The Crisis We Chose Not to Prevent

As Methuen confronts a painful FY27 budget process, it is worth asking the harder question: how much of this pain was avoidable, and what will we do differently next time?

Written by: Dan Shibilia

This article contains my opinion based on my education, training, and experience in budgeting and operations management. Reasonable minds may differ.

The city is in the middle of a budget crisis that, if we are being honest with ourselves, we all knew was coming 2 budget cycles ago. The warnings were there two years ago. The revenue trends were visible. The structural gaps between what Methuen spends and what it takes in were not a secret hidden in the CAFOs drawer. They were hiding in plain sight. And yet, here we are with Emmy-winning performances for acting surprised

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What follows is not an attempt to assign blame to any single person or administration. I feel like I’ve made it clear that this current administration has done more than earlier to help drive education specifically… but I will admit it still has its faults. It is something harder and more useful: an accounting of the tools we had available and did not use, and an argument that the path forward requires a different kind of discipline than we have shown.

What We Could Have Done and Did Not

Let us start with department restructuring. There was a moment, and there still is though the window is narrowing, where a serious look at how the city deploys its Police, Fire, DPW, and School (but it’s really too late for schools at this point) and other departments resources could have produced real savings. The only genuine attempt was an executive order on IT consolidation, and it was dead on arrival, not because the idea was wrong, but because of how it was delivered. There were also some early efforts to connect DPW with the schools on outside maintenance, a reasonable idea, but it materialized largely as a reaction to school conditions and short-staffing problems rather than as a proactive efficiency play. That is the difference between strategy and scrambling.

Then there is the grant question. A dedicated grant writer, hired at the start of FY26, could realistically be generating new revenue right now, federal and state dollars that could be dedicated to specific programs, freeing up municipal funds for the operating and personnel budgets where the pressure is greatest. Grant writing is not glamorous. It does not generate headlines. But money is money, and we left it on the table. To the mayor’s credit, they posted the position and nobody wanted the job. Personally, I can’t say that I blame them. Methuen hasn’t exactly created the most welcoming atmosphere. But running with our theme of honesty and retrospective … this was still 2 years too late and the pivot that’s occurring now could have occurred much earlier and it could have been a body in the chair at the beginning of the fiscal year.

On economic development: the city has finally started looking seriously at zoning. That is good. It is also late. A structured commercial attraction campaign, a real blitz with targeted outreach, incentive packages, and a clear pitch, could have been in motion two years ago when the fiscal forecast first turned worrying. We knew the day was coming. The urgency simply was not there yet, so the urgency did not come. To be clear, I’m not talking about more housing. We need to be targeting more business to grow our commercial tax base. The commercial tax base in Methuen hovers around 12 to 14% but all reputable sources suggested should be up in the mid mid high twenties.

The Longer List of Missed Opportunities

Beyond those headline failures, there is a longer list of tools that never made it off the shelf:

• Fee schedule audits. Many municipalities have not updated permit, licensing, or inspection fees in years. That is uncollected revenue sitting in a drawer. These departments should not be operating at the margin they do.

• Tax delinquency collection push. Money already owed to the city, unpaid taxes, fees, and fines, could have been systematically recovered.

• Shared services with neighboring communities. Splitting costs on specialized staff, dispatch, or heavy equipment does not require a merger. It requires a phone call and a will to cooperate.

• Monetizing underutilized assets. Surplus land (which admittedly we don’t have much of), unused municipal buildings (most of which are falling apart or in decrepit repair), billboard and cell tower leases represent real value sitting idle. With all of the miles of highways running through Methuen, there was an opportunity for expansion here.

• Multi-year budget forecasting. A three-year projection model would have made the FY27 problem visible and actionable in FY25, when there was still room to maneuver.

• Zero-based budgeting in select departments. Rather than rolling last year’s numbers forward, forcing even one or two departments to justify every line from scratch often surfaces savings that routine budgeting never finds.

• Early retirement incentives. A cohort of higher-salaried employees eligible to retire, given a structured incentive, can reduce payroll costs while creating room to right-size or hire at lower salary levels. To the mayor’s credit, he tried to bring this forward and it appears to have died on the vine courtesy of the council.

• Business retention programs. Losing an anchor business is often more financially damaging than failing to recruit a new one. Methuen has no formal program to prevent it.

The Real Problem Is Not the Budget. It Is the Clock.

None of the items above are exotic or untested. They are standard tools of municipal fiscal management. The reason they were not deployed is not ignorance. It is timing. Budget crises have a way of compressing time until the only options left are the bad ones: cuts to services people rely on, tax increases that hit residents who are already stretched, or deferred maintenance that turns today’s savings into tomorrow’s capital crisis. This should be our new city motto because it’s what we have been doing for decades.

Effective fiscal planning is, at its core, a discipline of acting before you have to. The city knew two years ago that this day was coming. What was missing was not information. It was the institutional will to treat a future problem with the same urgency as a present one.

What Comes Next

The FY27 budget will get passed. It will be painful. Some version of cuts, revenue increases, or both will happen, and the community will absorb it. That part is inevitable now. … Unless the state steps up at some point in the very near future to help Methuen and the numerous other communities suffering.

What is not yet determined is whether FY28 looks the same. The city has an opportunity right now, in the middle of this crisis, to put in place the structures that prevent the next one. Multi-year forecasting. A grant writer. A real economic development strategy tied to zoning reform. Shared services agreements with neighboring communities. Fee and delinquency audits. These are not transformational ideas. They are basic competencies that cities our size should have as a matter of course.

The question for the council, the mayor’s office, and frankly for the residents who elect them, is simple: will this budget season be a turning point, or will it be a rehearsal for the same crisis in three years? If history teaches us anything… we already know the answer to this but I am choosing to have faith in the Mayor for now.

Methuen deserves a budget process that starts 24 months early, not 24 days early. It is time to build one.