New Haven Independent

Her voice was one of the few critical ones raised among an audience of 30 people who came out on a windy and rainy Tuesday night at the Pilgrim Church in Fair Haven to hear the mayor explain — and defend — the property tax re-evaluations, the recently passed tax freeze for seniors, and other salient features of $445.2 budget for FY07-08.

Was Ginger satisfied with the mayor’s answer? Read on through the math that follows to find out.

At an event billed as a kind of touring seminar to explain the sometimes complicated issues of tax policy, the mayor came armed not only with Power Pointed pie-charts and bar graphs to lobby the public for his budget, but also the brain trust from the office of Controller Mark Pietrosimone as well. They posed here in a budgetary team photo (left to right, Rick Fiengo, Joe Clerkin, Kevin Berry, and Pietrosimone, along with retired Registrar of Vital Statistics Michael Lynch, who is not part of the budgetary team), before fanning out among the audience. With them they carried their copies of the Grand List in hand to offer any who dared give his or her address their new assessment for 2006. The point of the exercise was also to show the “savings” for the taxpayer if the tax bill is phased in, as proposed, with the mill rate of 43.29, over a five-year period.

Confused yet? Here were some of the main points of the mayor’s community budget message:

Don’t Blame Me

Public Act No. 06-176 as amended in the General Statues of Connecticut requires property evaluations every five years. We, by law, the mayor said, had no choice but to proceed with the re-evaluations.

Also look to the state for part of the blame. “Next to New Jersey,” the mayor said, “Connecticut is the most heavily property tax-dependent state in the nation.” With approximately 49 percent of the city’s revenue coming from the state, when that income lags, the property tax is the primary area where the shortfall can be made up.

The budget increase, of 7 percent, is not out of line, he said. The state’s budget has increased that much as well. While police and fire services, combined, reflect a 20 percent increase, the mayor challenged the audience, asking: Who can do with less of these?

“The police receive 130,000 calls a year,” he said. “It’s a high-volume, labor-intensive business. And the fire department now responds in 79 percent of its calls to medical, not fire, emergencies. That’s a service I think we must continue to provide to the city.”

Despite aggressive cost cutting in energy, that budget line has also gone up 13 percent, he said.
With the unavoidable dramatic rise in the cost of gas, it would have been much more without the city’s strong conservation measures.

We’ve Accomplished An Awful Lot

The mayor’s commitment to his aggressive school construction program remains at the heart of his convictions for the city. “Next to protection through the police and fire departments, this is what a city does for its families and citizens. Moreover, through reimbursement from the state, we get back 75 cents for every dollar we spend on school construction.” He pointed out drop out rates decreasing from 30 percent in 1995 to 16 percent in 2005, with many more graduates matriculating to colleges and becoming taxpayers.

After recounting what he termed “one of the worst days in my life,” when he read the police report of two bad cops, the mayor praised the efforts of the police department in general, the dramatic decrease in crime, and the plummeting of the murder rate from last year. And he called attention to the re-involvement of the city in housing development: The creation of areas like Monterey Place have resulted in declines in police calls from Dixwell. The extensive development of downtown, whose 40,000 jobs are the economic heart of the city. The fact that there is not a vacant building downtown, and there’s much development, such as at the former Shartenberg site, that will continue to grow the commercial property base.

But it’s residential property that will continue to bear the brunt of the revaluation. No way around that, for now.

The Shift

That’s because residential property values have grown at a faster rate than commercial. In 2005, they represented 43 percent of the Grand List, the total list of taxable property. But in 2006, with the new evaluations, they will represent 53 percent. Commercial property will actually have declined from 30 percent of the Grand list in 2005 to 29 percent in 2006. Thus the shift in tax burden to individual house and condo owners, even though the mayor’s charts also show a decline in tax exempt property as a percentage of the Grand List from 42 percent in 2005 to 37 percent for 2006.

