Editor’s Note: The following is a guest perspective from Town Meeting Member David Powelstock (Precinct 4) regarding the recent controversy over pay increases and promotions for two school administrators: Pat Aubin and Gerry Missal. The views and opinions stated represent the opinions of Mr. Powelstock.
In what is less a retraction than the latest in a series of single-minded attacks on the Belmont School Committee, the latest editorial in the Citizen-Herald seems surprised at their own inaccurate reporting last week of the textbook budget being “slashed to nearly nothing.” Instead of acknowledging its failure to check its facts, the Citizen-Herald instead implied that the restoration of this line item was kept as some kind of secret.
But the one-time funds that ultimately restored the proposed cuts to the textbook budget (among other items) were reported by the School Committee to the Board of Selectmen at the BoS meeting of March 17 and again to the Warrant Committee at its meeting of March 19. An overview of the resulting budget, specifically including the restoration of level funding in the textbook item, was presented at the School Committee’s public hearing on the budget held March 25 and included in the distributed materials. All of these meetings were open to the public, including the press. You could even watch them on TV. Where was the Citizen-Herald on March 17, 19 and 25? Instead, the paper blames someone else–the School Committee, of course–for the lapse in their own reporting. (“In all of the paperwork gathered from meetings, requests, and materials online, nothing showed the textbooks funds being restored.”) The paper is losing credibility by the week as editorial opinion blatantly drives, and increasingly supplants, actual reporting of the news.
David Powelstock
Town Meeting Member, Precinct 4
David,
Are we in D.C.? Paper exposes $63k in raises to 2 School admin’s during a budget crisis and what do you do… attack the paper for getting a seemingly minor element to the story incorrect. Isn’t that textbook (get it) Washington. Don’t like the news then discredit the source.
PJ
Hi David,
As I explained to you and some of your friends over drinks in a private meeting recently, the staff of this newspaper – and many other newspapers, across the globe – do not have the time to go to every single meeting in their communities. With all that we do, it is simply impossible. I wish it could be a different situation but it isn’t.
Personally, I like meetings. You get the nuance of everyone involved. You get to figure out who the players are and how their minds work. This is why I spend my free time watching the public meetings in my own city and Belmont’s online, whenever I get the chance. I’m glad they are available to me and others. If people want to know every little thing about every single committee, they should watch them online.
Your comments on our Web site and here though, however, are really over the top. If you think that I have any influence over how our reporter decides to report the news – as if she is not a capable, free-thinking person, who digs for her own stories and writes in her own ways – you are sadly mistaken. it really says a lot about you as a news consumer and as someone who knows our reporter. If you don’t like our editorials, that’s fine. If you don’t like the headlines, that’s fine. But to denigrate her character as a professional with your comments about our news reporting is offensive and you should be ashamed of yourself because you don’t know what you are talking about.
The textbook issue is really a red herring and any college professor in his right mind would know this by now. The facts are simple: The school superintendent issued a raise to the finance director to the tune of $22,000, an outlandish figure, and got caught, through good old fashion reporting. End of story. There is not opinion about it. Peter Holland admitted it. The fact that you, as a supporter of the public schools in Belmont, is not upset that this money isn’t being spent on the children is a wonderment.
I will also say that even though the textbook budget issue has been resolved since late March, I still receive complaints about the budget line item from parents in the school system, on average at least one a week. Many of us – parents, us, and others – were still under the false impression that the textbook budget had been cut in half. We were all wrong. The newspaper issued a correction in the newspaper and on the Web.
It really is time to move on.
Tony, your whole raise issue is a red herring.
The boring news is that our schools are well-run; we get good results, for not a lot of money. We know that the results are comparable with other districts because Ed Reform mandates standardized accounting, and mandates standardized measures (MCAS) of quality. Honest, law-conforming accounting is also boring news. (I understand you once caught Winchester’s school system playing with their numbers. I assume that the reason that we have not heard of similar scandals in other towns is because none could be found, and not because reporters stopped looking.) Given these good results on quality metrics, we have a good reason to not rock the boat. Not rocking the boat is also boring news.
If we did not pay the promotion/raise, we would save only a few dollars per student, but if Pat Aubin and Gerry Missal also retired at the same time as Peter Holland, we might have a real glitch in the management of our schools, and that could cost much more, or cause a much bigger loss to the students than $22,000 from the budget.
