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After months of budgetary back-and-forth, the City of New Bedford announced Wednesday that the state would appropriate $1.3 million to keep the New Bedford Fire Department’s Engine 9 open — as long as the state Legislature approves it.
The line item is a part of Gov. Maura Healey’s newly filed bill to suspend the state’s gas tax for two months amid rising fuel prices. According to a news release from the city, the appropriation comes after weeks of discussions between Mayor Jon Mitchell and members of Healey-Driscoll administration.
Fire Station 9, located in New Bedford’s North End neighborhood, had been slated to close this fall as part of broader layoffs and program cuts to resolve the city’s $32 million budget deficit. Under the mayor’s proposal the city would have needed to eliminate 58 unfilled positions and lay off 34 people, eliminating 92 positions in total.
News of the station’s closure was met with fierce pushback from public safety officers and city councilors, many of whom pointed out that New Bedford has one of the highest rates of structural fires per capita in the state. Mitchell countered that he would consider keeping the station open if the Fire Department agrees to lower its staffing standards from four firefighters per truck to three, bringing the city closer in line with other municipalities in Massachusetts.
“Our feeling is and always has been that he just doesn’t value what we do,” Billy Sylvia, president of New Bedford firefighters’ union, said at the time. “The correct staffing allows us to respond in a proper manner and have enough people on scene to actually do our work correctly and efficiently stop property loss.”
In May, state Sen. Mark Montigny announced he had secured $500,000 in state aid to keep the station open temporarily.
But those funds were only ever meant to be a stopgap fix, and Mitchell said at the time that he would continue to work for a longer-term solution.
That solution now arrives in the form of the state’s Municipal Public Safety Staffing Program (MPSSP). Currently, just 10 cities are eligible for funding from the program, including Fall River, which received $1.6 million from MPSSP last year. Mitchell has long advocated for New Bedford to become the 11th, and if the Legislature approves, it will.
Still, as the Light previously reported, New Bedford’s budget woes run deeper than a single fire station. Fast-inflating pension costs stand to keep the city’s finances underwater without deeper cuts or new revenue streams.
“To be sure, the long-term financial challenges facing the City, driven by unrestrained pension and employee health insurance costs, remain with us, but my hope is that the additional state aid buys us time for compromise with our local public employee unions, members of the City Council, and Retirement Board,” Mitchell said in a statement.
Email Brooke Kushwaha at bkushwaha@newbedfordlight.org.
“The State”? Did somebody say “the State”? But it requires Legislative approval! Are there any other Cities or Towns in the same situation? A lot of favors are going to be needed on this one, and it’s only good for ONE year! Not sure what the Polymarket odds on this are, but I would gather, not good. Are other communities better managers of their budgets and departments than New Bedford?
Considering the low property tax rates in New Bedford relative to comparable cities in Massachusetts, the state should absolutely not be paying this bill. The city council and the mayor need to accept reality that they can’t have excessively low taxes and fully-funded city services.