Council Budget Passes After All; Mayor Vows Veto

The Hamden Legislative Council did pass an amended town budget after all. But Mayor Curt Leng said he will veto it.

Town Attorney Sue Gruen determined on Friday that the Legislative Council did in fast pass a budget.

That was in doubt. Her ruling caming 12 hours after the council concluded that it had accidentally failed to pass its amended budget because of a mistaken procedural vote by Councilwoman Athena Gary on a subsequent ordinance.

Yet that does not necessarily mean it will go into effect, as Mayor Curt Leng said Friday afternoon that he plans to veto it. The council would require a 2/3 majority to override the veto, and will likely not have the votes to do so.

“The Council budget was approved with an excessive tax increase that requires action to protect our homeowners,” Leng wrote in a statement. ​“Tripling taxes from what was recommended is not a reasoned and steady way to manage the Town’s finances.

“I will veto this budget and continue working hard to improve our Town and our finances incrementally, day by day. This is a responsible course of action and what our residents are counting on us to deliver.”

The operational budget of $236,866,474 that the council has passed would raise the mill rate to 49.99, 2.03 mills higher than the current budget of 47.96, and 1.26 mills higher than the mayor’s proposed 48.73 mill rate. The new budget takes effect July 1.

At 1 a.m. Friday, the council passed its amended budget 7 – 6 and then failed to approve an ordinance to adopt it. That happened because Gary thought she was voting on the mayor’s proposed budget, rather than the ordinance to set the mill rate for the council’s adopted budget. So the council concluded that the original budget proposed by Mayor Curt Leng would have to take effect instead of its amended version.

Further discussions, and legal research, ensued Friday. Attorney Gruen was tasked with ruling on whether or not the amended budget did in fact pass.

Gruen said she does not speak to the press. But Majority Leader Cory O’Brien reported on her finding: Gruen determined that the council should not have voted on the subsequent mill-rate ordinance at all because it was not on the agenda. According to the town charter, no items may be added to the agenda of a special meeting (which the Council meeting was).

O’Brien said that, had the ordinance passed, it could therefore be challenged. Since it failed, it must be passed at another time.

The town’s charter states that the town must pass the budget by the end of the day on May 17. It does not say that the council must set the mill rate or anything else at that time.

“At such time as the council adopts said budget, it may also at said time or such later date as the General Statutes may permit, fix the tax rate in mills,” the charter states. That means, said O’Brien, that the council still has time to pass everything that the ordinance included.

Had the vote been legitimate, O’Brien said, the ordinance still would not have invalidated the budget that the council had just passed because all it did was set the mill rate and other numbers that the town uses to administer its finances.

Because the council budget passed 7 – 6, overriding a veto will present a challenge. Council President Mick McGarry, who cast the decisive vote to approve the budget, said he was unsure how he would vote on the mayor’s veto.

“Increasing the mill rate precipitously is harmful to the town,” he said.

An earlier version of this story follows:

Budget Chaos In Hamden

After almost seven hours of deliberations, at nearly 1 a.m. Friday, members of the Hamden Legislative Council thought they had squeaked into passage a $236,866,474 budget for the new fiscal year — until one member got confused and cast a mistaken procedural vote.

As a result, the council failed to adopt their budget, suddenly putting the mayor’s original proposed budget into effect.

The council has spent months amending the budget that Hamden Mayor Curt Leng proposed in March. It has spent countless hours in deliberations, tweaking here and there.

Then members voted just before 1 a.m., 23 hours before the town charter requires it pass a budget.

The new budget itself for the year starting July 1 passed 7 – 6, with one abstention, in a drawn-out process that teetered on the edge of failing for about a minute until Council President Mick McGarry cast the decisive vote.

Some members passed on votingmultiple times to see what their colleagues would do. Voting to approve were Jody Clouse, Justin Farmer, Harry Gagliardi, Lauren Garrett, Brad Macdowall, Cory O’Brien, and Mick McGarry. Voting against the budget were Marjorie Bonadies, Michael Colaiacovo, John DeRosa, Jim Pascarella, Berita Rowe-Lewis, and Betty Wetmore. Athena Gary abstained.

The council members thought their work was basically done. All they had to do was pass an ordinance to adopt the budget and raise the mill rate to 49.99 — mostly a formality.

When the Clerk Kim Renta called out the council members’ names in a roll-call vote, all voted the same, except for one. Gary, who had abstained before, voted no, making the vote tie 7 – 7. A tie is a failure.

Council members leaned back in shock. The budget had passed, but the ordinance to adopt the budget had failed.

“Fourteen years, I never saw that. Ever,” said Colaiacovo.

Gary explained that she voted no on the ordinance out of confusion. She said she thought that second vote was on the mayor’s proposed budget, which she said she definitely did not favor. Had she known that she was voting on the ordinance to adopt the budget, she said she would have abstained again.

“We are sort of in uncharted territory here where we have approved the budget but not the enacting ordinances,” said McGarry. ​“I think it was just sort of human error.”

Nonetheless, he said, it means that Leng’s original proposed budget is now in effect. He said he would call the town attorney and the council attorney in the morning to ask how to proceed in such an unusual situation, and to see whether the mayor will truly try to put his budget into effect even though the vote happened in error.

