Four times this year the council has voted to pay bills the city should have paid in earlier years, and the list keeps going further back. The September 14 package covered invoices from fiscal 2021, 2023, 2025 and 2026. The January package was mostly a decade of unpaid electric bills. Each vote is small. The pattern is not.
The Eversource decade
In January the City Manager asked the council to approve $49,471.31 in prior-year obligations. “The vast majority, $48,407.55, is for Eversource charges,” he wrote. The bills attached to the request run across more than 80 city accounts and, by the city’s own description, accumulated over more than a decade of misapplied payments, with disconnection warnings on City Hall, the streetlights and the pump station. We reported the details when the bills surfaced. The schools carried another $32,828 back to FY23 in the same month.
The rest of the year
In April the council approved $20,840 for Public Works and $30,410 for the schools. On September 14 it took up 26F40: $26,546.88 across Public Works, the City Clerk, Human Resources and the Legislative department. Inside that package: $8,288.87 owed to the state Department of Unemployment Assistance on a June 8 past-due notice that threatened to intercept state aid, $17,666.01 in Tufts Construction invoices from 2020 through 2023, and a note from the Council Clerk that Ricoh, the copier vendor, had not billed the council for eight to ten months. The September 21 agenda corrected the figure: the actual new bills came to $12,505.14, for an HVAC contractor, a GIS consultant and a newspaper notice, and the $26,546.88 was the earlier package still sitting in Ways and Means.
Why it happens
Massachusetts law requires a council vote to pay a prior-year bill out of a current-year budget, which is why these come up at all; in most cities they are a once-a-year housekeeping item. Four packages in nine months, reaching back five fiscal years, with a state agency threatening intercept and a vendor that stopped invoicing, is not housekeeping. It is a sign that invoices are not being matched to purchase orders and closed in the year they arrive, which is exactly the kind of internal-control weakness an auditor’s management letter describes. The FY25 audit was clean on the statements. The management letter, which is where such weaknesses would be described, has not been released.