The State of the city of
Haverhill, 2006
Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Good evening and thank you for listening. I want to start by thanking the city council for their hard work, and I particularly want to thank the public for the great honor and privilege of serving you as your Mayor.

When I first addressed you a little over two years ago, Haverhill faced an unprecedented fiscal crisis. We stood on the verge of losing the accreditation for our high school.

Our fire stations were closed, our library threatened with closure and the newspapers were filled with stories that our city might become the first city in twenty-five years to go into receivership.

Two years ago, we were a city where some people had lost all hope for tomorrow. Our citizens spoke only about was what we had lost — our hospital, our downtown, our radio station, and our college in Bradford.

Today, we see a new and different Haverhill than we faced only two years ago, and we face new and different challenges. Today, we no longer speak of what we lost yesterday. Today, Haverhill is alive, and people are daring to dream of tomorrow.

The Haverhill renaissance is on its way, and Haverhill is moving forward.

This renaissance in Haverhill did not just happen. It took a great group of city employees, who worked harder and longer to provide the public with service, even though there are 55 fewer employees than there were three years ago.

It took a great group of volunteers who make up our boards and agencies. It took volunteers throughout the city who stepped up to the plate and put in countless hours helping our city in so many different ways. Thank you, all of you.

It took the city council to vote to rezone downtown and to loosen parking requirements. And, most of all, it took a public that was willing to make sacrifices to keep our city going. Thank you, all of you, for your sacrifices.

Two years ago, we outlined a new plan to expand our tax base. Our strategy was simple—if you make Haverhill livable, you attract more people, and those people, in turn, will attract more business.

We bought new street sweepers for downtown and we worked with a wonderful group of volunteers from Haverhill’s Brightside to keep our city cleaner. We planted the first trees in decades, and we brought in the first disease-resistant elm trees in over half a century.

We worked with our police department to set up a local Gang Task force, and used block grant money to add more patrols to high crime neighborhoods. Today, crime is down for the second year in a row.

Schools
A key part of improving our quality of life is to improve public education. Last year, we worked with the school committee to become only the second city in the entire State to institute mandatory summer school for our students. We sent a clear message to our children—if you don’t pass, we won’t give you a free pass to the next grade.

We spent millions of dollars on the high school and reversing decades of neglect to our middle and lower schools. This year, for the first time in four decades, our children will have fully equipped state of the art science labs. We brought back the middle school band program, added more teachers at the high school and tried to do a better job of stressing the good points in our system. Then we worked with our school committee to hire a great new superintendent of schools, and I want to recognize him this evening—Dr. Raleigh Buchanan.

This coming year, we’ll work with Dr. Buchanan to introduce some exciting new concepts in public education—concepts that will put Haverhill at the cutting edge of technology and the cutting edge of the best concepts in education. We’ll work to make our high school a virtual high school, one of only thirty such virtual high schools in all of Massachusetts. Our children will have the opportunity to take on line courses from throughout the world. We’ll tell you more about this later.

Then we’ll work to make our high school an advanced academy for math and science sometime with the next few years. We’ll tell you more about this later this year. When our children graduate from school, they aren’t going to be competing just with children from the Merrimack Valley. They are going to be competing with children from throughout the world. Our goal is to offer a world-class curriculum and a world-class education so that our children can compete with any child, anywhere in the world.

Rezoning to attract new business
To attract new business and grow our tax base, we needed to be innovative. When I spoke before you a year ago, I asked the city council to rezone some areas near highways, to remove some regulatory barriers that prevented large retail stores from coming to our city, and to join with me in a 21st century retail strategy.

Tonight, we can report that this 21st century plan is working. For over thirty years, retail stores have fled our city, and little by little, we’ve lost our retail base. Tonight, Lowe’s and BJ’s—the two largest retail stores ever to locate within our city, have announced they are coming to Haverhill. Starbucks is going to follow and there are more on the way.

