FITCHBURG — The state’s longest-serving mayor and the woman looking to unseat him met for their only debate on Thursday, Oct. 14.
On one side of the Workers Credit Union Studio at Fitchburg Access Television was Dean Mazzarella, now in his 28th year as Leominster’s mayor. On the other side was Andrea Freeman, an 18-year city resident running for public office for the second time.
A former police officer, Mazzarella has held the top office in Leominster since 1994. He also owns Main Street Gift & Café on Main Street, which recently moved across the street from its former incarnation, Central Flag and Gift. He has been a member of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation Board of Directors since 2015. As mayor, he also serves on the Leominster School Committee.
Freeman most recently worked for the Massachusetts Public Health Association, serving as field director and director of development and special projects. She moved to Leominster in 2003 to help establish the Doyle Park & Conservation Center. She then helped launch the Twin Cities Rail Trail Association, which will see its dream realized in 2022 when a 4.5-mile multipurpose trail opens between downtown Leominster and downtown Fitchburg.
Here are five areas covered during the debate, sponsored by Fitchburg-Leominster All Politics TV and FATV, and moderated by FLAP TV host and producer Kevin Cormier:
School funding
Asked if they thought the city “fairly and adequately” funds the school system, Mazzarella answered in the affirmative and Freeman said it does not.
Freeman focused on how much the city spends above the state-mandated minimum (also known as net school spending), saying, “The fact is that we have, year after year after year, are very, very close to the bare minimum of net school spending.” She did not say during the debate how much, or what percentage, Leominster spends above net school spending.
According to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Leominster budgeted $78,600,141 for the schools (1.8% above net school spending) in fiscal year 2020 and $81,256,147 (2% above net school spending) in fiscal year 2021, which ended June 30.
Districts spending around the same percentage above net school spending in 2021 include Brockton (0.3%), Dracut (0.6%), Gardner (1.3%), Lowell (1.2%), Lynn (1%), Malden (1.3%), Methuen (2.2%), Northbridge (2.7%), Orange (1%), Springfield (1.3%), Winchendon (2.6%) and Worcester (2.1%).
Freeman compared Leominster (with a median income of $32,927 in 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau) with Pittsfield ($29,909 median income), saying that Pittsfield spends about 20% above net school spending, while Leominster does not. According to the DESE, Pittsfield spent 19.9% above net school spending in fiscal 2020 and 21.1% above in fiscal 2021.
Median income is the point at which half of Leominster’s residents earn more than that amount and half earn less than that.
When Mazzarella said the city has spent above net school spending each year, Freeman interjected, “It’s a small percent.” Mazzarella then responded, “I don’t know where you grew up, but those aren’t tiny.”
While Mazzarella said that about 70 percent of the city’s budget goes to the schools, Freeman pointed out that about half of that comes back to Leominster through Chapter 70 state aid.
Mazzarella said education “isn’t just how much money you put into education, into the net school spending formula. It also means what you put into your buildings.” He cited projects completed during his 28 years as mayor, such as three new schools (Samoset Middle School, Sky View Middle School and the renovation of Leominster High School), the renovation of the Leominster Public Library, “new parks for our kids,” and new boiler systems, roofs, security systems and phone systems in school buildings.
Mazzarella also mentioned the millions of dollars the school district is receiving in COVID-19 pandemic relief funds — which includes “$20 million to help kids catch up who have fallen behind.”
Pensions and ‘savings’
Freeman suggested reducing the amount the city puts in its fully funded pension fund (for current and future retirees) and its Stabilization Fund (the city’s “savings account”) and using some of that money for the School Department.
“We are overfunded in our pension fund,” she said. “We are overfunded based on recommendations from the State Department of Revenue. We are overfunded in the Stabilization Fund. We have almost 13% of our operating budget in the Stabilization Fund. The Department of Revenue recommends 3 to 5%.”
Mazzarella countered that in the fiscal 2022 budget, which started July 1, the city took $2.5 million of the roughly $6 million it spent each year on funding the pension and “gave it to the schools to put directly into the classrooms.”
“That was needed to make it to net school spending,” Freeman responded.
Reducing the amount of money in the pension fund and the Stabilization Fund, Mazzarella said, would affect the city’s Aa2 bond rating from Moody’s Investors Service and make it more expensive to borrow money for future projects.
“I do not propose — in fact, we cannot take money out of the pension fund,” Freeman said. “It is in a locked box. That money that is in there now is protected.”
Freeman pointed out that some retirees went seven years (going back to 2010) without a cost of living increase — to which Mazzarella did not respond during the debate — and the “race” to become the first community in Massachusetts to fully fund its pension fund (Leominster reached that mark in 2017) meant “there are people left behind in the process.”
