Tonight the City Council is asked to pay $26,546.88 in bills from prior fiscal years, one of them for lead pipe work done on Washington Avenue in September 2020. It is the third time this year the council has been asked to do this. The January order was for $82,299.79 across the city and the schools, the April orders for $51,249.38. With tonight’s, the city will have paid about $160,000 in 2026 for goods and services delivered in earlier years.
State law does not let a city pay last year’s bill out of this year’s budget without a council vote, which is why each of these packages comes with a letter from the City Manager, a memo from the department, and the invoices. Tonight’s package runs 45 pages. The stories inside are more interesting than the total.
A contractor waited six years
The largest item is $17,666.01 to Tufts Construction of Everett for four jobs under contracts the city signed in 2019, 2020 and 2022: lead service replacements at 535 Washington Avenue in September 2020, 130 Washington Avenue in July 2022 and 137 Garfield in August 2022, and a hydrant on Eastern Avenue in April 2023. DPW Commissioner Cate Fox-Lent writes that three of the four invoices “were never submitted prior to 2026,” and the fourth “was found to have an error and sent back to the vendor in 2023 who did not resubmit until 2026.” She has confirmed the work was done. The MWRA loans that funded the lead work have since been closed, so the money will come from this year’s Water Enterprise capital account.
The contractor’s own letter explains the hydrant invoice. Tufts was moving to a new billing system and issued the same invoice number twice, once for the Eastern Avenue hydrant and once for a job on Lafayette Street. The Lafayette bill was paid. The hydrant bill, for $7,020, sat.
The state’s unemployment agency sent a past-due notice
The second item is $8,288.87 to the Department of Unemployment Assistance. Chelsea does not pay unemployment insurance premiums; as a reimbursable employer it repays the state dollar for dollar for benefits paid to its former employees. The state’s June 8 notice shows the city was billed $374,251.15 in such reimbursements for October 2025 through March 2026, had paid $368,829.68, and owed the balance plus $2,867.40 in interest. The notice gave the city 15 business days and warned of “intercept of state or federal payments or tax refunds, processing fee charges, and referral to collection.”
The city’s benefits manager, Millie Gonzalez, explained the shortfall in a July email to Maltez: “We did not have enough funds in the PO as we can not predict a total amount on a monthly basis.” The June 2026 bill attached to her email was for $21,093. The notice does not say whose claims produced the charges.
The copier company stopped sending bills
The council’s own office owes Ricoh $542 for its copier lease for May and June. Council Clerk Clifford Cunningham’s August 31 email to the finance office says Ricoh has not been sending invoices “for most of the past 8-10 months,” that the office has to call or email to get each one, that the August invoice arrived only on August 19 after a direct request, and that the office has asked “well over five” times. He asked Procurement, as contract manager, to intervene. “As of the end of last week, we have had no success on either front.” The July invoice in the packet carries a $2.71 late charge. The order lists the Ricoh item under fiscal 2021, which appears to be a typographical error; the invoices are from 2026.
Cunningham adds a second problem: W.B. Mason has the council office, the City Clerk and the Law Department all listed as contacts for Room 306, so deliveries and invoices go to the wrong office, and last year the council paid another department’s supply bill out of its own line before anyone noticed.
And a $50 legal notice
The smallest item is $50 to a local newspaper for a legal notice about Arlington and Walnut streets, invoiced in October 2024. City Clerk Jeannette Cintron White’s June email is the most candid document in the packet: “I tried making payment, however, I failed to respond to the email for correction last year. My apologies.”
The order is filed by Councillor Norieliz DeJesus and is expected to go to Ways and Means. The meeting starts at 7 p.m. at City Hall.