The Phase In

The good news, or rather the silver lining, is that if your are not a senior eligible for the freeze or the deferral, or some other deferment such as if you are a veteran or blind, your increase in taxes per the 2006 Grand List will be considerably moderated through a phase in of the increase over a five-year period.

This woman, Esther Armmand, who lives on Quinnipiac Avenue, found out that she would have to pay $300 additional in taxes per year, with the phase in. She told Joe Clerkin and Kevin Berry that she might have to shine some shoes, but she could handle it.

Another person, who lives on the river, got this news: his current 2005 Grand List evaluation is $103,000. The new assessment for the 2006 GL will be a whopping $256,000. (Less than 10 percent of property owners challenged their new assessments, according to Pietrosimone, many less than expected.)

Okay, so the additional assessed value to pay taxes on is $153,000. Are you following? The current tax bill on this property is $4,624. The new tax bill, at the proposed 43.29 mill rate, would be $7,920. However, through the magic of the phase in, the bill in the first year would be $5,788. Still, that’s nearly a $1,000 increase, payable in two payments of $500.

How did all this go over? Local activist Chris Ozyck queried the mayor about deliberate dilapidation being practiced by certain homeowners, in order to avoid the higher evaluations. The mayor said he didn’t think this was a problem as the new valuations were based on market value more than on paint jobs.

The mayor did, however, announce that he and his staff would soon announce an aggressive new policy about blight. “We are going to ramp up our LCI (Livable Cities Initiative) and be much more aggressive about people who have furniture on their front lawns, blight enforcement on houses where people are living.”

Journalist Jerry Dunklee (at right in the photo) pushed the mayor to answer what the state might do to help the city become fiscally healthier. Of the 49 percent of revenue that comes from the state, 32 percent (including bonding) goes directly for projects like schools. Seventeen percent comes through the PILOT program, reimbursements for tax-exempt properties like colleges and hospitals, and a little through casino money.

The mayor said great relief could be provided if the state did three things: First, give serious new funding to local education so property taxes could be accordingly reduce. He also called for full funding of PILOT, and then he called for smart growth and land use reform that would create economic development near the state’s cities.

The various local alders in attendance (Erin Sturgis-Pascale, Alex Rhodeen, and Arlene DePino) said the mayor was on his game. But Alex Rhodeen pointed out that in the entire $445 million proposed budget, with so much substantially untouchable, such as the money from the state, there was really only $65 million to examine for cuts. That’s why he has called for growth in the Grand List and, he said, locking in good terms in labor negotiations. DePino, who described Monday’s passage of the senior property tax freeze as the greatest day in her six-year aldermanic career, said the entire budget was on the table for the BOA to examine. Both said they were looking forward to Thursday, when a public hearing on the budget is scheduled before the Board of Aldermen.

Before he left, Ginger told the mayor she was concerned because as a realtor in the city she is seeing landlords selling their multi-unit buildings. “They can’t pay the taxes,” she told the mayor.

“Look,” he rejoined, “I know it’s not easy. But it makes sense to me that a person, say, who is a millionaire, should pay more taxes than you or me. But for middle-class people, you should look for the state tax credit. Many people are eligible for this new measure the Democrats are pushing, which raises from $500 to $1,000 that you can take off your tax bill. That might help.”

Ginger seemed not too satisfied. The mayor told her, “The most important things I believe I can do for the middle class is make the city safe and provide good schools. These schools we build, in this neighborhood, Nathan Hale, and the Jepson School that is moving toward being finished, immediately attract lots of kids. We sent our kids to the public schools. These buildings are beautiful and we serve the kids. That’s the measure of the city.”

“My kids are at the Barnes/Woodward School,” she answered him, “and they get yelled at all the time by the kids and the teachers.”

They shook hands, and the mayor moved out with the budgetary entourage. The next stop for the community budget tour will be April 24 at St. Brendan’s Church, 455 Whalley Ave., at 6:30.