Aldermen should start paying attention to how the schools spend millions of dollars. And they should tie spending to performance.
Those are two of the “blue-ribbon” suggestions for better budgeting from a citizens panel charged with thinking long-term about New Haven government’s financial woes.
The Blue Ribbon Budget Review Panel was created in October to advise aldermen on the FY09-10 budget. Aldermen approved a budget on May 26, but the panel’s report wasn’t due until June 30, the last day before the fiscal year begins. The group, comprised of seven citizens, two aldermen and three city officials, submitted its final report to aldermen Tuesday: Click here to read it. (Pictured: Tim Holahan, who headed the panel.)
After reviewing the city’s budget for nine months, the panel concluded that aldermen’s job isn’t easy. But they called on them to “demand accountability” from city government, as well as open up the budgeting process to facilitate more citizen participation.
Reached Thursday, aldermanic President Carl Goldfield vowed to get to work on one of the report’s recommendations, performance-based budgeting.
School Reform
Education ranked high on the group’s list of financial challenges for the city, whose budget is heavily reliant on property tax and state aid, in a town with a high percentage of non-taxable land.
“Education is the major area where performance and investment are just wildly out of whack,” said Tim Holahan, who chaired the blue ribbon group.
“We spend more on education than on anything else, yet our students’ performance consistently ranks among the lowest in the state,” the report notes.
Aldermen approved a $464 million general fund budget for next year, including $173 million, or 37 percent of spending, for the schools.
But when you look at total money the city spends, including capital projects (borrowed money) and special funds (grants), education spending is much higher, the panel concluded. Factoring in school construction costs, special funds projects and personnel benefits, the group calculated that the city spends 50 to 60 percent of total expenditures on education.
Panelists recognized aldermen’s limited power in controlling the most major expenses: Aldermen approve school board funding and union contracts solely through an up or down vote.
“Taken together, education spending and other contractual personnel costs represent the overwhelming majority of the money New Haven spends every year, and the Board of Aldermen has virtually no control over how that money is spent,” reads the report.
Holahan said while aldermen may not be able to control the details, they should take on a more active oversight role.
The blue ribbon group called for aldermen to set up an Aldermanic Education Reform Oversight Panel of nine citizens who would give oversight to the school system’s new reform initiative.
“We really ought to see what’s spent on each school, how much is spent per student at each school — these are all key parts of school reform,” said Holahan. “You’ve got to understand where the money’s going, or you can’t understand what you’re getting for what you’re spending.”
He suggested that the school system articulate spending goals and priorities, and report back on progress along those lines.
“We don’t see that approach in government,” especially not in education spending, said Holahan. “There’s no perceived need to change.”
He said there is a big need to change the transparency and oversight of school spending, especially on the verge of a new wave of reforms that may bring a new wave of costs with them.
“We’re not proving that we’re getting the best bang for our bucks” in education, Holahan said. He said he was certain that that view is shared by the citizens on the panel, if not by the aldermen and city budget officials, he said.
The panel included Newhallville Alderman Charles Blango, who’s a truancy officer for the school system. He’s one of three aldermen, along with Michelle Edmonds-Sepulveda and Katrina Jones, who regularly abstain from school-related budget votes because they work for the Board of Ed. (Blango couldn’t be reached for this story.)
“I don’t think a Board of Ed employee can effectively oversee” education funding, said Holahan. He called the conflict “unseemly” but not a major problem.
Reached Thursday, Jones (pictured) was asked if aldermen should take a more active role in overseeing education spending.
“I don’t know if I should comment on it at all, because I am an employee of the Board of Education,” said Jones. “I really should remain neutral.”
“There have been times when I felt that it does sort of put a restraint on me, as far as voicing my opinion as a member of the board,” she conceded.
“It really prevents my ability as a board member to be active in the decisions that concern the Board of Ed,” she said. “But what do you do. You keep saying, I need to abstain.”
Alderman Goldfield pointed out that by charter, aldermen aren’t set up to have line-by-line control of the school board’s budget. The city has a mayorally appointed school board that determines the details of school spending. Aldermen simply vote yes or no to the final budget figure. And state law dictates that the city must fund education to a minimum level, or risk losing funding.
Goldfield did not advocate taking on the extra oversight role.
“We can do that now,” he said. “The Board of Education holds hearings on its budget. They’re open to the public. There’s the opportunity for input.”
“The fact of the matter is that we don’t have line-item discretion over how that money is spent,” he said. “It would be a whole new world for us to take on that role.”
“We try to give our input over how the money’s spent,” he said, “but ultimately they don’t have to listen to our input.”
A Performance-Based Pledge
However, Goldfield was encouraging of another recommendation the panel made, to shift to more transparent method of budgeting.
Holahan endorsed a so-called performance-based, or results-based budgeting that would direct city departments to articulate spending priorities, set goals, and measure achievement according to those goals.
Aldermen resolved to pursue this method in 2007, but the effort never got off the ground.
The idea was to restructuring the way the budget’s written to a format where departmental efficiency becomes more transparent. For example, the parks department budget would be broken down by services, so aldermen could see exactly how much was spent on tree trimming, and how many trees were trimmed, and adjust resources accordingly, instead of just copying the budget from the year before.
Asked about the effort Thursday, Goldfield resolved to get back on the task.
“I have to be honest and say that we probably should get back to it, sit down with [budget director] Larry [Rusconi] and [Controller] Mark [Pietrosimone] and see if we can get back to that type of budgeting,” he said. Part of the problem, said Goldfield, was that that scale of reform seemed huge.
Thursday, Goldfield said he intends to push for initial reforms, starting with restructuring the budgets in a couple departments, such as public works or parks.
“That’s what I’m gong to do,” he said. “It’s time to move forward on this.”
Transparency
To create more accountability, the panel calls for making budget documents easier for citizens to read, and creating a more transparent sign-up process for giving testimony at public hearings.
Goldfield said he welcomes any effort to create more transparency in government.
The panel also recommends that in the next round of contract negotiations, aldermen should push the city to shift from a defined benefit to a defined contribution pension plan for new employees. (Click here to read about some aldermen’s work on the topic).
Aldermen should make it an “urgent priority” to shift ownership of Tweed-New Haven Airport from the city to the state, the Blue Ribbon Group also concludes. Click here for a past story on the group’s views on Tweed.
To empower aldermen at the budgeting table, the group calls for the city to pay for aldermen to attend up to two classes per year in accounting or finance, as well as give aldermen access to outside financial consultants with no connection to the city.
Once again, Tweed Airport is the "whipping boy" in the city's quest for "efficient" government. The irony here is that other jurisdictions have airport projects totaling into the hundreds of millions of dollars while New Haven's Board of Aldermen wrestles with cutting Tweed's operating budget to below $500,000. Not surprisingly, Tweed-hater David Cameron is part of this "blue-ribbon" panel ("pink ribbon" should be more like it). These are the very same people who favor the New Haven-Springfield rail line, a project which the state's own Department of Transportation predicts an operating deficeit of $7 million a year, in the misguided belief that folks will board a train in New Haven and make 8 stops before arriving at the Windsor Locks station to board a shuttle bus to the terminal. There's nothing wrong with Tweed that some navigational fine-tuning (clear approach zones) couldn't solve. A state takeover is NOT the answer.