Eric Kriss
Encyclopedia
Eric Arthur Kriss is a musician and business executive who served as Secretary of Administration and Finance in Massachusetts
Governor Romney's
cabinet (January 2003 – October 2005), and as assistant A&F secretary under Governor William Weld
(January 1991 – February 1993). Kriss is currently the Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Miami
.
In 1976, Kriss produced and performed on Mike Bloomfield's
If You Love These Blues, Play 'Em As You Please, nominated for a Grammy Award
. He launched the instructional book and record division of Guitar Player Magazine and also co-founded Inner City Records
, voted the Record Label of the Year in the 1979 International Jazz Critics Poll.
In 1984, Kriss helped launch Bain Capital
, which now manages over $65 billion in assets. He was
CEO of MediQual Systems (1993–98), a healthcare information company, and founder/CEO of MediVision (1983–1989), a network of eye surgery centers.
emergency request to appoint a state receiver to take over the City of Chelsea's
bankrupt municipal government , the first state-designed municipal receivership in U.S. history. Weld named Jim Carlin, a businessman and former state Secretary of Transportation, to become the Chelsea receiver, reporting to Eric Kriss, who, as the assistant Administration and Finance secretary, had drafted the Chelsea legislation.
Chelsea, directly across the Mystic River
from Boston, had long been in economic decline with a spiraling fiscal crisis. Carlin and Kriss immediately undertook a broad municipal turnaround, with a focus on labor negotiations with the local Firefighters union. Boston University
, already involved in local education, took over school administration.
Within two years, Chelsea's budget was balanced, a restructured firefighters contract was negotiated, city operations were streamlined, and new school construction was underway. As the Receivership achieved stability, a charter change in 1995 implemented a new efficient council-manager form of government. Increased emphasis on economic development and capital improvement led to an influx of new business, and, as the turnaround reached maturity in 1998, Chelsea was named an All-American City
by the National Civic League
.
In 2004, Springfield
, the third largest city in Massachusetts and long suffering from economic decline, requested extraordinary state assistance to met its financial obligations. Kriss, now Secretary for Administration and Finance, drafted a new receivership bill, modeled after his 1991 Chelsea legislation, that expanded upon the receiver's powers by suspending Chapter 150E, a key law that enfranchised public sector unions and defined the collective bargaining process in Massachusetts. After heated debate and intensive lobbying by public labor unions, the legislature placed Springfield into a state receivership controlled by Secretary Kriss on June 30, 2004, but without the proposed suspension of the Chapter 150E labor law.
Without the Chapter 150E suspension, the state receivership entered into a long collective bargaining process with the teachers' union. In September 2006 agreement was finally reached on a new contract that included merit pay, the first time that student performance was explicitly tied to teacher compensation in a large urban school district in Massachusetts.
The Springfield receivership, as in the earlier Chelsea experience, balanced the municipal budget, streamlined operations, and earned an upgrade in the city's bond rating. On June 30, 2009, the receivership returned governance of the city to local officials.
In February 2004, Kriss advocated the elimination of the monopoly granted to public sector unions through state laws such as Chapter 150E in Massachusetts. These remarks, plus the controversy over the original Kriss draft of the Springfield receivership legislation that suspended Chapter 150E, motivated Harvard University's
John F. Kennedy School of Government
to host a debate between Secretary Kriss and two labor union supporters, Economics Professor Richard B. Freeman, co-faculty director of the Harvard University Trade Union Program, and Jack Donahue, a Kennedy School lecturer and director of the Weil Program in Collaborative Governance.
The threat of escalating municipal labor costs due to Chapter 150E led Secretary Kriss to introduce the concept of Municipal Stability Factors as an online assessment tool for local officials. When he left office in September 2005, Kriss warned that overly generous contracts with public employees, together with a failure to control employee healthcare costs and an aversion to development that could spur new tax revenue, have doomed cities and towns to a dark financial future. "This is a quiet crisis, a crisis of attrition. It's not a Katrina, but if we extrapolate over the next couple of years, it will get worse and worse and worse."
to highlight the importance of open formats and public records: "It is an overriding imperative of the American democratic system that we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format, perhaps unreadable in the future, or subject to a proprietary system license that restricts access."
