The most useful thing said at Wednesday’s budget hearing came early, and it did not come wrapped in the usual miracle-talk.
Mayor Carlo Van Campen told the council FY27 is up about $12 million over the adjusted FY26 budget, and almost all of that is fixed cost pain, not shiny new ideas. He broke it down plainly: about $5.8 million for health insurance, $3.4 million for schools, and $2 million for negotiated salary increases. That is $11.2 million before anybody starts pretending there is some secret pile of money hidden in a drawer.
That matters because budget season always attracts two kinds of nonsense. One side acts like every increase is greed. The other acts like every increase is progress. Sometimes it is just math.
Van Campen also said this budget book is “significantly smaller in volume” because it now shows “actual amounts” instead of what he called “unnecessary, superfluous information” that previously “hid the transparency component.” Fine. Smaller is good if it is actually clearer. Everett has had enough budget paperwork that reads like it was designed to keep people tired.
On his own office budget, Van Campen said there are no vacant funded positions and that he expects to return about $3,650 to free cash on salaries, “primarily because he declined the mayoral car allowance,” plus about $650 tied to staffing changes and no longevity payment. He also said the office is running at about a 78 percent burn rate with a month and a half left in the fiscal year, so more money may come back at year end.
That is the kind of detail the council should keep dragging out of every department.
The more interesting policy signal came when Al Pietrantonio got into health insurance and take-home vehicles.
On insurance, Van Campen confirmed the obvious but important point: any shift toward the GIC or anything like it would require union negotiations. He also tried to stop the rumor mill before it got going, saying, “I don’t want people at home thinking that we’re moving into the GIC. It’s just one option of several options that I’m planning to have conversations with our public unions about.”
Good. Say what is happening, and say what is not happening.
On vehicles, he announced an actual policy change: effective July 1, the city will eliminate take-home vehicles for all non-union, non-public-safety staff. He said code enforcement alone has “8 or 10 take-home vehicles.” He called that inherited practice a “cost driver,” and he is right.
Pietrantonio put it in the blunt Everett way: “We all know, everybody in the city takes a vehicle home.”
Apparently not for much longer.
Van Campen added one of those details that sounds small until you realize what it says about prior management: the DPW gas pump “had no gauge to measure consumption.” The administration has now installed one so the city can track how much gas is being used and by which vehicles. If that sentence makes you ask, wait, they were handing out fuel without tracking usage, yes, that is the correct reaction.
He also said the city’s old practice of unlimited vacation carryover created “hundreds of thousands of dollars in expense” and a real unfunded liability. Again: not glamorous, but real money.
The 311 hearing was a better example of what a budget hearing should sound like.
Reno DeFilippis laid out the basic case: weekday demand is up, weekend volume is not. The office will eliminate weekend remote staffing and shift resources to regular business hours. He said weekend calls are only about “2% of the activity during the week.”
That is called using the numbers.
Councilors got the staffing picture on the record. The office still has four full-time employees including DeFilippis. The weekend coordinator remains full-time. The budget reduction is not a wipeout of the office. It comes from removing the former assistant director funding and two weekend part-time positions. Holly Garcia pinned the line item change down from about $194,000 adopted last year to $178,000 proposed now. DeFilippis said the department expects to return roughly $22,000 this year.
That is how this is supposed to work. Ask what changed. Ask why. Ask what comes back.
Planning and development brought one of the smarter structural proposals of the night.
The administration wants a new senior planner position to bring work in-house rather than keep burning about $88,000 in grant funds on an outside consultant. Matt Lattanzi said that if the city internalizes that work, it can “claw back” that grant money and redirect it to actual programs: housing rehab, public service groups, community organizations, maybe small business facade work.
Council President Stephanie Smith said, “I love bringing things in-house,” which, for once, was not just a slogan. If the city can stop paying consultants to do staff work and use those funds on visible programs instead, that is a better deal for Everett than financing another layer of professional middlemen.
Lattanzi also said the planning office already has a full-time grant writer and rattled off real numbers: over $500,000 in forestry grants, about $1.8 million in conservation grants, another $848,000 in FY27 conservation and sustainability commitments, plus over $1 million a year in CDBG. That is actual money, not LinkedIn language.
Transportation had a similar theme. Mr. Monty said Everett has been without a GIS coordinator for about five years and needs better internal capacity on underground infrastructure, traffic signals, and data. He said the department currently consists of himself, one full-time employee, and one intern.
DiPierro, to his credit, kept that hearing from drifting into a policy TED Talk. “This is a small budget,” he said. “We’re going to stick to the budget.” Imagine that.
There were a few less tidy moments too.
In recreation, councilors got into the wellness center closure and how members will be credited or reimbursed. That should have been cleaner before it reached the hearing. If people paid in advance, they should not need detective skills to find out what happens next.
And in personnel and finance, the hearing again exposed the bigger municipal problem: trained finance staff are hard to find, and Everett is competing in the same shallow labor pool as everybody else. Interim finance official Fowler put it plainly. “There’s not enough people to fill the positions out there.” Rogers translated it into regular English: “So it’s supply and demand?” Fowler answered, “Yes, it’s definitely supply and demand.”
Exactly.
No grand scandal broke here. No activist circus took over the room. Mostly, this was a long hearing about whether city hall can stop wasting money in stupid ways while building enough in-house competence to function.
That may not trend online. It is still the real story.