Pat Aubin’s raise also seems like a complete slam-dunk, and I do not understand why the paper made such a big deal of it. We need someone to fill Peter Holland’s position; the going rate for the job is $180,000, Pat Aubin is qualified, and already knows the system. I notice, in your letter above, that you have dropped mention of Pat Aubin’s promotion, so it seems that you basically agree with that reasoning — but that’s not what the headlines said, and the headlines are what people will remember.
Gerry Missal’s raise is not such an obvious slam-dunk, but I can also give the schools the benefit of a doubt (since they have proven their competence again and again over the years) and assume that perhaps they know what they are doing. Doesn’t mean that one should not poke and dig for scandal, but if it’s just the money, let’s please look at ALL the money (the whole budget) and what we get for it.
Hi dr2chase,
I guess I’m a bit puzzled by your response although you make a couple of good points.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter if $22,000 breaks down to a few dollars per student. A $22,000 raise is a lot of money when last year, the finance director received almost 6 percent and most other town department heads received less than 3 last year and this year. Those folks work with less staffing than they have in the past and are under the same constraints as everyone else. The fact that you can’t see that or even make excuses is puzzling.
$22,000 is a lot of money when collectively used for a line item. It could buy a lot of other things like, for example, more textbooks, something parents are clamoring about. Last year, according Dr. Holland, the BHS PTO bought $30,000 worth of textbooks for students. A WC member recently offered to donate $10,000 of her own money for textbooks, something that the schools turned down. This money – as well as money that would be available if Dr. Aubin’s raise was lowered – could buy a lot of textbooks.
$22,000 is a lot of money when your school super and finance director went before the WC begging for a raid of the Post Employment Retirement Account – a looming, huge, multi-million deficit that residents have to come up with. No one knew then what we know now. But school officials and school supporters seems to be to reward excessively now and pass it on to future generations later. Not good public policy and not good government.
No, I don’t agree with the decision to give Dr. Aubin a 29 percent increase and I said so in the editorial dated March 22. She could have been awarded 10 percent – a perfectly fine amount and in line with what other interim department heads have received, as noted in the editorials. But that seems to be a done deal, unfortunately. Unless, of course, the School Committee comes to its collective senses and rescinds the raise, which I have also suggested they do. I can tell you this: I would HEAP PRAISE on the SC if they did this on Tuesday and yeah, it might actually save the roads override, Wellington debt exclusion, and maybe even next year’s operating override [BTW Paul and others: The operating deficit for next year, according to the town treasurer and WC chairman, is $2.3M to $2.6M, not $4.5M. $4.5M was the operating override amount Scott Stratford tried to float earlier this year which sank like a lead balloon. You might want to try stay focused to the correct amount of money].
Thank you though for proving a point to me and allowing me to use your comments to show why I held John Bowe’s letter: “…the going rate for the job is $180,000 …”
In actuality, current and former school officials have privately suggested that the salaries of new administrators could be much higher than current pre- or post-raise salaries, because of what is going on in the market. Most of you know this because you have probably had the same conversations.
So, this line by Bowe: “I’m confident that School Department administrative salaries for years following this transition period will be in the same range as at present,” is not quite accurate and certainly does not line up with what they are saying privately.
This line: “In the near future we hope to be able to report that these FY2009 salaries will be less than the entire amount budgeted,” may also not be accurate, according to figures privately being bantered around by current and former school officials. They can “hope” all they want. But the math doesn’t seem to add up to that at all.
I do appreciate your comments that we should poke and dig for scandal. That’s our job. I think this was a great land by Cassie. It occurred because she has been developing sources and now, everyone in town is talking about these stories. Our job is to sell newspapers and get people to visit our Web site. We’re not the library.
We’ve looked at a lot in this year’s budgets. I love budget stuff. Some folks find it boring but I think it is a lot of fun. I still have a lot of documents leftover from when I was the reporter here in 2000-2002, when I woked in Winchester, and my local budget stuff, much to the chagrin of my wife. We have most of the town reports that Linda left from previous years too. I think if you saw things side by side, you’d be surprised at what you would find. In fact, instead of posting it here, I think we will do a story about that in the near future. That sounds like a good intern project for this summer!
I would also add that both the town administrator and treasurer are very good about getting me information, whether I request it by phone or email. It usually doesn’t take more than a day or two to get information. The same can not be said for the school system.
