A Numbers Problem

A Numbers Problem
Local cities and towns grapple with finding and hiring qualified employees
 Eryn Dion
News Staff Writer


How hard is it to find good help? Well, as many cities and towns in the area are finding, it’s actually pretty difficult.

Just ask Gardner officials, who shuffled out their auditor last week. On paper, he resigned for “personal reasons,” though it was well-known that the city, and his office, was struggling to close its books and submit its paperwork to the Department of Revenue into April – well after the December deadline – due to numerous errors. No paperwork equals no free cash certification from the Department of Revenue, slowing down several projects around the city and causing an all-around headache for the mayor and finance committee, who had to step in and help.

It could have been much worse, though. Early last year when Templeton went through a similar situation, the DOR threatened to withhold its local aid payments indefinitely – a devastating blow for a town that was already grappling with a half-million-dollar hole in its budget.

Of course, Templeton is also intimately familiar with the type of havoc high turnaround in a financial management office can cause. Both its accountant and treasurer positions were a revolving door for a number of years, resulting in the aforementioned $500,000 budget deficit, a system almost no one in the office could follow, and financial records left in such disarray that an auditing firm won’t even look at them until they’re completely reconstructed, delaying the town’s free cash certification yet again.

Luckily, the new town accountant seems to have everything under control and is even finding long-lost accounts holding hundreds of thousands of dollars (which would have been helpful during said financial crisis) – though even hiring her proved to be quite a trial, as the position was posted repeatedly for months and generated no viable candidates. And with the position essentially vacated for some of the busiest months of the year, there was still hesitancy in hiring her because, despite her years of experience working for big-name nonprofits, she’d never worked in municipal finance before.

Then there’s neighboring Winchendon, which had its own multimillion-dollar budget de­ficit discovered last year. Though it was determined there was no outright malicious wrongdoing, the gap was largely caused by accounting errors, specifically in the town’s health insurance trust fund and a lack of communication between the town manager and finance department.

Clearly this is not an isolated problem and is, in fact, something towns all across the commonwealth are struggling with, namely how to find and hire qualified and talented employees. And it’s not just accountants or treasurers – building inspectors and health agents are particularly hard to come by as well, particularly in Massachusetts.

So what gives? Driving around, there’s no shortage of private accounting practices and people promising help with your taxes, clearly there are skilled people out there. But a town looking for a new accountant can only pull one qualified candidate in four months of advertising and interviewing?

Barring a shortage of qualified people, the next obvious answer is money. Peruse any city or town budget and you quickly realize municipal employees are not getting rich. Most do it because they’re from the area and genuinely love the communities they work for and the people. They’re providing a service, and based on their pay, practically being treated as volunteers.

The year after its financial crisis, Templeton voters approved a salary of $41,760 for a 32-hour per week accountant position in the fiscal 2015 budget. This was a major boost from the part-time gig previously offered, and both the town’s interim town administrator and members of the Board of Selectmen readily admitted that one of the big reasons the town found itself in a financial mess was because of the pittance they had been offering as pay.

“The reason we’re in this position is because we’ve cut those employees’ salaries,” Selectman Kenn Robinson said at the meeting last year when the accountant’s pay was discussed. “We cannot attract candidates to town.”

While over $40,000 may seem like a respectable salary, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average median salary for an accountant in 2013 was about $65,000 nationally. The highest-paid can pull in well over $110,000, and only the lowest rung made in the $40,000 range. The statewide numbers are lower, but only slightly.

See the problem? At $41,000, Templeton could only attract one qualified candidate and, not long after hiring her, realized her hours would need to be boosted to 40 per week to handle the necessary workload. Gardner budgeted a seemingly respectable $75,000 for its city auditor and still had difficulty. It’s gotten to the point where some towns have resorted to outsourcing their accounting services to some of those private practices I mentioned earlier. Hubbardston is one example, signing a contract with an accountant all the way out in Sagamore Beach for services for $35,000, or about the salary they could pay an in-house accountant. The Franklin Regional Council of Governments provides accounting services for 13 communities in Franklin County, and even the Mass­achusetts Municipal Association will handle a town or city’s accounting for a fee.

It seems we can’t go a year without a town or city in our coverage area going through some sort of financial trouble as towns, like many of the people living in them, are basically living paycheck to paycheck, budget to budget, on a precarious tightrope from year to year. The issue is not as simple as paying people more – the money has to come from somewhere and many of these budgets are down to the bare bones, or in some cases, the marrow. While I don’t claim to have the answers, what is glaringly obvious is this is becoming a growing problem not just in this area, but in all areas of the state, and one that will become costly for the towns and cities themselves, but the taxpayers as they’re left to pick up the slack.