What if the equations that dictate how Connecticut disseminates Covid dollars encourage segregation?
Stamford Mayor David Martin discussed how the state miscalculates diversity on this week’s episode of The Municipal Voice, a co-production of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and WNHH.
“I think the state isn’t doing what it should do in terms of its funding formulas,” Martin said.
While his city may look more affluent than other major cities in the state, it’s an illusion based on the formulas used, he argued. While nearly 60 percent of his students receive free- and reduced lunch, Stamford gets almost nothing to support them because they are a “so-called wealthy community,” he said.
(For context, 70 percent of New Haven students are eligible for free- or reduced lunch.)
For him, the reality is that Stamford has one of the most diverse populations in the state.
“The way we’ve cut this state into 169 different balkanized little cities, and the formulas we’re using, actually are penalizing the diverse cities within our state,” he said.
Martin’s evidence is in how the state divided up the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act dollars.
He pointed to Bridgeport and Fairfield. Bridgeport with a population of 150,000 and Fairfield with 60,000 received approximately $4.5 million and $500,000, respectively. The former is an example of a fairly homogeneous poor city, and the latter is an example of a homogeneous wealthy town. That’s $5 million dollars for 210,000 people.
But based on the equation, if you were to combine them into a diverse community of both wealthy and poor areas – a town he calls Bridgefield — they would get only $3 million.
“As separate homogeneous communities you get $5 million, but as the diverse community you only get $3 million. We complain that we’re the most segregated state in the country, but we’ve got formulas that are encouraging the segregation.”
Martin is not particularly in favor of regional government – there are some solutions that make sense to pool together, like highways.
“If the benefit goes out to everybody, shouldn’t the cost be spread out to everybody,” he said.
Reconfiguring those equations will not be easy, since they’ve been in place for so long – they are “part of the culture and the way funding works.”
Though he offered no precise equations to replace the outdated and outmoded ones, he offered a starting place for those who will take on that task.
“Invest in those places that are diverse, invest where the community has made a point of making certain that all of its schools have roughly equal mixture of Black and Brown and white, invest where your principles are, that’s what I want to see the state start doing.”
