How it started vs how it’s going

It’s been one week since a group of Quincy residents launched an effort to repeal the 79% and 50% raises for the mayor and city council, but it feels much longer. 

In part, that’s because we had been working for several weeks before that to convince the city council not to vote the raises through. That work sprang up quite organically. Folks shared news of the record-setting salary range proposed by consultants connected to city officials, researched the bidding process through which the consultant’s contract came about, discovered that (a) the city has a charter, (b) the charter requires politicians’ raises to go into effect in the term following the one in which they’re voted, and after a public vote, and (c) apparently the charter has no teeth, and state law allows the raises to go through in the calendar year following a raise vote (ie, January 1, 2025). 

Neighbors who had never met in real life shared findings from their public records requests and calls to the state attorney general’s office and organized protests at City Hall.

Before the June 17 council votes on the raises

Teachers got between 0 and 3% increases every year since 2015, when the mayor’s last raise went into effect. The mayor’s newly approved salary is equivalent to him making a 6% raise for each of those years.

Quincy is one of 15 cities with so-called “plan A” governments in Massachusetts. The mayor’s new raise is far out of line with what the mayors of all those other cities make

After the council rushed through the first of two votes to approve the mayor’s raise and looked set to rubber stamp both raises at the following council meeting, the group of residents that had come together started holding Zoom meetings to plan more protests and create an online poll to show the city council how many folks were against the raises. But on June 17, the council voted to push the raises through – without a public hearing – before working out a better system for calculating salary changes, which they vowed to do in the fall.

One resident who had seen the writing on the wall had already been researching how to UNDO the raises once they had passed. She found out that according to state law, any measure (like the raises) can be repealed if 12% of registered voters physically sign a referendum petition within 20 days of the measure’s final passage. We had more Zoom meetings, and debated whether we could get the 8,000 signatures needed by July 8. After all, that’s equivalent to 40% of the voter turnout in the 2023 election, which people had a higher chance of knowing about, in large part thanks to the ubiquitous yard signs and frequent mailings that one of the candidates spent about a million dollars on.

Could we, a group of about two dozen residents who had come together to organize the protests, along with the signers of our online poll, get so many signatures in such a short period of time? In the summer, when many residents are away for the July 4 holiday? Was it worth the daunting effort? And if we didn’t get the signatures, which seemed likely, would that contribute to more cynicism about residents’ ability to effect change and even about the democratic process itself?

We discussed it and decided that the effort was worth it. The trying was the whole point. By trying, we could spread awareness of how this raise process was handled, and remind our elected officials that they are meant to look out for our interests above their own. By trying, we’d meet new people, build community, and flex the muscles of our out-of-shape democracy, where less than a third of eligible voters cast ballots in the last election.

And it’s working! Nearly a hundred volunteers have taken petition forms to collect signatures, and we’re all meeting new people across the city and having conversations and (thankfully respectful) debates about how we want things to run here. I am energized after these conversations. Sometimes I start to worry that we’ll never reach our goal of 8,000 signatures at that pace, but then I stop and remind myself that those conversations are the goal. That sense of community and camaraderie is the magic that makes a street feel like a neighborhood. And that mutual sharing of information and hopes and frustrations is what a democracy is all about.

A bonus is that this magical feeling of connection and empowerment seems to be spreading, and people have been lining up to sign the petitions. So while I think that our efforts have already paid off in strengthening our democracy and community, I am increasingly hopeful that we will also meet our goal of repealing these raises and forcing our elected officials to come up with a fairer and more sensible raise process. 

So if you haven’t already, please find out where to find tireless signature collectors at ajustquincy.com/petition. And stop to chat with them, even if you don’t end up signing. Talking together is not just a way to keep democracy alive. It’s our only hope.

Folks signing the petitions to repeal the mayor’s and council’s raises

—Maggie McKee