Weeks ago, I asked Pat Brusch if plans for the Wellington were available electronically. She said she would have Gerry get them for me. Well, we’re still waiting.
It took more than three weeks to get a copy of the budget in digital form and I had to chastise school administrators in an editorial to get them to post it online, something the town already had done. The finance director scoffed at the idea of having to put the budget online for the public and the press to see [Oh yeah, he should get a $22k raise ...]. Instead, he should have jumped at the chance to make sure the public had everything they possibly needed to get access to. What is the problem over there?
I have not been surprised by the lack of response when trying to get stuff from the school system. This was a similar problem when I was the reporter here and was similar when I was in Winchester looking at all of their shenanigans. It is a similar problem with my local school system. I don’t know why educators feel the need to hold back information from everyone. I guess the word “autonomy” goes to the heads!
Hey Tony. A strong defense and some good points. At some level, I think you do have to look at the big picture here — how Belmont’s administrative costs match up to those of the other towns we compare ourselves to –which are the top performing school districts in this state: Wellesley, Weston, Lexington, Newton, Lincoln-Sudbury, Needham, etc. etc. (and I’m probably omitting a few). I think you also need, as John suggests, to look across the board at administrative costs as a percentage of overall school funding, rather than picking out one or two positions that you feel are overcompensated and making a cause celebre out of those. Looking at the big picture on administrative spending and including the comparisons is all about providing context rather than merely creating controversy. I haven’t seen to much of that (so far, at least).
Reading your comments, you sound all fired up to do a “then and now” side by side comparison of budget numbers between 2000 and 2008, but that strikes me as a piece that is of little utility to the BCH’s readership, unless you just want to play with numbers and stir up the anti-school crowd sentiment. All its going to show is that running a school system got more expensive between the time when you were a reporter here and now that you’re an editor — and we already know that. It’s hardly Belmont’s fault that healthcare costs, fuel and basic material costs have skyrocketed, nor is it in our control if the market for educators or administrators puts a premium on top caliber teachers and administrators which town wants running its schools and teaching its students. We could adopt a bottom-line mentality in all our professional hiring, but I think experience will show that that can cost you a lot more in the end and that paying for talent and experience yields results (as our school system’s top ranking in the state and nationally attest).
It hasn’t been written yet, but what your piece will need to show is how other towns have fared, what school and administrative costs have done in those towns and how well they’ve done at managing them — better than Belmont, or worse? It may be, when all that is figured in, that Belmont still looks like an outlier and a town that’s administration-heavy. If that’s the case, then we can have a debate about whether we’re getting our dollar’s worth but — again — I don’t think you’ve proven that at all. I’m anxious to read your follow on reporting on this issue and I’ll be looking for the context.
In defense of the BCH, I agree with others that the paper has every right to dig into issues like this. At some level, that’s why you have a town paper, blog, whatever. The question that’s been raised here is about transparency. I doubt there would have been an uproar (or as much of one) if the SC and School Dept. had come out in advance or at the time the decisions re: promotions were made and said “here’s what we’re doing to retain these two critical employees who know their jobs and our school system inside and out, and here’s why we feel this is necessary” and also “here’s what the statistics are on overall administrative costs and how we’re working to keep these in control going forward.” It’s called controlling the message and making sure people have the facts they need to see the big picture, rather than doing damage control, which is what officials are engaged in now. My 2c.
Also…I think Merriam Webster would correct you on one thing: facts and figures are “bandied about” (as in batted back and forth) where as we-all are “bantering.”
paul
I’ve clearly not made my point clearly enough.
Schools in Massachusetts are unusual, compared to other departments in town government, because of all the metrics mandated by ed reform. We can (more or less) objectively determine whether a school system is doing well, simply by looking at the metrics. Other information, like what people are paid, or what raises they receive, may be interesting, but it is not relevant. We ask the schools to educate our children well, for not a lot of money (relative to other schools), and they do it, and the metrics prove it. All else is just details. Responding to newspaper reporters in a timely fashion, or publishing budgets online, those are nice, sure, but they’re not in the metrics, and they’re not educating our children, and they’re not (directly) saving us money.
We may quibble with the exact definition of the metrics (does MCAS measure what we care about? Does the Ed Reform definition of spending fairly capture spending? Is anyone cooking the books?) but otherwise, the metrics win.
