about the 2026 City Budget, he said, in essence:
We have a lot of financial questions, and it will not be a “year of plenty.” Considering that growth (development) has slowed down and the State may not be in a position to be as financially helpful, to take on a “new initiative,” operating a second City ambulance (which would require the addition of eight more firefighters, two per shift, according to the Chief’s presentation), is a big ask for this year.
I had a question for Chief Nicholson about this. It wasn’t clear to me whether this would require the purchase of a new ambulance. Here’s his response:
“We do have a spare ambulance currently. We will also be taking delivery of a brand-new ambulance in early fall, that was ordered as part of our regular ongoing vehicle replacement plan. If the proposal is funded, we would look to keep the current spare as a third truck, instead of trading it in, so that we would have a reserve.”
The statistics presented that night were sobering and clear. Click here to watch the meeting.
About 4400 calls and 2000 transports yearly, with about a third of those transports handled by outside ambulances
Minutes count: An example, in cases of cardiac arrest, chances of survival decrease 7%-10% with every minute delay
The NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) acceptable standard is at least 90% of the time, an ambulance responds within 9 minutes
In 2024:
Watertown’s ambulance responded in 9 minutes or less a very respectable 94% of the time
Outside ambulances (usually coming from Cambridge) responded in 9 minutes or less just 48% of the time. (A personal note: I’m sure that the “improved” narrowed streets and street parking patterns are not helping). A councilor asked about response times to the west end of Watertown, since about one third of the ambulances are coming from Cambridge.
Revenue brought in by the Watertown ambulance transports: $1.5 million in 2024 (collected from insurance, Medicare, Medicaid). Revenue that was not collected by Watertown last year, because the transport was done by another ambulance service, amounted to about $400,000.
There was talk about what the priorities should be for the 2026 Watertown City Budget. I checked those priorities (called Budget Policy Guidelines), and nowhere in them do I find any specific language that lists the safety needs of our community, but I do see one strange addition to the list of priorities in a financially “lean year.” More about that later.
Parts 2 and 3 are set up sort of like a syllabus, a three credit course on the realities of today in Watertown, if you will. It is chockfull of facts and opinions (mine).
When you look at this, you might sigh and say, “There goes Linda again…she’s so painfully long-winded! Here’s my advice: read it or don’t. Dive as deeply or go as shallow as you choose. The point is, the 2026 budget could be one of the most consequential ones we’ll live with in decades. It could set us on a course one way or the other. You decide.
PART 2: And How Does Our Budget Grow?
Apparently, in leaps and bounds, personnel-wise.
Fiscal Year 2026 Watertown City Budget is now being formulated and discussed.
It would be good for all property owners in Watertown to be aware of what is being proposed, since they’ll be paying for it.
As City Manager, George Proakis said last year:
“The time to discuss reducing taxes is when the budget is created. The Property Tax Classification reflects the budget amount passed in June when the Council approved the budget.” In other words … if you want lower taxes, you need to plan for them.
And City Council President, Mark Sideris said of last year’s budget process:
“During the recent City Council Budget Priority Guideline hearings, cutting the budget did not come up as one of the priorities.”
“That would have been the time to say, ‘hey wait a minute, let’s take a look at this, maybe this isn’t the time to be adding.’ I think the Council needs to consider carefully before the manager makes his budget in the future that these are the ramifications,” Sideris said. “What we are doing tonight is basically what we voted for in June.”
So, budget meetings for the 2026 Watertown Budget have been happening. See meetings of the Committee on Budget and Fiscal Oversight (Click the date to watch):
November 13, 2024 Recommendations on FY 2026 Budget Policy Guidelines
February 24, 2025. Recommendations on Capital Improvements
March 3, 2025. Make Recommendations for the Fiscal Year 2026 – 2029 Capital Improvement Projects
March 6, 2025. Cost/Benefits of a second ambulance
Budget decisions are being made. The City Council will devote an entire meeting to this process at their next meeting on Tuesday, April 8th, from 7:00 to 10:00. After that, there’ll be meetings that cover expenditures in each City department, with a full meeting in June to approve the budget.
Part of the budget process was to review the 2025 budget. In the 2025 Budget “Strategic Priorities,” is listed a category called “Enhanced Organizational Effectiveness,” which seemed to be interpreted as adding more staff … a lot more staff! (and many in high priced supervisory positions). See the note at the bottom of the slide below. There were 24 additional requested City positions that could not be filled in that year.
