With the legislative session set to start next week, Connecticut towns and cities say it’s high time to help lower property taxes in a meaningful way.
Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, who serves as president of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, joined the “Municipal Voice, “a co-production of CCM and WNHH 103.5 FM, to talk about the legislative proposals set by towns and cities that they think the bovernor and General Assembly should act on in 2022.
“Reducing overreliance on the property tax as the sole source of local government funding has been a longstanding priority for CCM,” Bronin said. “We are one of the most reliant on property taxes in the country.”
As part of the legislative proposals, towns and cities are asking the state to consider municipal revenue diversification and providing incentives for municipalities to expand shared and regional services.
For cities like Hartford and others, Bronin says that there is a need-capacity gap. This term refers to situations in which municipalities simply do not have enough capacity through taxable property to meet the needs of the community, while others have more than enough. This can create vast disparities in tax rates and outcomes between different communities.
In Hartford, there’s more than a fair share of non-taxable properties – state property, colleges, and hospitals – that even fully funding programs like the Payments in Lieu of Taxes would not overcome these gaps.
This is true also of education.
As part of the suite of proposals from towns and cities, they believe that the funding of the Special Education Excess Cost Formula should not be capped.
Bronin said while this formula could use an update for the 21st century, small towns and big cities are hamstrung by insufficient state funding and volatility. Stating that these students with special needs deserve to have their needs met, but just one student can alter the budget in a small town, while there may be a concentration of need in a city.
The mayor also spoke to proposals on Transit Oriented Development, Opioid Ombudsman, and the Transportation Climate Initiative. He argued that Connecticut is in a position to make big changes in a lot of areas that will help the everyday citizens of Connecticut by creating housing, stemming the opioid epidemic, and future proofing our infrastructure.
The will is there to make many of these changes, and on more than one occasion the mayor applauded efforts from the state to help with these issues. For municipalities, it’s a matter of having that voice at the capitol where decisions are being made.
“There are so many ways in which this pandemic has changed the game at the local level and raised the stakes,” Mayor Bronin said, “and we’re all dealing with unprecedented challenges, but we also have some unprecedented opportunities.”
1 of 2.
Mayor Bronin is not entirely transparent in his analysis, or at least he chooses not to criticize his own party's economic policies (no surprise there). Until recently, "Spend and Tax" (in that order) under the guise of better public services was the mantra of Connecticut's Democrats (for many older career politicians, it still is, no matter the expense).
Unbalanced political policy lead to decades of bad economic policy, creating massive debts \ future obligations ($90+ billion), making us less competitive for the private sector.
It is paramount that average citizens understand why taxes and the cost of living got so high? It was not an accident. Our state government was spending far more than it could tax. So regardless of need, you can only provide with what you have - common sense.
If Mayor Bronin now says the "need-capacity gap" can't be met, even at 100% of funding PILOT, then that means the city of Hartford can't provide sustainable services anymore. Usually, that means bankruptcy, but the state has guaranteed Hartford's future debts, so it is up to MARB to limit all non-essential services and gauge who is using them so they can be reduced.
This approach may seem cold-hearted, and it is, but only in the short term.