By Ashley Taylor

A consultants claim that Assembly Square can be developed without adding any extra police or city services to the area was met with disbelief by one alderman last week.

“I can’t even begin to believe that we wouldn’t need one more firefighter?” Ward Six Alderman Rebekah Gewirtz commented after Paik’s presentation.  “We wouldn’t need one more police officer?”

Richard Paik, of the Salem consulting firm, W-ZHA, presented his firm’s analysis of the municipal impacts brought on by developments in Assembly Square.  The consultants concluded that the city could serve the new residential and retail developments without hiring any new school, fire, or police staff.

Gewirtz responded by saying, “I appreciate and thank you for your presentation.  I am going to ask that you either just put this away and start over or that we get a different contractor to give us a second opinion.  It’s sort of like when it looks cloudy outside and someone tells you, ‘But it’s a bright sunny day.’  You’d say, ‘Well, I really want a second opinion; it really doesn’t match up.’”

The meeting included discussion on Mayor Joe Curtatone’s request that the city post a $25-million bond to fund Assembly Square development that will use District Improvement Financing (DIF).   Yet perhaps the agenda item that received the most attention was not the DIF bond but the rosy report on the project’s municipal impact.

W-ZHA concluded that the project would incur $37,500 in municipal expenses in its first full year of stabilized operations, or 2014.  According to Planning Department Director Monica Lamboy, 2014 would be the first year of occupancy for the DIF’s three buildings, which include 400 new housing units.

Paik compared the city taking on the Assembly Row development to a factory.  “If the factory receives an order for 100,000 microphones a year and they get an order for 20,000 more microphones, wow, they need a new factory, they need new people, they need new equipment.  The marginal expenses of that order may exceed the revenue generated.  But if that factory is, like most factories, not operating at 100% capacity, but their machines are handling everything—how many computers use all their memory—and their people have a little bit of cushion and they get an order for say, 10,000 microphones.  That’s basically pure profit.”

According to Paik, police and fire departments reported that they would not need to hire additional staff to serve Assembly Square.   Paik described those departments as operating below full capacity and as being able to do more with existing resources.

Maryann Heuston, Ward 2 Alderman and Chair of the Finance Committee, responded to that characterization by saying,  “I don’t know if you factored in that you’re really stuck with a deficit in this City…We hear continually that there are not enough people to do X, Y, and Z, enough vehicles to do X, Y, and Z.  I think we’re barely making the mark there.”

She questioned Paik’s methods—asking department heads if they would need to hire more staff to accommodate developments at Assembly Square—because she doubted that department heads would admit to inadequacy, to being unable to meet the city’s demands, for any reason.

“I don’t think there’s one department head in this City—and I know you were trying to be respectful—who would put something out on the line there, who would be so bold as to say, ‘You know what, we can’t do it with what we’ve got here, already we can’t handle the load, I could use ten more people,’” Heuston said.

Paik defended his approach by saying that his analysis considered new demands the development would place on the City, not the City’s current shortfalls.  He reiterated what the police and fire departments told him:

“When I talked to police and fire, they said we have people stationed well enough to serve that area, and they have to be there all night and all day, but this is not going to make us have more people at the station.”

The consultant drew a similar conclusion about the school system determined that the school system.  W-ZHA’s report predicted the Somerville Public Schools could absorb the additional 44 students that the Assembly Square development is predicted to add to the system without hiring any new staff.  The consultant predicted that additional school costs ($15,500) would result only from additional supplies.

When Chairman Heuston opened the meeting to comments by the public, School Superintendent Tony Pierantozzi corroborated what the consultant had said about the school’s projected expenses but added that the predictions are very difficult to make.

“We could absorb, in fact, as the consultant suggests, with the exception of something in the $15,000 range, as he projected.  Now if they were all high school students, the number would actually be $23,000; if all of them were elementary students, it would actually be about 12; but the additional one profoundly disabled special education student, which you can’t predict, the addition of all advanced placement college credit students, which you can’t predict, would throw that number off.  So it’s not the fact that we don’t want to give more numbers that take things into consideration; from the education point of view, it’s unpredictable,” Pierantozzi said.

The Finance Committee will next meet on April 6 and again April 13 to further discuss these matters.  The April 13 meeting will be another public hearing on the Mayor’s request to post a bond for the DIF.