Web Surfers Invited To Dive Into City Budget

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.

Gore Vidal

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the canidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy--to be followed by a dictatorship."
― Alexander Fraser Tytler

Online budget? Welcome to the 21st Century, New Haven! Thank god for Hausladen.

"With the new website, Harp aims to calm some of the howls. Harp said the site could foster a "productive discussion" about a tax increase, by allowing people to "see what's driving the costs in the budget."

Allowing taxpayers to see what's driving costs is not a new concept. Previous budget introduced to the public were presented by the mayor in a narrative and graphic form in the budget and during neighborhood meeting presented by the Mayor.

This introduction represents yet another duplication of service, because graphs and charts have already been in the budget books for the five previous years mentioned in the pie charts.

She has just added another 2K to the expense side of the budget by hiring Silicon Valley's OpenGov.com, which has a $2,000 annual contract with the city.

What is missing then, as is now, is a balanced tax cutting approach which reflects accurate revenue estimates and sensible spending reductions that requires operating departments to produce more while receiving less. There is no logical graph or chart which can explain Harp's initial proposal to increase general fund positions by up to 10 new positions, as political payoffs, and moving another 5-8 positions out capital funds, into general funds, which are the major cost driver she attempts to allay taxpayer's fears by the introduction of this web site.

While Doug Hausladen is to be congratulated selling the idea of making the budget interactive online, it is still five hundred pages- online.

Nice try but no sale. Let's go straight to the "productive discussion" about a tax increase.

This is great! Intuitive and easy to use. Will the FY15 proposal become available in this format?

Flin flam...........don't need a web site..... Did they just run out of money to finish the plowing of the streets........?? A few streets in the Wooster Sq. area still need work.
All the nice words and graphs look nice but do you think we know what they mean!!! It looks like the taxes go up each year and the services are cut. TAX YALE AND THE OTHER NON-PROFITS........One more time TAX YALE....not me!!!!! I am on a fixed income. We got a 1 1/2 % increase on our SSA all of 38.00 per month. If the taxes go up $450.00 it will eat up that BIG increase..

We don't know what the state will give us for money this year.

Budget and Tax Increase Notes:

I find this underwhelming. It's basically a nicely designed, online excel chart generator. It gives one far less information than the 418 page online PDF on the FY13-14 budget. No narrative or explanation. Far less detail on how the money us actually spent. Nice for a 10,000 foot view, but that's not very useful for understanding a municipal budget. Tastes great, less filling. What's next?

Hausladen is all bells and whistles. Why was he focused on a superfluous budget site while he was executing the worst parking ban in recent memory? Why was there no over site from his superiors when he came up with the obviously ridiculous idea to promise to clear all of the trash routes, something obviously beyond public works ability, on a holiday week no less when no one clearly understood which day they should expect the plows? Then I get a ticket with a ridiculous URL on it that would send me to a site that gives me vague updates on snow emergencies, except neither the URL nor the sign up actually worked. But yes, please Hausladen, give us a website to see how this administration is mismanaging the money I paid the city to get my car back! Thanks so much!

I dont need a chartfull of colors to tell me which color will be hurt the most by higher taxes. I was one of the six people who went to all of last spring's budget hearings. We were all offered copies of the current budget (thick book). I learned there are 6 rich companies in town including Yale. They own most of the land and buildings. Of the 500 million dollar yearly budget, only 12 million came from Yale Corp.

Nuts and bolts problem solving Mr. Hausladen please. Tag, ticket and tow cars violating the bans and gumming up the plowing. And also tow away those cars in the same space for 72 hours or more. This was unacceptable.Master basic service delivery first before wonking out.

Can someone remind me why I didn't vote for Elicker? Oh yeah, Thanks AFSCME

The annual budget pie chart historical comparison is usually the first thing I go to and that's what this site represents but this site really goes one (very general) layer deeper into a budget breakdown. This could eventually be an effective tool if it quick jumps you to detailed portions of the actual budget.
If the tool stops here its a half hearted attempt to engage the public. If its eventually tied directly into the budget, it's a good idea. Most people don't know how to navigate that document.

Well, I guess I now know what people were working on instead of clearing the streets of snow.
How about this. Let's manage people and have them all work on what they are paid to do. Let's trim the budget. If that means there are a few less people, or less resources, or less maintenance in the short term so the upgrades that Mayor Harp said the city needs, then so be it. While it may be nice to have some pretty graphs, I do not need someone telling me that I can read a budgerigar because it's too confusing. Even though this is only $2000. every penny should be scrutinised in a time when there is a proposed tax increase.
Make no mistake here, I do not support any tax increase. Find savings to come up with the new things that need to be done. Work within the budget. Get people working on what their jobs are and do not allow people to work on other items until their departments are humming.