At a September 16, 2005 meeting with the Mass Technology Leadership Council Kriss raised state sovereignty as the overriding issue surrounding public records. While supporting the principle of private intellectual property rights, he said sovereignty trumped any private company's attempt to control the state's public records through claims of intellectual property.
Subsequently, in September 2005, Massachusetts became the first state to formally endorse OpenDocument
formats for its public records and, at the same time, reject proprietary formats such those used in Microsoft's
Office software suite.
Authority board asked Kriss to lead a comprehensive review of the Turnpike following the ouster of Chairman Matthew J. Amorello
and the collapse of a portion of the roof of the Ted Williams Tunnel
. On October 19, 2006, Kriss recommended to the board that all tolls, except on airport tunnels, be eliminated. The board then voted to remove tolls west of the 128 toll plaza by June 30, 2007, the first step in dismantling the Authority's original mission begun in 1952.
In June 2009, Governor Deval Patrick
signed legislation to formally end the Turnpike as a stand-alone authority on November 1, 2009.
Business
Government
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
Governor Romney's
Mitt Romney
Willard Mitt Romney is an American businessman and politician. He was the 70th Governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007 and is a candidate for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination.The son of George W...
cabinet (January 2003 – October 2005), and as assistant A&F secretary under Governor William Weld
William Weld
William Floyd Weld is a former governor of the US state of Massachusetts. He served as that state's 68th governor from 1991 to 1997. From 1981 to 1988, he was a federal prosecutor in the United States Justice Department...
(January 1991 – February 1993). Kriss is currently the Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Miami
University of Miami
The University of Miami is a private, non-sectarian university founded in 1925 with its main campus in Coral Gables, Florida, a medical campus in Miami city proper at Civic Center, and an oceanographic research facility on Virginia Key., the university currently enrolls 15,629 students in 12...
.
In 1976, Kriss produced and performed on Mike Bloomfield's
Mike Bloomfield
Michael Bernard "Mike" Bloomfield was an American musician, guitarist, and composer, born in Chicago, Illinois, who became one of the first popular music superstars of the 1960s to earn his reputation almost entirely on his instrumental prowess, since he rarely sang before 1969–70...
If You Love These Blues, Play 'Em As You Please, nominated for a Grammy Award
Grammy Award
A Grammy Award — or Grammy — is an accolade by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry...
. He launched the instructional book and record division of Guitar Player Magazine and also co-founded Inner City Records
Inner City Records
Inner City Records, an American jazz record label now based in Elmsford, New York, was founded in 1976 by Irv Kratka, owner of Music Minus One, and Eric Kriss, an independent producer. Affiliated labels included Guitar World and Classic Jazz...
, voted the Record Label of the Year in the 1979 International Jazz Critics Poll.
In 1984, Kriss helped launch Bain Capital
Bain Capital
Bain Capital LLC is a Boston-based private equity firm founded in 1984 by partners from the consulting firm Bain & Company. Originally conceived as an early-stage, growth-oriented investment fund, Bain Capital today manages approximately $65 billion in assets, and its strategies include private...
, which now manages over $65 billion in assets. He was
CEO of MediQual Systems (1993–98), a healthcare information company, and founder/CEO of MediVision (1983–1989), a network of eye surgery centers.
Municipal Turnarounds
On September 11, 1991, the Massachusetts state legislature approved Governor William Weld'sWilliam Weld
William Floyd Weld is a former governor of the US state of Massachusetts. He served as that state's 68th governor from 1991 to 1997. From 1981 to 1988, he was a federal prosecutor in the United States Justice Department...
emergency request to appoint a state receiver to take over the City of Chelsea's
Chelsea, Massachusetts
Chelsea is a city in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States directly across the Mystic River from the city of Boston. It is the smallest city in Massachusetts in land area, and the 26th most densely populated incorporated place in the country.-History:...
bankrupt municipal government , the first state-designed municipal receivership in U.S. history. Weld named Jim Carlin, a businessman and former state Secretary of Transportation, to become the Chelsea receiver, reporting to Eric Kriss, who, as the assistant Administration and Finance secretary, had drafted the Chelsea legislation.
