New Haven Independent

Only a small crowd turned out Thursday night for the meeting, DeStefano’s neighborhood road show to explain his proposed $466 million city budget for the coming fiscal year, which begins July 1. That proposal’s gap widened another close to $10 million Wednesday. (That story here.)

Those who did show up to St. Aedan’s Church on Fountain Street included Denys Turner (pictured above with the mayor), an academic immigrant from Cambridge, England. He’s pleased to be living on Cleveland Road. But he is appalled at his property tax increase. By the end of the evening the mayor’s skill at explaining the budget turned him into a new fan. DeStefano also made some significant pronouncements.

The Budget Picture

The mayor clarified that the current gap between his proposed revenue and expenditures is $15 million, after the state legislature appears unlikely to boost by $10 million the amount the city receives from the Payment in Lieu of Taxes program for tax-exempt property. (DeStefano had counted on a $10 million increase in drawing up the budget.) Restored by the state’s Appropriations Committee (pending approval by the full legislature and governor) were $2 million in funds for Early Reading Success that provides literacy coaches and paraprofessionals.

The mayor was also counting on $6 million for the sale of the city’s solid waste transfer authority that may not appear because of an amendment added by aldermen this week. The aldermen approved Hill Alderman Jorge Perez’s amendment to insert a sunset clause requiring any potential sale of the operation to be subject to review within three years.

The city administration had counted on revenue from the sale not just for the next fiscal year’s budget, but last year’s too, before the aldermen got a chance to review the plan, let alone approve it. Then City Hall urged the aldermen to rush approval of the project to fill budget holes. (Click here to read about that.)

“I think Jorge Perez and the Board of Aldermen made a very serious, tragic mistake, and I would urge them to reconsider,” he told the sparse crowd, which included Westville Alderwoman Ina Silverman, and the mayor’s budget braintrust, Larry Rusconi, and Controller Mark Pietrosimone. The mayor’s numbers men worry this will disable the sale of bonds from a future authority and undermine confidence in it, or block efforts to lock contractors into long-term contracts.

Hard Times For Homeowners

But the mayor’s strongest pronouncement was to say that he is less concerned about closing the budget gap —- “We’ll figure out how to do that in the coming weeks and months ” — and more about the effect of a spreading mortgage crisis on the city.

Foreclosures rose 80 percent in New Haven this past year. They’re supposed to continue climbing this year amid a nationwide credit crisis. The mayor formed a task force to explore ways to tackle the problem.

“I’m dramatically more worried about mortgage problems,” he said, “and how they might filter down to areas where we have put in a lot of development effort.”

To that end he said that next week he would announce a citywide foreclosure initiative. Although he wouldn’t reveal details, he said, “The idea is to keep people in their homes, to provide counseling. I’m extremely worried that the very areas of the city where we have put the most effort into community development are going to be hardest hit. If we have abandonment and foreclosures, we’ll likely have tax collection issues,” he said. “And even if out of state banks, for example, do the foreclosing and pay the taxes, they often don’t care about the properties or maintain them.”

Click here for a previous story in which his task force members elaborated.

DeStefano recalled a time when the city had 1,500 vacant buildings. “We spent enormous sums boarding up and then re-boarding up vacant buildings, whole blocks of them. We do not want to allow this to happen.”

Next week, the mayor said, he will hold a press conference to announce that for the first quarter of the year burglaries and larcenies are up. More serious crimes like murder are pretty much at last year’s levels.

“We could cut some of the new cops, and save money that way,” he said, “and did deliberate internally, but the feeling was that public safety was paramount, that the people spoke, especially here in Westville, that they wanted the cops, and they’ll have them.”

So where do we cut? Libraries? No. “And then some people tell us to take on the public employees. I happen to feel the average public employee is not overcompensated. Let’s not make them the piñata.”

The mayor provided no more specifics than to strike his familiar themes that the state did not have a sense of urgency about property tax reform or about all the tax water the city carries for the rest of the state — for example, through the homeless-shelter population in New Haven.

The mayor also announced that his future budgets would not rely on one-time budget-closing items, such as the transfer station sale.

Eventually, and invariably at these gatherings someone asks about their property re-evaluation. This time it was Denys Turner, who teaches medieval religious studies at Yale. As a Brit, he said, he expected the tax burden to be lighter here than in Europe, but it was not the case. His taxes more or less doubled in a year on their house on Cleveland Road, he said. More troubling: He didn’t see any comparable increase in services.

“I don’t mind taxes. I rather like it in fact,” said Turner, who enjoys bus-commuting to Yale with his senior discount “for a weekly pass of four-dollars-twenty. But I want to see what I get. I don’t want to rub it in, but it feels like taxation without representation. If I’m going to pay so much, I’d rather pay income tax.”

“The way to do that,” said the mayor, “is to fully fund PILOT, think about issue of equity, as to why, for example, many Connecticut companies like G.E. don’t pay any corporate income tax, and then the property tax might be reduced.”

Turner said the mayor gave good answers, but he and his wife are concerned that their neighbors got some tax reductions and they, being new and not knowing the revaluation appeal process, did not. Mayoral Chief of Staff Sean Matteson talked to them about such matters. The Turners left impressed that the mayor would spend so much time with them.

Of course, there were not a whole lot of other members of the public to spend time with. Tim Holahan, who recently ran unsuccessfully for a Democratic ward committee co-chairmanship, said he was shocked at the small turn-out.

“I don’t know,” said the mayor, “we emailed Ina’s [Silverman’s] list, and it’s a long one.”

Still the mayor’s take on the state’s role in the city’s woes — from an excess of the paroled and probationed arriving without a plan or a buck to the draconian dependence on the property tax — Holahan found persuasive.

“Look,” the mayor said, as he and his staff shut down Saint Aedan’s parish hall lights and packed up the doughnuts, “we can’t be naïve. The state budget funding is collapsing, and that raises new concerns, and for the first time in my 14 years as mayor I’ve seen an increase in vacant buildings.”

Despite the serious budget challenges and the minuscule turnout, you couldn’t help but feel that the mayor left the parish hall with an optimistic gait. Or maybe he was just happy the road show was finished.

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