Here’s what that looked like in the 2025 Watertown City Budget:
As an example, our City Manager, when he arrived in Watertown, already had an Assistant City Manager for Community Development and Planning and two very capable and experienced administrative assistants in his office.
Now, in addition to those three that he “inherited,” Mr. Proakis has added a Deputy City Manager, an Assistant City Manager for Finance, a Management and Grant Specialist, a Digital Media Manager (who he transferred from another department to his office), and a Community Engagement Specialist.Then there was a part-time job not listed on this slide (but hired by the Manager months before this slide was presented) that assisted the City Manager with the production value of his presentations as well as working on a City logo … hopefully that omission was a one-off. By the way, since we have decided to go in a different direction on the logo, is he still on the payroll to vet manager presentations, etc.?
Last year, we also had a City Compensation Study which raised salaries for many City workers by twenty to thirty percent. Here’s a link to that study’s results. And here’s one page to give you an idea of the scope of this:
The raises were a long time in coming, and I don’t begrudge staff making a decent living and the City retaining employees but that much higher number has to be accounted for in this whole budget picture. We own those expenses now, so we need to take them into consideration when making our decisions about other expenditures.
Then there’s paying for pensions. It’s called fully funding our City’s retirement system. This is the only responsible thing to do, and City Manager Michael Driscoll, with a lot of belt tightening from Watertown residents and staff, accomplished this very difficult task by July 1, 2021.
Question: As the number of employees precipitously rises and salaries increase, are we out of compliance again on this issue? If so, how much more of our budget needs to be devoted to fully funding our retirement system? As you can see from the review of the 2025 budget, the City Manager likely will be looking for funding for at least 24 more new positions in the future.
Another Question: Is the 2026 budget, with all of the fiscal uncertainties, the time and place to be adding more staff? And if we need to be careful in this area, wouldn’t staffing public safety be the first priority? Also, remember that staffing a second ambulance (which we already own) comes with added revenue from insurance (possibly almost two million dollars in total, as pointed out in the Chief’s March 6th presentation) for the City, as well as the “benefit” of saving lives.
And yet another question: How many new positions were created in 2023 and 2024? And how many new positions are included in this 2026 budget and in what departments? I know that there will be at least one new supervisory position mandated by the new Health and Human Services Study recommendations.
Allow me one more question: Where are the job descriptions for all of these folks? What are the demands of these jobs, and how many provide direct services to residents of this community?
And finally: I noticed that this year $25,000 was transferred into our Human Resources Department (not the Health Department), earmarked for wellness initiatives (I refer you to former City Councilor Kounelis’ April 1, 2026 letter in Watertown News for details). Do you think, given next year’s challenges, that that would be an appropriate use of taxpayer money in 2026?
Tomorrow: Part 3: Action Expresses Priorities
Well, Linda, I don’t ALWAYS read your lengthy epistles, but I read every word of this one. And I thank you. You raise the right questions, and leave room for individual interpretation.
You prompted one issue in my mind, which it sounds like you will address tomorrow: if hiring practices are in keeping (barely!) with City Council “policy goals”, then it’s the policy goals themselves that are most in need of examination. And I’m not even being “political” (as I often am). I have questioned before the need for a Human Services Director (with her/his own Cabinet, no less!), but primarily for diverting $110,808 to salary (and more in benefits I presume) from, you know, actual services. The Council just approved the whole Human Services shebang (see https://www.watertownmanews.com/2025/02/28/city-will-add-new-position-of-human-services-director/), complete with several initiatives I couldn’t possibly support. But if those are “City Council policy goals”, they’ll have to be paid for; and if that means no new ambulance, the community will have to understand (as the Council is pretty responsive to community demands, more’s the pity sometimes). The “guns or butter” debate is now a HSD or WFD debate. Except there’s no debate, imo.
Thanks again for your learned and informed efforts, and I’ll try to be a more faithful reader in the future. Certainly tomorrow!
There is so much to consider. Thank you for your diligence and observations.
There seems to be many well paid additional positions and having details about what is expected from these people would be needed to understand how to evaluate salaries.
I support a lean system and think we all deserve it. Lean can be efficient.