I was mainly addressing this comment:
“Doesn’t mean that one should not poke and dig for scandal, but if it’s just the money, let’s please look at ALL the money (the whole budget) and what we get for it.”
I have done this in Belmont previously and I took a pretty good look at the budget this year [at least that is what I thought ... I clearly missed a thing or two].
That said, there isn’t much to look at over on the town side because it has been flatlined for quite a while. In fact, there have been cuts on the town side of the budget over the last eight years while at the same time, there have been many new hires on the school side. Most everyone knows this to be true, even if they don’t want to admit it. Most everyone knows that town department heads have been working with less compared to previous years. At the same time that the town side has been starved for staffing, the School Dept. got seven new teachers in its budget. This isn’t to beat up on school supporters or the School Dept. Quite the opposite. It is just to acknowledge a fact.
Is there potential savings there by looking at both line items [and by "savings," I mean money that can be shifted from one line item to another ... governments never stop spending money unless they are forced to ...]? Sure, especially if the school and town could stop being so territorial about every penny and understand that it is “one town.”
Take the IT vacancy. Everyone knows that there is no need for two IT directors. And yet, the vacancy on the school side comes up and they start hiring a new one instead of merging the positions. How many textbooks could be purchased with the difference in expense between the two? How many more potholes could be filled? I don’t know. But it is relevant question, don’tcha think?
However, so long as the School Dept. has autonomy over its budgeting, these “savings” are probably not going to happen and residents will be suspicious of the depts’ expenditures. It has been this way for a very, very long time.
My suggestion for a story is that folks don’t have to take my word for it – and why should they, after all, right? I’m sure readers would be interested in a deeper understanding of their budget. But, I wouldn’t go back just eight years. We’ll go back a lot farther than that. I don’t necessarily know if it will fire up Yes or No crowds or whatever. I don’t know how people will perceive it. What I’m fired up about is that it is a GREAT STORY to tell. It is clear that a lot of Belmontians don’t know their history. They also don’t know how strapped the town side is for money, just to make sure the schools have as much as they can get without massive overrides. Everything is going to be on the table now that the reserves have been spent though. It will be interesting to see how this will get done.
This story doesn’t have anything to do with other towns. The only town that really matters is Belmont. What Belmont spends; what Belmont can afford; what Belmont needs; etc. As you know, Cambridge and Watertown spend more per pupil than Belmont and yet, folks move here from those towns because they know their kids will get a better education here. If that comes at $10k per pupil vs. $12k or $19k, what difference does it make? The children of Belmont are getting a better education than most in the rest of Massachusetts, if not the United States. It doesn’t matter what other towns do and has no bearing on looking at the whole budget.
As far as the definition goes, I wasn’t thinking about teasing remarks, I was thinking about circulating information freely.
Dictionary.com, bandied:
1. to pass from one to another or back and forth; give and take; trade; exchange: to bandy blows; to bandy words.
2. to throw or strike to and fro or from side to side, as a ball in tennis.
3. to circulate freely: to bandy gossip.
The point of comparing to other towns is to get some idea of how we are doing. The fact that we are/were (according to some study some years ago) the first or second most efficient school system in the state, should tell us that we have probably found most of the easy efficiencies, and many of the hard ones. One reason for Ed Reform is so that we can make these very inter-town comparisons; the less-efficient towns can look at towns like Belmont, so that they can try some of the things that we do to see if they can get more for less, like we do.
Historical comparisons are much, much harder. Requirements on the schools (special ed laws, for example) have changed over time. The definition of inflation is a little tricky, because the consumer price index was tinkered with in recent decades (and even now, it determines the cost of housing by the cost of renting, not the sale price of houses or the cost of mortgages). Income growth over decades has been different for professionals and non-professionals, and the schools largely employ professionals (college-educated plus graduate degree). Pension accounting also has changed over the years. And, even if you account for all that, and discover something startling in the history, you don’t know if it is peculiar to Belmont, or just part of some larger startling trend that we share with other towns.
And, if we did discover something that we thought needed changing, we need to know if it is just a Belmont phenomenon (which we have a hope of fixing) or part of some larger trend that we really do not have much hope of changing, or that must be approached at the state or national level.
Dear Tony,
I have a lot more to say by way of response (I apologize in advance!), but for now let me just note the following from the end of your most recent post. You wrote:
“The children of Belmont are getting a better education than most in the rest of Massachusetts, if not the United States. It doesn’t matter what other towns do and has no bearing on looking at the whole budget.”