Our rezoning policy also worked downtown. Our anchor tenant, the Beacon project, has broken ground, and the first ever artist’s lofts are available for sale downtown.

We should rejoice in the fact that so many people are starting to recognize what we have always known— Haverhill is a great place to live and a great place to work. Now our challenge is to manage this growth—to mange the traffic that will surely increase, to preserve our open space, and to keep our neighborhoods livable as we move forward. The first step to controlling growth is to push growth downtown, where we can control it, and preserve space in the outer areas of our city.

The Challenges Ahead
Our progress has been great, but the challenges we face us are also great. The Hale debt that preceded us, $7 million a year, is still with us.

This year, we face an immediate budget deficit of nearly $4 million. This figure is misleading because it does not include the real deficit in Haverhill.

Our real deficit is that we do not have the money to fix all of your potholes, repair all of your schools, streets, or take down all of the trees that need to come down.

Our financial problems threaten our renaissance—they threaten our ability to provide people with the services and schools they need to make this an attractive consumer city.

Our challenge tonight is clear, how do we keep the vital services that are so necessary to keeping the Haverhill renaissance going?

The same spirit that has brought us this far can carry us forward and help us to surmount the challenges ahead.

The root of our financial problems is simple—the rising costs require us to spend more than we take in.

This year, healthcare premiums will increase by $2 million to a total of $21 million. This year, we will pay more for health insurance premiums than we will pay for the entire police department, the entire fire department, and the Hale debt, combined. The increase in health care costs— $2 million —is more than all the revenues we are getting for all of the new condominium projects combined.

If it weren’t for this increase, we could add ten additional policemen, 10 additional schoolteachers, and still have $800,000 left over.

We’ve made enormous strides in controlling health care costs. We worked with our unions to combine five (5) health care packages, and used our increased bargaining leverage to negotiate a lower rate for our employees. Most of our unions agreed to pay more for their health care in exchange for a cost of living increase. With these reforms, we were able to save hundreds of thousands of dollars last year.

But more needs to be done.

Next week, I will meet with our insurance advisory board and ask them to work with me to achieve the next level of health care reform.

I’ll ask them to fashion a program to allow our employees and retirees to import prescription drugs from Canada and save up to $200,000 per year. I’ll ask them to join with me in coming up with a reformed health care plan that is fair to our employees and that we can afford.

Our current plan—which my family and I have—allows us to go to a doctor with a $5 co-pay. We pay between 75% and 90% of the cost of health insurance for our employees and retirees, and surely, if we could afford to do so, we could continue on this path. But, this path is a path that leads in only one direction—to layoffs.

I’ll ask our advisory board and our unions to work with us once again—this time to increase co-pays and deductibles, provide bonuses to those employees who take their spouse’s plan outside the city. I’ll also ask them to devise programs for new employees that will work with higher deductibles and co-pays, and work with health care savings accounts, to provide health care needs at a cost we can afford.

Reorganization of city government
Controlling costs must start with health care costs, but it cannot stop there. Two years ago, we instituted a government reorganization plan that saved vital services and streamlined government. This year, we will once again recommend a reorganization of government to make our government leaner, but not meaner. Our model should be private industry—which for decades has used automation and mechanization to constantly improve efficiency and meet the challenges that face them. Our challenge is to keep our city affordable and keep taxes to a reasonable level. The best way to do that is to make government more efficient.

Increasing revenues— Selling Water and Waste Water
Stabilizing our finances has to start with controlling costs, but it must go further. We also need to look under every rock for new revenues.

The first stop should be our wastewater department. Our wastewater treatment plant was built to accommodate over 100,000 people, and is expandable from there. We process today the wastewater from the entire town of Groveland and for State line plaza in Plaistow. We have the potential to make millions of dollars in hook-up fees, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in recurring revenues if we sell our services to groups outside our city. We have enormous potential there—and it is time we explored this option.

