New Haven has three extra months to catch its breath as the state continues to try to pass a budget.
So said Mayor Toni Harp Sunday.
She announced that Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has agreed to protect New Haven from cutbacks he plans to make next month in state aid to local school districts if the legislature still hasn’t passed a budget.
The legislature failed to meet a July 1 deadline to pass the new fiscal year budget. Legislators have failed all summer to pass one. They’re now saying they hope to pass one in the coming month, but nobody’s sure.
So in the meantime Malloy announced that he will drastically cut the Educational Cost Sharing (ECS) dollars the state sends to most school districts if the legislature doesn’t pass a new budget by Oct. 1. He vowed to eliminate all ECS funding for 85 districts and slash the funding to 54 others. But he promised to protect the school budgets of the neediest cities.
Harp said she received a call from state budget chief Ben Barnes confirming that New Haven will receive all the education money it received last year.
Until receiving that call, Harp had officials planning for a possible sudden multimillion-dollar gap when school starts. She predicted the city could face a cash-flow crisis by the end of September if no budget is passed by then. (Read about that here.)
Harp announced the latest news about school funding during a mayoral debate Sunday afternoon at Varick Memorial AME Zion Church on Dixwell Avenue.
“It helps to have relationships with people” in Hartford, she said. She said the administration will continue planning “conservatively” for overall state budget cuts, and hold off on new contracts and new hires (except in the police and fire departments).
Ben Barnes confirmed to the Independent that he made the call to Harp and that the city will be shielded form education cuts and will receive the same amount it received last October. New Haven got $38.5 million at that time.
Marcus Paca, Harp’s opponent for the Democratic mayoral nomination, noted at Sunday’s debate the Malloy administration is offering that educational funding protection for all major cities, not just New Haven. He predicted that a “deficit looms” for the city given expected state cutbacks in overall aid.
Didn't Paca cost the city an enormous amount of money through his incompetence in his former position?? I remember something about that before he was fired. Please, correct me if I am wrong.