A reader pointed me to a September 30, 2009 Forbes magazine article, “Cambridge runs amok”. In this article, we learn the following:
- the city manager earns $300,000 per year (plus benefits and pension obligations that may cost another nearly $300,000 per year)
- the Cambridge, MA’s director of affordable housing gets paid more than the governor of Massachusetts
- the city has accumulated $1.2 billion in liabilities, most of it from unfunded pension liabilities, which would grow far larger if doctors are clever enough to extend peoples’ lives
The liabilities, divided by the 22,000 parcels of taxable land in Cambridge, work out to roughly $55,000 per property owner. A different way to put this into perspective, considering the valuable commercial office towers in Kendall Square, is to look at the total value of property in Cambridge. According to a September 21 letter from that $300,000 per year city manager, the total tax base is about $24.3B, making the liabilities about 5 percent of property owners’ assets. So it is still safe to buy that $1 million condo in Harvard Square, but remember that you’ll eventually have to pay $50,000 of that in taxes, in addition to whatever it costs to operate the city government on a current basis.
Does the 22,000-parcels figure include the very large property holdings of universities exempt from the property tax?
Well, here in SF there are over 9,000 city employees who make more than $200,000 a year. I believe the salary for a cabinet secretary in the US is $191,300 a year (except for Hillary Clinton who makes $186,600 because conflict of interest rules would not allow her to get a pay raise she voted for).