On the Ambulance, I did not see the breakdown between income and expense. There is “Revenue brought in by the Watertown ambulance transports: $1.5 million in 2024 ” but what were the expenses for this service? Personally, I would never call for an ambulance because of the extreme high cost. Also, the ” transport was done by another ambulance service, amounted to about $400,000″ strikes me as curious. Maybe the other ambulance services are more efficient and cheaper where they are being used and Watertown services are not so efficient? Are private services something to look into?
It would be nice to have better information to understand all this government expansion.
About the spare ambulance idea, If there were two ambulances, would they be able to pay for themselves? Keeping a “spare as a third truck” may not make sense if there are already two trucks as the second would in a practical sense be a spare.
Thanks you Linda. I really appreciate your many words as I know the good intentions, great deal of work and considerations behind them.
Hi David,
I am in no position to speak for the Watertown Fire Department. In the March 6th meeting, the Chief provides the details. Here’s the link: http://vodwcatv.org/CablecastPublicSite/show/3737?site=3
I think that his presentation might clear up many of your questions.
Yes, there are many things to consider, and I don’t envy the job that the City Councilors have ahead of them, but I also didn’t want people to be unaware of the specifics being discussed.
Often there can be grumbling about decisions made. As both City Manager Proakis and Council President Sideris said last year, now is the time to pay attention and speak up, if you support or don’t support these plans, before the decisions are made!
Thanks for your kind words!
Hi Josh,
Thanks for reading! In this particular case, I’m trying to make sure that people (even people who’ve lived in this City, for a long time, but don’t usually pay attention to these type of things) get the full picture. It’s easy to make decisions based upon one piece of information, rather than looking at the whole. Nothing’s easy these days!
For instance, some of our climate initiatives have run afoul of developers, which means there’ll be fewer construction starts, then less City money… then less affordable housing…it’s a vicious circle! Do I know the answer to all of this? No way! But what I know from a lifetime of experience is that most things turn out better when varying opinions are at the table. It might get noisy and messy, but it gets better!
I may be a little late to the party, but I felt I had to say thank you to Linda Scott for taking the time to delve into this issue so thoroughly. She always does her homework, and this assignment certainly required a lot of home work.
We have been and are still experiencing some economic uncertainties and we need to proceed with our city budgets with caution. We seem to see continued additions to city staff and all the associated costs tied to them. We managed with far less in the past, and many of us have concerns that we need so many additions.
I agree that we need to get job descriptions and goals of these new or proposed people and also be sure they get annual reviews. In the private sector this is a regular procedure to see if people are doing their jobs well and accomplishing the goals set.
Do all of these additions need to do just one job or could their responsibilities be combined so we don’t need to have two full-time employees? I would think there must be days when their jobs are not as demanding if they have only one title and job to do. In the Planning Department many proposed new city plans are not taking place yet and we don’t have definite dates when they will actually begin depending on interest rates, costs involved with building and the demand for them.
The prior manager, Mr. Driscoll, was known as ‘fiscal Driscoll’. He certainly didn’t overspend and he was one of the few city leaders in the state to be sure that our pension system was fully funded. We seem to be going from one extreme to another and we the citizens of Watertown need to hold our City Manager and Councilors responsible for what they approve in these budgets.
I would like to see the safety of our people be of utmost importance in those budget decisions. We certainly don’t want taxes to go up more as people are paying more for so many things and finding it difficult to pay all their bills.
The need for up-to-date ambulances with the appropriate staffing is a must. Other budget items should be deleted or reduced to make sure this happens.
We have many older residents here and we are planning to build higher buildings in denser areas and need to plan ahead for those needs. Having the vehicles and trained staff in place earlier rather than later seems to be a laudable goal.
Let’s ask our Councilors to watch the upcoming budget proposals carefully. We’d prefer not to see a go along to get along approach. It’s a difficult process and a complicated one, but it’s an important one.
There will always be surprises coming up in city expenditures and we need to be sure we have adequate rainy-day funds available. We have older infrastructure and need to plan accordingly.
I always remember the old saying, “Watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.” Maybe we should go back to some of the older tried and true approaches to running our city.
Having employee appreciation days and the associated activities is a nicety that corporations can do as those expenses come out of the profit lines. A city doesn’t have such a line in their budget, so maybe this isn’t a must have.
I hope many people will watch the upcoming budget sessions and address Manager Proakis and our Councilors with questions and concerns. This is an important issue.