Urban Village Approach
In the long term, keeping the renaissance going means being a city with a high quality of life that will attract people to live here—a city with clean, safe streets and excellent schools.

Our future lies in a Haverhill where people face the waterfront rather than turn away from it and a city where people once again live downtown.

Our future lies in being what planners call an urban village—where people live, work and dine all in the same area.

To make this happen, we need to take a fresh look at our zoning laws.

The old model of zoning was used a means of keeping certain things out of certain neighborhoods. But zoning can also be used as a tool to spark a revival and bring business in. We know that rezoning works to attract business because it’s worked here in Haverhill.

Within the next few months, we’ll present our urban renaissance-zoning package to the city council to remake our downtown. Our new renaissance zoning will take a portion of our downtown, and rezone it for housing as a matter of right.

We’ll seek to become the first city in the state to take advantage of the new housing incentive laws, general laws chapter 40R. Our renaissance zoning will bring in up to $400,000 in new State aid immediately, and give us a chance to bring buildings in our downtown area back to life.

Rezoning has helped us make great progress on Locust Street and Locke Street. Now it’s time to extend the Haverhill renaissance to Merrimack Street.

Make no mistake about it—extending the Haverhill renaissance to Merrimack Street is fraught with challenges.

Merrimack Street could live again but it will not be easy. Some buildings on Merrimack Street have been vacant for decades, and for good reason: parking and regulatory barriers have made it difficult to put residences there. We do not want to raise expectations beyond what we can produce or we set ourselves up for failure, but the greatest failure of them all is to fail to try.

This year, we’ll ask the city council to allow for housing as a matter or right on Merrimack Street.

Then we need to tackle the biggest problem, the problem of parking.

Now, Merrimack Street has far more parking than Wingate Street, but Wingate Street is booming and Merrimack Street is not.

We have a parking garage on Merrimack Street, that is almost 100% vacant at night, which we cannot afford to clean, we cannot afford to adequately light, and we cannot afford to repair.

The key to Merrimack Street isn’t to build more parking. The key is to use the parking we already have to encourage mixed-use buildings. If Merrimack Street is going to be redeveloped, if we are going to extend the renaissance to Merrimack Street, we need to allow investors to lease spaces in the parking facility.

We need to examine every option, including leasing parking spaces, selling the air space over the parking garage, and even selling the parking garage, if we can make certain the public interest is protected and there are adequate public places left to park. The parking facility on Merrimack Street could be the key to allowing residences to return to Merrimack Street. We need to explore that option.

We also need to turn our attention to our shopping centers. Some of our shopping centers are worn and tired—in need of the same renaissance that is taking place downtown.

Our zoning laws should allow and encourage these shopping centers to also become urban villages, where people can live, walk and work in the same area. We should begin by soliciting proposals from existing shopping center owners, and we should rezone those areas for mixed use development—to allow people to live over the centers, and live, dine and work all in the same area. New urbanism has worked throughout the country. It can work here.

Over the past two years, we’ve made great progress in our city. Our city is experiencing an unprecedented revitalization.

Where retail stores have left our city for decades, today Lowe’s, Starbucks and BJ’s are coming to Haverhill.

Where our shoe factories have been vacant for decades, today they are living again as artist’s lofts and new housing. Our anchor tenant, Beacon Company has broken ground, and Forest City, the largest urban housing developer in the country, is exploring turning several old shoe shops in housing.

Where people turned their backs to the Merrimack for decades, now they are turning towards the river and bringing in boats, docks and marinas. This spring, with the help of a grant secured by our congressional delegation, we will begin testing to see if we can dredge the river.

Where we have complained for decades about parking, today we have the largest ever grant ever given to our city, $7.6 million, to build a new parking facility downtown.

Like any community, we have our difficulties. But working together this year as we worked together in the past year, we will continue the renaissance that the Boston Globe called the ‘picture of progress’.

Make no mistake about it. The Haverhill renaissance is moving forward, and in Haverhill, hope is back.

Thank you.
 

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