New Haven Independent

Doyens, who lives in Westville, was one of about two dozen residents who attended a meeting with Mayor John DeStefano Tuesday night at St. Brendan’s Church on Whalley Avenue to learn more about the income and expense sides of the city’s budget - and how that relates to their ever-increasing property taxes.

DeStefano made a 35-minute PowerPoint presentation in which he broke down the budget to show which departments get the biggest pieces of the pie (education gets 39 percent, followed by police and fire at 15 percent each) and which have the biggest increases over last year. (The waste contract jumped 28 percent, energy and debt service 13 percent each). All the increases add up to a proposed budget 7 percent bigger than the current year’s. Click here for the entire presentation.

Little-known fact (at least to this reporter): just under half (49 percent) of the entire city budget comes from state aid (including 12 percent that comes from PILOT, or Payments in Lieu of Taxes from nonprofits); another 43 percent comes from property taxes.

DeStefano made the case that other costs — like gasoline — have increased much more over the 13-plus years he’s been mayor than have property taxes. That was cold comfort to people like Glenn Nelson (pictured) of Edgewood Avenue. He said before the meeting started that the budget is “excessive” and that property reassessment was done at the height of the real estate cycle, thereby sending many property owners an increase of several hundred dollars.

A woman sitting across from Nelson said that unless the mill rate is lowered, it will hurt current residents and the city overall. “People don’t want to move here because of that, and we could be in a real bad way,” she said.

The mayor made the case for his $445 million budget proposal by touting accomplishments such as the rebuilding of 24 of the city’s 50 schools (with many more in the works or on the drawing board) and the demolition of old low-income housing replaced with lower-density, mixed- income developments. He said these accomplishments greatly improved quality of life in the city and were funded largely from the state and federal budgets.

He said the city plans to increase its police force to 500 sworn officers, making it the largest police force in the state (though New Haven is not the state’s largest city). This is largely a response to the spike in murders last year, although he noted with a “knock on wood” that so far this year the city has experienced exactly zero murders.

Although the mayor had, at the start of his presentation, invited people to interrupt him with questions, nobody did. He got through all the charts with their mind-numbing dollar figures and percentages, and then again invited response from the audience.

Gary Doyens was ready. He’s a member of the ad hoc Citizens Review Committee, made up of homeowners around the city who have been dogging the mayor at his community budget meetings. “The spending in this city has escalated to where my eyes roll back in my head,” he said. Committee members have picked apart the budget and criticized components from the $37,000 for bottled water all the way to the big boost in the police department budget to hire all those new cops. Though he has two kids in Edgewood School (“We love it” he said after the meeting), his group also argued all the bells and whistles on the new schools are expensive and unnecessary.

Doyens said, “The mayor does a very good job of dancing on the head of a pin — he’s very knowledgeable about all the technical details of a budget. Where he falls woefully short is taking a pencil and an eraser to the budget requests of department heads.” DeStefano took issue with that assertion, saying, for example, school officials certainly did not get everything they asked for.

After the meeting, Doyens said, by way of example, “The idea is, if you’re trying to run a lean, mean city government, and city water is good enough for my family and the public schools, then it ought to be good enough for city employees.” He argued that a 10 percent reduction is very do-able, starting with the biggest chunks of the budget — schools and police and fire — and then going from there. “We have high expectations,” he added. “We’re passionate, but we’re reasonable.”

DeStefano (pictured) said that budget documents always reflect choices about where the money should go — or not. He’s defending the need for the money in order to make up for state and federal cuts, to maintain residents’ quality of life, and to provide services for the additional 5,000 residents who have moved into New Haven in the past five years, pushing the city’s population to 130,000 (he noted with a touch of pride). As it turns out, Gary Doyens is one of them, having moved here from Branford in 2003, looking for more racial diversity (his family is bi-racial) and a shorter commute to work for his wife.