Chelsea, directly across the Mystic River
Mystic River
The Mystic River is a river in Massachusetts, in the United States. Its name derives from the Wampanoag word "muhs-uhtuq", which translates to "big river." In an Algonquian language, "Missi-Tuk" means "a great river whose waters are driven by waves", alluding to the natural tidal nature of the...
from Boston, had long been in economic decline with a spiraling fiscal crisis. Carlin and Kriss immediately undertook a broad municipal turnaround, with a focus on labor negotiations with the local Firefighters union. Boston University
Boston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
, already involved in local education, took over school administration.
Within two years, Chelsea's budget was balanced, a restructured firefighters contract was negotiated, city operations were streamlined, and new school construction was underway. As the Receivership achieved stability, a charter change in 1995 implemented a new efficient council-manager form of government. Increased emphasis on economic development and capital improvement led to an influx of new business, and, as the turnaround reached maturity in 1998, Chelsea was named an All-American City
All-America City Award
The All-America City Award is given by the National Civic League annually to ten cities in the United States.The oldest community recognition program in the nation, the award recognizes communities whose citizens work together to identify and tackle community-wide challenges and achieve uncommon...
by the National Civic League
National Civic League
The National Civic League is an American non-profit organization that advocates for transparency, effectiveness, and openness in local government...
.
In 2004, Springfield
Springfield, Massachusetts
Springfield is the most populous city in Western New England, and the seat of Hampden County, Massachusetts, United States. Springfield sits on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River near its confluence with three rivers; the western Westfield River, the eastern Chicopee River, and the eastern...
, the third largest city in Massachusetts and long suffering from economic decline, requested extraordinary state assistance to met its financial obligations. Kriss, now Secretary for Administration and Finance, drafted a new receivership bill, modeled after his 1991 Chelsea legislation, that expanded upon the receiver's powers by suspending Chapter 150E, a key law that enfranchised public sector unions and defined the collective bargaining process in Massachusetts. After heated debate and intensive lobbying by public labor unions, the legislature placed Springfield into a state receivership controlled by Secretary Kriss on June 30, 2004, but without the proposed suspension of the Chapter 150E labor law.
Without the Chapter 150E suspension, the state receivership entered into a long collective bargaining process with the teachers' union. In September 2006 agreement was finally reached on a new contract that included merit pay, the first time that student performance was explicitly tied to teacher compensation in a large urban school district in Massachusetts.
The Springfield receivership, as in the earlier Chelsea experience, balanced the municipal budget, streamlined operations, and earned an upgrade in the city's bond rating. On June 30, 2009, the receivership returned governance of the city to local officials.
In February 2004, Kriss advocated the elimination of the monopoly granted to public sector unions through state laws such as Chapter 150E in Massachusetts. These remarks, plus the controversy over the original Kriss draft of the Springfield receivership legislation that suspended Chapter 150E, motivated Harvard University's
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
John F. Kennedy School of Government
John F. Kennedy School of Government
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University is a public policy and public administration school, and one of Harvard's graduate and professional schools...
to host a debate between Secretary Kriss and two labor union supporters, Economics Professor Richard B. Freeman, co-faculty director of the Harvard University Trade Union Program, and Jack Donahue, a Kennedy School lecturer and director of the Weil Program in Collaborative Governance.
The threat of escalating municipal labor costs due to Chapter 150E led Secretary Kriss to introduce the concept of Municipal Stability Factors as an online assessment tool for local officials. When he left office in September 2005, Kriss warned that overly generous contracts with public employees, together with a failure to control employee healthcare costs and an aversion to development that could spur new tax revenue, have doomed cities and towns to a dark financial future. "This is a quiet crisis, a crisis of attrition. It's not a Katrina, but if we extrapolate over the next couple of years, it will get worse and worse and worse."