“They’re not because, you know why, now because we’re 100% funded, those retirees will get a raise, an increase, forever and it will come out of the system,” Mazzarella said.
“Some of those retirees are no longer alive, sir,” Freeman responded.
COVID-19 mandates
The subject of COVID-19 vaccine or testing mandates for Leominster’s public employees was brought up during the debate, in light of the City of Boston last week placing more than 800 public employees on unpaid leave after failing to comply with the city’s order to get a COVID shot or provide weekly negative COVID test results.
Freeman said “yes” when Cormier said she would require city employees to get a COVID shot or provide weekly negative test results.
“We may have to go [to] weekly testing,” Mazzarella said. “We may have to go to once we can get people tested. The problem now is we can’t. There are so many people that want to get tested once we go to that, it will probably go to you have to get tested every so often because you can still get COVID when you’ve had the vaccine.”
Some city employees are under collective bargaining agreements negotiated between the city and their union, and their contracts would need to be renegotiated to allow a vaccine or testing requirement.
Diversity and representation
Freeman said it is important for city boards and committees to represent Leominster’s demographics “in terms of our racial and ethnic makeup,” “age or ability, or there’s other ways. It’s mostly white, older and mostly men.”
As for why some seats have not been contested in recent years and the turnout in city elections has been heading down, Freeman said, “I don’t have the answers to that, but I think that if I had to guess, I would say it’s because we’re just kind of stuck that people don’t think that they can make any change, that they can have an influence and that they’re welcome.”
She said it is “hard” to find on the City of Leominster’s website information on how to run for public office: “All it says is call the city clerk. It doesn’t give any information about what it takes, the timeline. It’s a very intimidating process, I have to say, and so I think that’s why we don’t have hardly any people running.”
Before running for mayor, Freeman sought an at-large seat on the Leominster School Committee in 2015 through a write-in campaign. She came up short to a fellow write-in hopeful, mayoral aide and city grant writer Wendy Wiiks, who could not take the post because the city’s charter forbids city employees from also serving on the City Council or school board. Freeman did not run in the 2016 special election for the seat.
“I think a lot of it is, is anybody listening? Is my voice being heard?” Mazzarella said. “I would say the reason people don’t run for City Council or for mayor or School Committee jobs might be that people feel I am being listened to, I am being represented and they’re doing a good job.”
In this year’s election, four people are running for School Committee under a unified “Kids First” ticket because they feel the board did not listen to constituents in the summer of 2020 on holding online vs. in-person or hybrid classes because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mazzarella spoke at their combined campaign kickoff in June.
Mazzarella said he has reached out to members of the community to encourage them to run for public office or join a city board or commission.
“When you’ve recently appointed several people to Conservation Commission, Planning Board, Historical Commission, Office of Emergency Management just in the past several months, did anybody you appointed, would they identify as black, indigenous or person of color?” Freeman later asked. “Would they identify as LGBTQ+? Would they identify as being someone with a disability?”
“We put it out all over social media with press releases everywhere,” he replied.
“So, did you appoint any?” Freeman said.
“They didn’t apply,” Mazzarella responded.
Closing statements
In his closing statement, Mazzarella touted his 28 years of experience as Leominster mayor in “community development, economic development, compliance, labor law, union negotiations, community communications, crisis management, and especially municipal finance. A few rookie moves in any of these areas, and you can set the city back decades and cost the citizens and the taxpayers millions of dollars.”
Mazzarella added, “After all these years, you know who I am and what I’m all about. I was born and raised here. I’ve spent my entire career serving the city, first as a police officer, then as your mayor. Leominster is my passion and my calling. You know how hard I work for all of you and how I do absolutely anything to help anybody.”
“I’ve gained skills and experience our city needs during my career as a program director and coalition builder for organizations across the state and the country,” Freeman said. “I know how to bring people together around challenging issues to clarify values, to identify shared goals and to make plans for achieving them.
“Our city needs a vision for the future, and we all deserve to be heard and well informed along the way,” she added. “As your mayor, I will make sure that you know how to be involved and where to get answers about how your tax dollars are being spent.”
Freeman said one area of focus should be reversing the rise in Leominster’s poverty rate from 9.5% to 12.5%.
Because the debate ran a couple of minutes past the one-hour allotted time, the closing statements were cut off by other programming on both Leominster Access Television and FATV — during Mazzarella’s on Leominster TV and during Freeman’s on FATV. The full debate, including the candidates’ closing statements, is available through the video on demand platforms on the stations’ websites, www.leominster.tv and www.fatv.org.
Dean Mazzarella Andrea Freeman mayor debate school funding diversity