Andrea Sanchez: the city worker who questioned longevity pay for pols

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How was it that after 35 years of providing longevity pay to elected officials New Bedford suddenly stopped the practice last year?

It stopped because a second-year city employee, working by herself in an understaffed treasurer’s office, questioned it.

Andrea Sanchez spent much of her working life at the Dartmouth Walmart. She worked 16 years there, moving up from a temporary cashier to a team leader who supervised seven departments.

While she was at Walmart, the company paid for Sanchez’ bachelor’s degree in business administration from UMass Global, a private online university associated with UMass. At 58 years old, her degree in hand, Sanchez sent out lots of resumes and landed in the city Treasurer’s Office as a financial assistant in August of 2022.

By January 2023, she had already moved up to the position of financial analyst to the payroll audit supervisor, also in the Treasurer’s Office. By June, she was the audit supervisor of Centralized Payroll as the two people above her in the office had left their positions. 

Employees of the City of New Bedford receive their longevity pay every year in December, sort of like a Christmas bonus. So as audit supervisor, when December came around, Sanchez had to pass off on the longevity payments. She examined every category of employee who received it and that’s when something bothered her.

“I found it odd that elected officials were there,” she said.

Sanchez did further research and found that elected officials were receiving the longevity payment under the category of Unit C Management even though they were not Unit C Management.

“So I questioned it. Why do they have a Unit C Management table in their Job Salary Screen?” she asked.

Ah, Andrea, Andrea. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to ask questions about things that don’t make sense in New Bedford city government? Where have you been? Obviously not in New Bedford government.

At the December 2023 payroll committee meeting where Sanchez raised the issue, she said it was decided that the payroll checks were already in process and it was too late to do anything about it, even if the elected officials were not entitled to the money.

But Sanchez was undeterred and she continued to wonder about the practice.

“I didn’t let it go at that point,” she said. “Because I felt that elected officials work for the constituents of the city. Whereas management, Unit C Management people, are appointed to actually work for the city.”

Sanchez, on her own, proceeded to look up in the city’s Code of Ordinances under the City Council category to see if she could find anywhere that it said elected officials receive longevity pay. 

“I took it upon myself,” she said. “Because I am a person who wants the clarity. I need to know, like if they get it fine, if they don’t fine, but somebody clarify it.

“So I pushed through,” she said.

“What do they get paid? You know, how is it in there?” she asked about the basis for paying the elected officials. Sanchez was talking to me during a 30-minute interview in the presence of the city’s public information officer, Jonathan Darling 

“And nowhere in there did it say they receive longevity payment,” she said.

When December 2024 came around, Sanchez again brought up her concerns to the payroll committee. Asked who was on that committee (or generally on that committee), she said she recalls personnel from payroll, information technology, the auditor’s office and maybe the chief financial officer’s office as being part of that team.

“I wanted legal clarity,” Sanchez said. “My intent was not malicious. My intent was not to hurt anybody,” later adding that it was her job to audit payroll and she was still new at it.

The payroll committee decided to give Sanchez the answers she wanted although she recalled people on the team telling her at the time that paying elected officials longevity pay was the way it had always been done.

“It was decided that we just need to push this up to solicitors,” she said. “The solicitors needed to be involved to give us a legal determination. And we left it there.”

City Solicitor Eric Jaikes has said he receives lots of questions on legality from city employees, and he answered this one quickly when it came to him last December. He looked up the City Code and found nothing about elected officials. The 1989 ordinance when reclassification of Unit C pay grades and longevity pay for Unit C Management specifically states it is for that category of employee. 

“Elected officials are not Unit C employees. Therefore they are not entitled to longevity,” Jaikes told me. He’s told the press it was a small amount of money and he didn’t spend more time on it.

That’s an understandable interpretation on Jaikes’ behalf but I’m not sure it was researched deep enough. More about that in a minute.

Jaikes said he informed Mayor Jon Mitchell of his decision and the mayor advised him to inform the council, which he did through the council’s attorney, David Gerwatowski.

Andrea Sanchez described the decision a little bit differently.

“Eric relayed that, after discussion with the mayor’s office, that it was not to be paid out,” she said. “That’s all I know. Anything other than that, I’m not privy to.”

There is another small discrepancy between Sanchez’ version of events and Jaikes’. Jaikes has described it as a phone call he received while Sanchez has said she understood it happened by way of email.

The New Bedford Light asked for copies of any emails from members of the payroll group and Jaikes on longevity pay for the months of December 2023, December 2024 and January 2025. Darling, the city’s public information officer, instructed me to file a public records request with the solicitor’s office. I did that on Sept. 19 but have not heard back from the office yet. By state statute, they have 10 business days to respond, which would give the city until Oct. 6.

Though the language of the City Code may have bothered Sanchez, and ultimately Jaikes when it was brought to his attention, it’s difficult to determine how the payroll office back in 1989 decided to pay the elected officials the longevity pay. It’s especially curious because the city apparently paid the elected officials the longevity pay but not the annual step increases that Unit C was granted as part of the same ordinance.

