ZAK STONE PHOTO
If this year’s budget planning decisions seemed tough, just wait for next year’s. That was the message Mayor John DeStefano brought to Westville in the first stop on a citywide budget road show.
The true budget “crisis” comes in 2012, when the state deficit is scheduled to mushroom to more than ten times current levels, he said.
DeStefano delivered the message to a crowd of 35 Westville residents who gathered in the gym of Edgewood School Wednesday night. Attendees listened respectfully to the mayor’s remarks, although one mayoral critic drew some applause.
The city has been scrambling to fill a $38.6 million gap in next year’s budget, by raising property tax revenues, cutting expenses by 1.7 percent, and betting on future income streams from parking meters to earn some cash in the short term.
Yet 42 percent of the city’s budget still comes from the state, the mayor noted Wednesday night. With the state deficit scheduled to swell from $280 million in 2011 to $3 billion in 2012, the city will have to make “brutal decisions” next year when state funding decreases all around, DeStefano predicted. In part, that’s because this year’s state budget relies heavily on federal stimulus money that runs out next year.
Legislators at the state level “just want to get out of town right now,” said DeStefano, and are trying to solve short-term problems. Everyone understands that next year will be even tougher no matter what, he said, and would rather save the big decisions for then.
The mayor said that this reality was made clearer to him Wednesday when he traveled to Hartford to meet with Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez and Mayor Bill Finch of Bridgeport. The “Three Amigos,” as he called the cohort of mayors from the state’s largest cities, discussed the “structural imbalances that affect cities” as they try to come to terms with the “disconnect” between revenue generation and fixed costs, especially the enormous costs of compensating employees.
He said that at least “people understand that there cannot be economic recovery in Connecticut” without thriving urban areas. Unfortunately for the city, places that “look like New Haven are not a majority in the state.”
“It is going to be a period of sacrifice,” said the mayor. A year of “sucking up … There’s not a lot of great choices,” right now, he said.
His budget reflects that reality. He said that he could not justify more layoffs among city employees “in good conscience,” nor did he think that the public would “tolerate dramatic tax increased” or “dramatic service reductions,” like cutbacks on libraries, education, or fire department and policing.
ZAK STONE PHOTO
Mayoral critic Gary Doyens (pictured) suggested that cutting some services might be preferable to new hikes in property taxes. “I hear you talk about sacrifice, but I don’t see sacrifice,” said Doyens, who’s part of the New Haven Citizens Action Network. “Who would’ve ever thought that a middle-class family can’t live in New Haven” because the taxes are too high? he said.
His income has already dropped 30 percent, he said. If income taxes raise, there’s no way he’ll be able to replace his 11-year-old car, he said. He disagreed with the mayor’s assertion that cutting services citywide will “lead to a decrease in livability.” The crowd commended his remarks with a round of applause.
Doyens, who said he has attended budget meetings for seven years, said he was pleased by two aspects of the budget: its honesty and its length.
He said that in the past the mayor has been “heroically optimistic” about how much funding will come in from the state, while this year the mayor is taking a more realistic approach. The mayor himself said that he has adopted a “very pessimistic view” of how much promised money the state will actually turn over.
Doyens added that the budget was nearly “double” the number of pages this year, since City Hall added many more details than usual to the Forms 106, a section of the budget which provides a line by line itemization of expenditures.
“At least there’s transparency this year,” he said.
Thank you, Gary, for working on this and presenting your case as you did.
I agree completely--while I don't like cuts in services, if you hike taxes so that families can't afford to live here, you are talking about a real loss in livability versus our assumptions that people can't handle reduced street sweeping.
Is the mayor's office serious that reducing services will make this a less desired city versus an immense tax hike, when people already have lower income?
The mayor's office gave out incredibly irresponsible raises last summer. When I spoke to staff, they had the arrogance to say, "We didn't get a raise last year."
Guess what? No one I know did--no one--not a single person employed in private industry has gotten a raise this year, last year, or the year before.
How dare municipal employees, paid by tax revenues and not profits, think they deserve a raise more than people who work hard producing PROFIT for companies? People who GENERATE money for their communities are not getting raises. How dare the Mayor give raises to people who are not GENERATING money but instead USING money?
People in my ward have serious concerns about their future in New Haven. They have seen their incomes DROP whilst municipal employees incomes have RISEN. Now they hear their taxes are going up this year.
Where does that leave them, with the collapse of the housing market? They can't even sell their homes to get by.
This is an irresponsible and inappropriate direction. I eagerly await the mayor's written statement on Kerekes 66 million dollars document.
I still think that the new school construction program was a good idea, but horribly executed, with incredibly over-priced schools. Between this, hemorrhaging money into Tweed, not charging full taxes on commercial properties, hiring new employees for the city THIS and LAST year, giving raises to city employees last year, making budget projections based on PILOT funding we knew we wouldn't get, I don't understand what is happening at City Hall.