The council cannot meet again to hold another vote because the council must adopt a budget by May 17 at midnight. In order to hold a special meeting, a notice must be posted at least 24 hours in advance.

Unless the town and council attorneys come to a different conclusion on Friday, it appears Hamden will adopt the $235,998,505 budget that Leng proposed back in March, which will raise the mill rate from 47.96 to 48.73.

As the chair of the Finance Committee, Pascarella said that he would introduce a few budget amendments before it goes into effect on July 1 to bring some of the changes that the council had voted on. Chief among them, he said, will be a motion to eliminate seven police positions that the mayor had proposed. Five were new, two are currently vacant. The mayor originally proposed making two of them school resource officers (SROs), a proposal that met with strong opposition from some community members. He later recommend that instead six of the officers be community police officers, and none SROs. Pascarella said his amendment would allocate the funds for those officers towards the state’s CMERS pension plan.

Some members of the council said that Leng’s budget will result in a definite deficit because of overly optimistic revenue projections and expense projections set too low.

“At the very least, we’re $13 million short,” said Farmer. ​“To be solvent this year, our mill rate needed to be 51.” It was either that, he said, or significant cuts to the budget, which did not manage to pass in the months of deliberations.

“Pushing Hamden to a 50 mill tax rate would have been harmful to families, seniors and the entire community,” wrote Leng in a 1 a.m. statement to the press. ​“Tonight the Council nearly approved a 3x higher tax increase than I proposed — something completely unacceptable. I was prepared to veto this budget to protect our residents.”

Bonadies, who is the council’s minority leader, said she voted no on the council’s amended budget because it raised taxes too much. ​“This particular year every single one of my constituents directed me not to raise the mill rate,” she said.

Pascarella said he voted no for a variety of reasons. One, he said, was the fact that the council had placed much of the police department’s overtime in the council’s emergency and contingency fund, which would force the police chief to come to the council periodically for transfers. He said he was also frustrated with the process. It was the first time he voted no on a budget, he said.

Garrett, on the other hand, said the council’s budget, though not perfect, was better than what the mayor had proposed.

“For All This Time, For All This Talk”

Over the course of the last few months, the council has adjusted revenue and expense lines to numbers that a consensus believed were more realistic. The council’s amendments had raised the mill rate by 1.26 over what the mayor had proposed. Most of that increase was the result of the council lowering revenue projections that many council members believed were too high and would leave the town with a deficit. The council also increased some expenditure lines that members thought were unrealistically low. It was unable to pass large enough cuts to keep the mill rate where the mayor had set it.

At the beginning of the meeting, McGarry introduced a motion that would lower the mill rate from 50.30, where the last deliberations session had left it. It involved counting around $1.14 million in Alliance District funds as a revenue in the town’s budget. Under the Alliance District program, the state gives extra funding directly to the Boards of Education of certain municipalities whose school districts need extra help. When the BOE passed its budget, it was counting on around $4.3 million in Alliance funds. The governor’s proposed budget later passed the Appropriations Committee with $5.4 million in alliance funding for Hamden, giving council members more confidence that the extra $1.14 million would come through. If the state did end up giving the Hamden BOE the extra $1.14 million, the BOE would then pay $1.14 million to the town. If the state did not end up giving that extra alliance funding , the town would take the hit.

McGarry’s motion originally failed. Later in the evening, however, it was reintroduced and passed, lowering the mill rate to 50.05.

Garrett then introduced a motion that lowered expenditures in a few departments, including two lines in the Fire Department. The motion passed, reducing the budget by around $200,000, bringing the mill rate to 49.99.

Gagliardi introduced a motion to deny the BOE the 2 percent increase that the mayor had allocated, and fund it at last year’s budgeted amount. The motion failed after Assistant Superintendent Chris Melillo explained that the BOE is strapped by contractual obligations and mounting special education costs, which is required by federal law, and that any cuts would come at a cost to students.

Throughout the evening, Macdowall tried and failed to pass spending cuts in order to lower the mill rate to a level that he thought would allow the budget to pass. He floated the idea, without fully supporting it, of cutting the finance director salary in half. (The town is currently in search of a finance director.) The motion failed.

He then introduced a motion to cut spending in all departments by 2 percent. Though he said he knew it would affect some departments more than others, he said it was a last-ditch effort to try to get to a budget that would pass. It would have cut the budget by $2.9 million. The mayor, he said, would then have to submit a series of interdepartmental transfers to cover up the holes. His colleagues did not appear to support it, so he suggested 2.5 percent of all departments except the BOE, because the council had just voted not to cut the BOE budget.

“What can people stomach?” he asked. ​“Because this budget is not going to pass.”

He tried 1 percent of all departments, and then 1 percent of all departments except the BOE. Finally, he tried .5 percent of every department except the BOE. It failed.

So, the $236,866,474 budget with a 49.99 mill rate went up for a final vote, and through error, passed and then failed, throwing out months of deliberations and hard-fought amendments.

Lynda Burke, who was one of the few members of the public to sit through the entire meeting, said she was very unhappy about the outcome. She had brought a beach chair to make the almost-seven-hours more comfortable.

“Absolutely nothing got done,” she said. ​“For all this time, for all this talk, we’re back to square one. We have an unrealistic budget… The citizens have not been served at all.”