Oh I see. There is more detail in the third layer and beyond. You have to use fly out toolbar on the left from Expenses. Unfortunately each of the individual budget components (wages, benefits, supplies, etc.) gets lumped into one color graph instead of being portrayed as separate graph lines.

The city had a choice of either breaking these items out graphically or lumping them together; the choice of lumping them together really suggests the city is trying to blur the budget rather than clear it up for taxpayers.

Mayor Harp, thank you for all the pretty charts but we cannot withstand anymore tax hikes!

I stopped reading at taxes will rise. Are you kidding me! wasn't this election about how Mayor Harp will make the tough call on the budget? How much more tax money can they squeeze out of us. I'm still trying to catch up from the last one. This city has got to stop spending so much money. Please Stop

ONNA,

Ditto!

Toni Harp actually thinks that website will help the average Joe better understand why we need a tax hike? Pass me some Kool Aid.

posted by: heightster70 on February 27, 2014 6:40am

Can someone remind me why I didn't vote for Elicker? Oh yeah, Thanks AFSCME

Elicker would be doing the same thing.

3/5,

Not so. Elicker stated that we couldn't cut our way out of our deep debt problem but he promise to trim fat in City Hall. So far, Mayor Harp has shown zero sensitivity to spending, first announcing the re-institution of a mayors chauffeur, and then announcing redundant grant writing positions that seem solely for employing her campaign workers. I have low hopes for the future.

How is this less than awesome?

This cost 2K for a year's service, probably took an hour to gather the excel and send it to the vendor. Very easy for concerned people to get their feet wet and then dig in to the PDF, which was a huge, but recent, improvement in itself. ( Can we get a link to that PDF in the footer of the opengov pages? )

I'm by no means a Harp supporter, but I think the comments that boil down to, "the City should have been plowing streets instead of this" are pretty infantile. A City government should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time...all initiatives shouldn't cease every time there is a snowstorm.

I'm very happy to see year-by-year actual expenditures, able to drill down to department & division. While some posters may be advanced financial readers, others have found the huge 400+ page PDF of the budget quite daunting. I feel with a small expenditure of $2,000/year, New Haven has made the budgeting process more transparent. With $497 million worth of decisions to make, I believe this moves us a small step toward public accountability.

ON ANOTHER NOTE, I would like the City to expand the capacity of the emergency notification system to allow for BOA, BOE and commission meeting notifications on an opt-in basis. Another small cost measure that would greatly help transparency.

Two Questions:

1) Didn't Harp look at the Finances before she was elected?

2)Before asking for more money from the taxpayers, why not first every department head to come up with 1% in cuts/cost savings? That's what the private sector does to survive.

The city charter has a recall provision. It needs signatures that number 20 percent of the the number that voted in the last election, which would be 4,000-- quite achievable. Then there's a recall election. Yea or nay on the incumbent.

Unfortunately, if the mayor is recalled, there isn't an election for a new mayor. The president of the alders steps in for the rest of the term.

But a recall would send a message.

Paul, I suspect you are more financially sophisticated than many NH taxpayers (I would guess that you and your brother have had many interesting conversations on tax policy over the years.) While this is not a substitute for reading the budget, it is an accessible primer. As we used to say back in the day, different strokes for different folks.

The only thing these charts for 'dummies' tell the Serf of New Haven is taxes will go up for ever and ever until someone turns those graph lines flat or down.

New Haven is on an unsustainable course towards bankruptcy. But until they get there, they will roll every lower to middle class citizen for every last nickel while the municipal union club and the Yale freeloader gang get richer and richer.

Because the lines on the computer screen point upward that makes it alright? This suddenly makes it acceptable? This is our proof because the almighty supercomputer spreadsheet says so?

And as far as the traffic tsar organizing this dog and pony show for the serfs during the worst shovel out in memory. Outrageous.
That alone is gross negligence of duty and shows mismanagement and incompetence at the highest levels.

Lets get the petition for recall rolling, lets organize and picket, lets start running someone for Mayor now.

I like Doug Hausladen, but how does he rate $90,000 in salary?

Jim Travers was deputy director of transportation for 2.5 years and then acting director for 7 months, when HE got $90k in his first year in 2011.

What experience does Hausladen, who as it was reported on the campaign trail, was working multiple part-time jobs before this, actually have to validate the same salary as Travers?

If that reporting was correct, Hausladen would have probably jumped at the job if it paid $70k, let alone ninety-thousand dollars! That's a $20,000 savings that New Haven could have made right there.

It's unreasonable not to lower that starting salary based on how little actual, on-th-job experience that Hausladen has in this kind of role. If he was still an alderman, and someone else with the same lack of credentials got paid the same money, he would be opposed to it. Now that he's the one with his name on the check, though, I guess it's okay.

They could have brought him in at $70k and said he'd get $5k a year raises until he hit the $90k as long as he was running the department well. But they didn't.

I'm disappointed in both the City of New Haven and Doug on this one. Very disappointed.