E-Mail This Article to a Friend How you’ll feel the pinch (continued)

You’re more likely to suffer a horrible catastrophe. Massachusetts was number one in the country for local-government-personnel reductions over the past two years, according to the MTF. Many of the 14,000 or so vanished jobs were frontline public-safety workers, including police, firefighters, and emergency medical technicians. There simply aren’t as many people to help if something goes wrong.

The new federal budget adds to the trouble with cuts in state and local law-enforcement grants, including essentially eliminating the popular Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants. This will have a significant negative effect on crime fighting in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville. "There is no question," says Mark Horan, of the Somerville mayor’s office. "There are a number of crime problems we need to address, like drugs and gangs, that are affected."

On the plus side, Boston has received a good chunk of homeland-security funding — but, as the Boston Globe reported this week, the city has failed to share with its neighbors. Eight neighboring towns were supposed to receive disaster-response equipment and training out of the $15.4 million grant, but have seen little to date.

You’ll pay more for housing. Property tax is the main avenue by which local governments can raise their own revenues — and the total amount raised this way in the Commonwealth has ballooned to $9 billion. Many local communities have raised their rates again for 2005. Boston, for example, just announced that the residential-property-tax rate is going up from $10.15 to $10.73 (per $1000 valuation), which translates into a $263 hike for the average single-family home.

Even Cambridge, which has avoided many of the financial problems that have hit other cities, recently estimated a 17 percent increase in the tax bill of existing single-family homes, and a nearly 40 percent increase for multifamily homes. The owner of an average multifamily home in Cambridge will pay roughly an extra $1400 in 2005.

Thanks to a relatively soft rental market over the past two years, recent hikes have not yet been passed along to most tenants. That can’t last much longer, some say. Expect fairly significant rent increases when many apartments turn over next September.

Get used to garbage and disrepair. Filling potholes, planting trees, replacing playground equipment, pulling weeds, cleaning streets, and other everyday contributions to your quality of life are simply not going to occur as often as they used to. That’s where it’s easiest to squeeze local budgets, but funding for such services is also a casualty of a nearly quarter-billion-dollar reduction in the Community Development Block Grant program in the new federal budget. Those cuts hurt urban areas disproportionately more; Boston and Cambridge are both losing millions.

Forty percent of sidewalks in Brookline are in need of repair, says town administrator Richard Kelleher. In Somerville, Horan concedes that trash and litter now linger in busy areas like Davis Square and Union Square. "In an ideal world, you’d have people picking that up every morning, especially on weekends," he says, but that is not possible for the near future.

Your water might be murky. One of the new federal budget’s biggest cuts is in clean-water funds to municipalities, from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund and the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund. Massachusetts will lose nearly $10 million in clean-water money next year, according to Greg Speeter, executive director of the Northampton-based National Priorities Project. The state’s sewage-treatment plants and water-purification facilities in need of repair are likely to go another year without them.

These cuts will be felt especially in Charles River Basin communities, which are still trying to find and eliminate storm-water cross-connections lurking beneath old homes. These cross-connections, which contaminate storm-drain water with waste, are a big reason why more than a million Massachusetts residents drink water that does not conform to national health standards. Brookline has fixed about 100 of these drainage problems in recent years, thanks in large part to federal grants that are now being cut, Kelleher says. Cambridge has a similar program that will also be adversely affected. Other troubles will undoubtedly result from a 3.3 percent overall cut in federal Environmental Protection Agency funding.

Transportation and development projects will remain on hold. Somerville badly wants an Orange Line stop to help revitalize Assembly Square, and a Green Line extension to Union Square as promised in Big Dig negotiations. Both are key to the kind of commercial development that will bring jobs and commercial-tax revenue to the city, Horan says. Unfortunately, transportation dollars are especially difficult to get right now. "Without federal help on these things, it will be hard to get them done," Horan says.

The cuts in community-development block grants will mean less help for small businesses, and for infrastructure improvements to assist business development and growth, Speeter says. Representatives of every Boston-area municipality agree that these block-grant cuts will have significant effects.

You’ll pay in other ways. Most area cities and towns are looking for ways to increase revenue, and with property taxes capped by law under Proposition 2½, they have to get creative. Brookline has jacked up the cost of parking meters and tickets. In Boston, Mayor Thomas Menino is trying to pass a meal tax on restaurant-goers.

Get used to the homeless. The new federal budget reduces housing and urban-development funding overall by 1.6 percent, but the devil is in the details of how the money is distributed. Several changes to the public-housing voucher program effectively cap the amount that the federal government will reimburse housing authorities for vouchers, even if rent or utility costs in the area go up — as they tend to do in the Boston area. However, it is likely that this will force area housing authorities to limit the number of voucher recipients in the coming year, says Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Meanwhile, the state has cut funding for substance-abuse and mental-health treatment — the number of detox beds in the Boston/Cambridge/Somerville/Quincy area has dropped by 50 percent just since 2003, according to the Boston Public Health Commission.

Many of these services, when they are no longer offered by the state or by federally supported providers, end up in city and town budgets one way or another. Somerville has had to step in to help OxyContin abusers and people on the brink of suicide, says Mayor Curtatone — who was elected in part because of public dissatisfaction with former mayor Dorothy Kelly Gay’s delivery of services. He’s finding that it ain’t so easy when you have to do it yourself. "If the president and governor had spent some time as a mayor," says Curtatone, "they would appreciate what it means to provide these services to people."

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com