It may be because of how vaguely one portion of the 1989 ordinance was written.

The very same ordinance that reclassified grade rankings and step increases for Unit C Management also contained a provision for elected officials. The elected officials’ portion was severed from the main part of the ordinance but the ordinance does not say exactly how elected officials are to be addressed other than “as recommended by the Committee on Finance.”

This is when I decided I needed to know what the 1989 council and mayor were thinking, so I asked the City Council office to research the vote, and the discussions leading up to it.

Here’s what I found: There is evidence that the council and then Mayor John Bullard were thinking of the elected officials and Unit C Management in the same way. 

The Hay Group, which was the consultant hired to evaluate job grades and step pay increases for Unit C Management prior to the ordinance, was also charged with studying compensation for elected officials.

The Feb. 7, 1989, minutes of Committee of Finance meetings include the late Councilor George Rogers asking who was evaluating the elected officials as part of the reclassifications. They also include a lawyer working for the city, Arthur Caron, suggesting that the council pass an order instructing elected assessors to fill out the consultant’s form so they could be assigned a pay grade.

Finally, when some councilors were fearful that they would be squeezed out of increasing the salary of a particular employee that they felt deserved it, then Mayor Bullard is described in the minutes as connecting the council, mayor and Unit C all together.

The minutes state: “Mayor Bullard offered his assurance that there may be a way to work this out. He noted that Unit C has always been associated with the Mayor and the Councillors.”

I asked the former mayor about that and he said he believes he was responding to the council’s fears of being eliminated from a role in increasing a particular employee’s pay, as opposed to trying to convey that the council would get what Unit C got.

An amended ordinance including both Unit C Management and the elected officials was passed by the Committee on Finance on April 4, 1989. Bullard’s proposed ordinance suggested a 10% across-the-board increase for the elected officials but nowhere in the minutes of the Finance Committee meetings does it state whether the councilors would or would not be granted either the annual step increases or the longevity pay that were granted to Unit C in the same ordinance.

Bullard said his memory is that the discussion around this ordinance was all about bringing New Bedford managers up to the level of other municipalities, and developing a system that was fair to all managers as opposed to the current system in 1989 in which salary increases were merely based on whether the City Council liked a particular manager and wanted to give the person a raise.

Bullard said he was not sure that longevity was even discussed during his meeting with the Committee on Finance, or whether it was just thought of as another benefit the city wanted to give as the unionized employees had already obtained it.

“I don’t remember a discussion on that,” he said of longevity.

Whatever the truth is, the amount of longevity pay granted to elected officials has always been the same amount granted to Unit C, and not the greater amounts of longevity pay that have been won by some unions, particularly the police, fire and teachers.

When I asked Darling which amount of longevity the elected officials were receiving he said, “the elected officials were receiving longevity on the scale of Unit C employees.”

When I then asked Darling on what basis the elected officials were receiving the Unit C amount instead of other employee amounts, he said it was because Unit C pay is the amount the elected officials were receiving. 

Talk about circular reasoning.

All of this indicates to me that city officials were thinking of Unit C Management officials and elected officials as receiving the same benefits in terms of longevity.

When the elected officials were severed within the ordinance, it was about giving them the 10% pay raise instead of step increases, and classifying their pay under a certain grade. That’s because from the very beginning in 1989, the city seems to have split the difference. 

Having reported on City Hall for 26 years, I don’t think any of this happened by accident or by mistake, as some are now theorizing.

It’s hard to imagine that whoever was in charge of city payroll in 1989 decided on their own to pay elected officials the longevity pay and not a single elected or appointed official ever wondered about it for the next 35 years. Especially in the beginning.

I am also suspicious as to why the elected officials’ part of the ordinance was written so ambiguously. I think that the 1989 Treasurer’s Office, probably under the influence of the mayor or the council or both, interpreted the ordinance to mean elected officials got the longevity pay since they were in the same ordinance as Unit C workers. But they did not get the elected officials the step increases because the same ordinance had already given them a salary boost. No one at the Finance Committee meeting ever stated elected officials should not receive the longevity pay.

One person who might be able to answer the question is Bristol County Commissioner John Saunders who was on the City Council at the time.

Saunders, a former 28-year city councilor, was a key member of what was long referred to as The Machine, a group of political insiders that long dominated New Bedford politics. 

I’ve long written about Saunders and his connection to patronage and political favors in the city. 

As City Council president he had proposed an extensive pay raise for city councilors by means of paying chairpersons and the president more money. He lost his City Council seat in 2013.

Saunders did not return my calls for this column.  

Whatever the actual intent of the council and the mayor was when the 1989 ordinance was passed, the city immediately began to pay the longevity pay but not the step increases. And this practice continued through the mayoral administrations of Rosemary Tierney, Frederick Kalisz Jr., Scott Lang and the first 12 years of Jon Mitchell.

Until Andrea Sanchez came on board.

Andrea just did not understand the culture of New Bedford politics.

Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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