This stunning self-contradiction completely reveals your bias. One side of your mouth says, there’s no point comparing. The other says, gee, compare the Belmont education not just to the rest of MA, but to the entire nation. So, the quality of education should be compared, but the value (i.e., the cost of what is provided relative to it’s quality) should not?
Tony — I’d have to agree with David on this. On the one hand, you’re saying that comparisons don’t matter, but on the other you’re saying that they do matter, because we compare better with the rest of the state. In other words, comparisons don’t matter, except when they support your point of view, in which case they do matter. I’m also really concerned about your comment:
“What I’m fired up about is that it is a GREAT STORY to tell. It is clear that a lot of Belmontians don’t know their history. They also don’t know how strapped the town side is for money, just to make sure the schools have as much as they can get without massive overrides. Everything is going to be on the table now that the reserves have been spent though. It will be interesting to see how this will get done.”
You seem to have made up your mind already what story the numbers are going to tell — and its YOUR narrative about the schools taking money from the town and (in your opinion) wasting it. You seem to want to school us readers about your take on Belmont’s finances. That’s a really BAD position to take, as an editor, imho. My training as a journalist was that you do the reporting first and then let the facts speak for themselves — not the other way around. I appreciated the review you did of capital spending projects and felt, on the whole, that it was fair and balanced. But when you’re addressing the more politically (and ideologically) charged issue of whether the town is getting its dollar’s worth, I think you really need comparables to put it in perspective. I don’t think this is a radical concept, but you seem entirely dismissive of this idea, leaving us to wonder if you’re dismissing it because it doesn’t support your view of things.
Putting the BCH in the position of teaching Belmont citizens “our history” is also a bit presumptuous.What Belmont can afford and what Belmont needs are questions that are, ultimately, up to the town’s voters — not you or anyone else to decide for us.
The consistent refrain I’m hearing from many of my readers is a concern about the BCH’s objectivity and even-handedness. You’ve made the decision that there’s nothing to be found by looking into the Town side of things — but even recent history (hundreds of thousands of dollars left over in an account from the Town Hall renovation, etc. etc.) should tell you that that’s not true. Your comments above give me reason to be concerned.
Since I’m being tag-teamed three way here, let me split this up:
Paul: I already know pretty much with the numbers will show because I researched the story before and have spent countless hours reading through the archives of both the Citizen and the Herald. Not to sound arrogant but I certainly know more about the town’s “history” than some people who have just moved to town. I certainly know more about the town’s history than some people who don’t know what happened before 1997. Or, I guess I should say, if the previous editions of the newspaper are correct, and I have no reason to believe that they aren’t … etc.
That said, we’ll be going back beyond what I did previously. I think readers will be surprised by what they find out … since I already know part of the story.
As you know, staffing and capital accounts are two different things. There were problems with the Wellington funding found by the treasurer. Problems with the THA before that. All of it has been documented and reported. Old story.
The budget on the town side is pretty lean considering what it probably should be and compared to previous time periods. There is no “We need seven new hires to continue level service …” It is, in fact, under-staffed compared to previous years, and everyone knows this. And anyone who has watched WC meetings over the years knows that they spend twice as long looking at the town budget compared to the school budget. Now, you may not agree with fire staffing or police staffing or whatever. But that doesn’t mean the budgets haven’t been looked at.
DavidP: Whether you realize this or not, Belmont cannot be compared to other towns because it is completely different than other towns, especially when it comes to funding, property values, incomes, and non-residential property. There is virtually no commercial property tax. So, how can you compare Belmont and Lexington, when Lexington has millions in commercial tax revs? You can’t. Of course they are going to have more money for more buildings and more teachers, etc. How can you compare it to Waltham or Watertown or Cambridge? You can’t. The funding is different. You can’t even compare it to Arlington. So, why compare? That is a futile exercise … unless you cherry-pick the districts to come to a certain conclusion, which I have seen done before, much to the chagrin of the cherry-pickers when they get caught fudging the numbers.
That said, if money was that important, people wouldn’t move to Belmont from Watertown and Cambridge where there is a higher per pupil expenditure. If comparisons were that important, they would stay, because money is the only measure, right? And yet, they still move. Why? The schools are better.
