Thomas Breen photo
Finance Committee Chair and Westville Alder Adam Marchand, rising in support of the new $662.7M FY24 budget.
City of New Haven data
Assessor's office estimates of FY24 tax bill bumps.
Tax bills are heading up next fiscal year — even as the tax rate drops — thanks to the Board of Alders’ unanimous approval of a final budget that preserves the mayor’s top-line expenditure, revenue, and mill rate numbers.
Local legislators took that vote Monday night during a special meeting of the full Board of Alders. The meeting took place in person in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall.
All 25 alders who showed up voted in support of a $662.7 million general fund budget and 37.2 mill rate for Fiscal Year 2023 – 24 (FY24), which is set to start on July 1.
The final approved budget was nearly identical to the one that the Finance Committee endorsed earlier this month. It also kept intact just about all of the proposed $662.7 million budget that Mayor Justin Elicker first introduced on March 1, minus 25 of 34 proposed new city jobs.
Overall, the now-approved $662.7 million general fund budget marks a 4.66 percent increase above this fiscal year’s $633.1 million budget. Monday’s meeting and vote marked the culmination of more than two months of aldermanic hearings, workshops, and review of the mayor’s proposal.
Monday's Board of Alders meeting.
The alders stressed on Monday that they dropped two dozen of the mayor’s proposed new city jobs — which included an active transportation planner, three police sergeants, three police detectives, a Finance Department deputy purchasing agent, and two Health Department senior sanitarians — and OK’d higher salaries for existing workers through newly negotiated labor contracts, in a bid to get the city to fill its 100-plus current vacancies before hiring new workers.
This budget promotes “retention, as well as recruiting those that we need,” Board of Alders Majority Leader and Amity/Westville Alder Richard Furlow said. “We’re hopeful that with the increase in salaries, we can get some of these vacancies [filled] that are throughout these city departments.”
It’s important to fill positions first “rather than putting new people in,” agreed Quinnipiac Meadows Alder Gerald Antunes.
East Rock Alder Anna Festa lauded her colleagues, especially those on the Finance Committee, for compromising on which new positions to add — like a new parks caretaker — and which to cut.
“The board chose to not support most [new] positions, not because they may or may not be needed,” but instead because of the pressing need to fill existing vacancies, she said. “Just adding positions is not the only thing we need to look at to meet the needs of our residents.”
Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison rose to speak up in support of one such salary bump designed to fill a longstanding vacancy. She encouraged her colleagues to support raising the top city librarian’s salary to $145,000 to make that position more competitive as the city continues to look for a successor for John Jessen, who passed away from cancer a year ago. Maureen Sullivan as filled in as interim librarian since then.
“I ask my colleagues to support the amendment in ensuring that the new city librarian is paid in a way that is comparable to the work that they have to do, which is comparable to the size of the city” of New Haven, she said.
Furlow also threw his support behind the budget’s $8 million increase to the city’s public school system. “We have given a record amount to the Board of Education, which shows our commitment to our children,” he said Monday night. “It is our hope that the Board of Education will be discretionary in the use of these funds.”
Taxes To Rise As Reval Phases In
Hill Alder and Finance Vice-Chair Ron Hurt.
The mill rate — which translates to $1 owed for every $1,000 in assessed property value — will be dropping by 6.4 percent from its current rate of 39.75.
That doesn’t meant that tax bills will be dropping with it, however. Instead, the opposite is true.
That’s because the second-half of last year’s state-mandated citywide property revaluation will also be taking effect this fiscal year. The revaluation in total saw all taxable city property value increase by over 32 percent, to roughly $8.9 billion. Thanks to a two-year phase-in that alders signed off on last year, half of that increase took effect this fiscal year, and half will hit July 1. With the second half of the reval phase-in coming soon, even at the new lower mill rate of 37.2, property taxes will be going up for just about all property owners in town come July 1.
A chart provided to the Independent by the city assessor’s office on Monday estimates that the average single-family house will see an 8 percent increase to its tax bill, the average two-family a 15 percent hike, the average three-family 13 percent, and the average four-family 14 percent.
Hill Alder and Finance Committee Vice-Chair Ron Hurt said on Monday night that local tax revenue will be increasing by a total of $25.5 million in this new budget.
“This budget builds on the steady and significant progress we’re making as a city and I look forward to signing it into law,” Mayor Elicker stated in an email press release after Monday’s vote.