Open Formats
In early 2005, Eric Kriss, as Romney's Secretary of Administration and Finance, was the first government official in the United StatesUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
to highlight the importance of open formats and public records: "It is an overriding imperative of the American democratic system that we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format, perhaps unreadable in the future, or subject to a proprietary system license that restricts access."
At a September 16, 2005 meeting with the Mass Technology Leadership Council Kriss raised state sovereignty as the overriding issue surrounding public records. While supporting the principle of private intellectual property rights, he said sovereignty trumped any private company's attempt to control the state's public records through claims of intellectual property.
Subsequently, in September 2005, Massachusetts became the first state to formally endorse OpenDocument
OpenDocument
The Open Document Format for Office Applications is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents....
formats for its public records and, at the same time, reject proprietary formats such those used in Microsoft's
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
Office software suite.
Massachusetts Turnpike
In August 2006, Governor Romney and the Massachusetts TurnpikeMassachusetts Turnpike
The Massachusetts Turnpike is the easternmost stretch of Interstate 90. The Turnpike begins at the western border of Massachusetts in West Stockbridge connecting with the Berkshire Connector portion of the New York State Thruway...
Authority board asked Kriss to lead a comprehensive review of the Turnpike following the ouster of Chairman Matthew J. Amorello
Matthew J. Amorello
Matthew John Amorello is a former Massachusetts state senator and former chairman of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority who presided over the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel Project from 2002 to 2006...
and the collapse of a portion of the roof of the Ted Williams Tunnel
Ted Williams Tunnel
The Ted Williams Tunnel, also known as the Williams Tunnel, is the name of the third highway tunnel under Boston Harbor in Boston, Massachusetts, the Sumner and Callahan Tunnels being the other two...
. On October 19, 2006, Kriss recommended to the board that all tolls, except on airport tunnels, be eliminated. The board then voted to remove tolls west of the 128 toll plaza by June 30, 2007, the first step in dismantling the Authority's original mission begun in 1952.
In June 2009, Governor Deval Patrick
Deval Patrick
Deval Laurdine Patrick is the 71st and current Governor of Massachusetts. A member of the Democratic Party, Patrick served as an Assistant United States Attorney General under President Bill Clinton...
signed legislation to formally end the Turnpike as a stand-alone authority on November 1, 2009.
See also
- Adoption of Open Document format in Massachusetts
- Bain & Company (consulting firm)
- Bain CapitalBain CapitalBain Capital LLC is a Boston-based private equity firm founded in 1984 by partners from the consulting firm Bain & Company. Originally conceived as an early-stage, growth-oriented investment fund, Bain Capital today manages approximately $65 billion in assets, and its strategies include private...
- Springfield Finance Control Board
External links
Music and Performing Arts- On Performance by Eric Kriss: Collected performing arts criticism and interviews from the 1970s - Fair Isle Press, 2010 paperback edition
- Six Blues-Roots Pianists by Eric Kriss - Oak Publications, 1973*
- Barrelhouse & Boogie Piano by Eric Kriss - Oak Publications, 1973
- Beginning Blues Piano by Eric Kriss - Acorn Music Press, 1977
Business
- Eric Kriss Practicum series at University of Miami, 2010
- Index of INC Magazine articles, interviews, and commentary
- How to Survive the End of Inflation (Eric Kriss) - INC Magazine, January 1993
- So You Want to be a CEO? (Eric Kriss) - INC Magazine, October 1998
- Inevitable Electrics (Eric Kriss) - 2008 white paper
Government
- No More Public Sector Union Monopoly (Eric Kriss) - CommonWealth Magazine, Summer 2004
- Fourth Branch of Government (Eric Kriss) - February 2004
- Open Mind on Open Source (Eric Kriss presentation) - June 2004
- Executive and Management Compensation report - November 2004
- Budget Imbalance (Eric Kriss) - CommonWealth Magazine, Winter 2004
- Kriss Report to Massachusetts Turnpike Authority board, October 2006
- ODF vs. OOXML: War of the Words - Eric Kriss, Peter Quinn and the ETRM, December 2007