It is anecdotal but I can tell you that with friends and family all over this country and since I read about education a lot, since I’m a parent, Belmont kids are in fact getting a better education than most other kids. I don’t need to do a study. I know what the class sizes are. I know the condition of the schools. I know the colleges some of these kids will – and won’t – get into. I know what their parents can afford as far as tutoring or whatever.
We all know from state data, since the state has done this in the past, that Belmont kids are getting a better education than most of the kids in the rest of the state beyond the very affluent communities like Weston and Wellesley. So, again, what is the point of studying the comparisons?
Again, going back to the main issue that started all of this, could the Belmont school be better? Yeah. With more money? Sure. There’s $63,000 right there in money being awarded – or potentially awarded – to two administrators. That is a good place to start.
dr2chase: You’re correct on some of your points. The pension formulas are a mess and hard to compare. But Ed Reform has been around for quite a while now. What, 15 years? So, it shouldn’t be hard to look at things from that perspective. It also will lend an understanding for all the new people as to what the mindset of the older folks are.
Tony — sounds like you’ve got your mind all made up and the piece all put together. You’ve got some cherry picked facts from the past decade of town budgeting and some anecdotal evidence (friends and family all over this country) that Belmont kids have it pretty good (and, therefore, could do with less, we can presume). You even seem to be able to see into our household budgeting and know what we can and can’t afford (by virtue, I suppose, of what we paid for our houses?) That’s pretty good! Comparisons with data from other towns that might contradict your thesis? They don’t count. (Where’s Arlington’s whopping commercial tax base, btw? or Winchester’s? or Weston’s?) Non-anecdotal evidence that is different from your anecdotes or personal experience, we can assume, also won’t count, because you know what’s right and what isn’t?
This all sounds great for a BCH editorial. What I worry about is that you’re proposing it as a news story and seem utterly untroubled by the fact that you’ve reached a foregone conclusion about what the piece will show. I think the folks here are suggesting that you take a broader and unbiased view of things — which is a reporter’s job, after all — and you seem completely dismissive of that notion. Reading between the lines: you know you’re right, you know the town better than other people and the rest of us can go to hell. I said I was concerned before. Now I’m downright scared.
Comparing commercial tax base is yet another comparison between towns, and it would be an interesting history to learn how we ended up with so little. Not having been here at the time, I cannot say for sure, but it is my guess that it was our choice to be a town of homes, with the corresponding high tax rates.
The central mistake of the we’re-special line of argument is that we are not that special. There’s varying amounts of commercial tax base in different towns; when comparing taxes, we can take that into account. It is my understanding that the structural problems caused by prop 2.5 will hit every town sooner or later, they just hit us sooner, and harder, because a very large portion of our taxes are paid by homeowners. Our income distribution does not look that special (I checked the census info), either — richer than many, poorer than a few, but there’s nothing unusual about the distribution of incomes when compared to other towns.
The other problem with a comparison-avoiding historical analysis is that it assumes that, in some happy past, all departments of the town were well run and efficient. We don’t know that. We only knowthat about the schools now because of Ed Reform and inter-town comparisons. We have nothing like Ed Reform for the town side — any assertion that they are efficient is necessarily much less certain that the same claims made for the schools. And, further, without something like “Town Reform”, the town side may be deprived of the information that they need to be more efficient; we don’t have nearly as good an idea what works, and what does not. And, if the town side happens to be efficient, the lack of standardized accounting deprives them of the ability to proclaim, with true confidence, that they are in fact efficient, and really do deserve more money to keep things running, or else there really will be cuts.
I know I keep returning to metrics, but if you want to run your government like a business, you use metrics. You’ve got to be sure you are measuring the right thing — you don’t want to be the drunk looking for lost keys where the light is brightest, instead of where they were dropped — but when you get your metrics right, life is pretty good. It helps define your job, helps you know how you are doing, and lets you know when you have beat your head hard enough on a task and should work on something else.
Here’s one example where metrics and comparisons ought to help us, if we can use them properly. As of the 2000 census (I’m sure things have changed somewhat since then), the percentage of low-income people in Belmont (with out very low percentage of define-affordable housing) was about the same as the percentage of low-income people in towns that met their 10% goals. We ought to be able to use that to make the case that we are not doing that bad a job — though we miss the legal goal, we hit the proclaimed goal. But to do that, we have to buy into inter-town comparisons; if we’re selectively special, we’re less credible with that claim.