“It provides essential city services and programs to residents; it invests in key priority areas like education, affordable housing, public safety, and inclusive economic growth; and it continues to tackle the systemic budget challenges like underfunded pensions and overborrowing that have plagued our city for decades. It also lowers the property tax rate for homeowners for the second year in a row to help ease the increases associated with rising property values as part of the state-mandated property revaluation that occurred in 2022.”
Shafiq Abdussabur, one of three Democratic challengers vying to unseat fellow Democrat Elicker in his bid for a third two-year term as mayor this year, lamented yet another year of tax increases.
“Thank you to the Board of Alders for working hard to approve this budget,” Abdussabur wrote in an email message following the vote.
“That said, our taxpayers will see an increase in their tax bills from the phase-in from last year, while many families across the city are suffering under the burden of higher prices and stagnant wages. We are all feeling the repercussions of the way the mayor has led City Hall.”
He criticized Elicker for promising to “bring discipline to our spending three years ago, but instead, his administration oversaw a budget that has ballooned discretionary funding every year, all while providing fewer services to residents.”
In his own press release, Elicker described the city as in a “dramatically better financial situation than it was just a few short years ago” — with a more than doubling in state aid to $90 million per year, a $10 million annual increase in Yale’s contributions to city coffers, a $37 million local rainy-day fund balance, and a recent upgrade in the city’s bond rating to BBB+.
Majority Leader Furlow.
Hurt made clear Monday night, the 25 new-job cuts approved by the alders did not result in any net reduction of the budget’s top-line $662.7 million number.
That’s because, as first discussed during the last Finance Committee meeting, the mayor introduced a number of so-called “technical amendments” at the tail-end of the budget review process. Those amendments accounted for job title changes, scriveners’ errors, new positions inadvertently left out of the mayor’s original budget, and more than $5.3 million in salary increases tied to recently finalized and long-awaited contracts for members of three municipal unions, Locals 3144, 844, and 1303‑C.
In all, thanks to cuts elsewhere, the mayor’s technical amendments added $2.25 million to the budget. The changes endorsed by the Finance Committee earlier this month and approved by the full Board of Alders on Monday — including the reduction of 25 new positions — resulted in a $2.25 million drop in expenditures, thereby balancing out back to a $662.7 million total FY24 budget.
Click here to read the full new-job-cutting amendment endorsed by the Finance Committee and adopted by the Board of Alders on Monday. Click here to read a second amendment adopted by the alders on Monday, and introduced by Finance Committee Chair and Westville Alder Adam Marchand, that made a few additional personnel changes, including removing a park ranger position from the Youth & Recreation Department and adding a caretaker position to Parks & Public Works.
The alders absent from Monday’s final budget votes included Bella Vista’s Renee Haywood, Newhallville’s Devin Avshalom-Smith, West Hills/West Rock’s Honda Smith, and Fair Haven’s Ernie Santiago. There is not currently an alder for Upper Westville’s Ward 26, since Darryl Brackeen, Jr. resigned earlier this year. A contested special election to fill his empty seat is scheduled for May 30. Click here to read a previous article about some alders have missed many board meetings this term, in large part because of health and family reasons.
"Scoop & Toss" Amendment Tossed, Again
East Rock Alder Anna Festa.
While all 25 alders present voted in support of the general fund budget and mill rate, Festa cast the lone dissenting vote on the now-approved new two-year $55 million capital budget.
She did so after her latest annual failed bid to introduce a bit more sunlight, and popular oversight, over the next time New Haven decides whether to “scoop and toss” municipal debt.
As she did last year, Festa introduced a motion Monday night to update an obscure and buried section of the budget governing bond refundings. Ever since 2014, a small subcommittee helmed by aldermanic leadership and top city financial staff sign has had permission to sign off on bond refundings even if such a move would increase the city’s long-term debt. This has happened just once over the past decade, in 2018.
Festa moved on Monday to require that the full Board of Alders get to review and vote on such a restructuring of municipal debt results in a net increase borrowing costs for the city. This would allow the public to come and testify on the matter at a public hearing, and therefore make the whole process more “transparent.”
Ultimately, nearly all of her colleagues voted down the proposal in a voice vote.
“I am not in support of this amendment,” Furlow said before the vote. “It further increases the burden of city government and complicates its process. I feel that what was amended in 2014 was for the purpose of a better flow. My sense is: If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. It works as it is.”
Is the relatively higher increase in taxes for multi-family units mostly a result of those properties becoming more valuable (as rents skyrocket due to the lack of new construction in CT), or is it mostly a result of increasing property values in the neighborhoods near downtown (which are less likely to have single family homes compared to neighborhoods farther out)?