Ansonia Democrats have been looking into the important details and spending trajectory of our city, past, present, and future. We have been sounding the alarm with regard to the unsustainable budgets coming out of Mayor Cassetti’s administration, which has increased city spending every year, borrowed tens of millions, and is purging the city’s savings account to the combined tune of over $9.1 million dollars. This borrowing and savings account spending is not in the name of economic development that would serve to potentially grow the city economically, but to pay for things like vehicles, roads and other standard operating budget items that are usually paid for with normal city revenue.
The savings account spending from Mayor Cassetti has totaled $5.1 million to date, and will rise to $9.1 million this year. To illustrate how significant the current $5.1 million in savings account spending is, if we didn’t have any money in the savings account to draw from, the city would need to raise its mill rate to 43.12 to meet Mayor Cassetti’s budget for 2016, a mill rate increase of 5.8 that would cost the average homeowner an additional $1,000 in taxes.
When you factor in the borrowing for non-police station related purchases of $6 million, this would drive our mill rate up to a staggering 55.81, costing the average homeowner an additional $2,258 in taxes. This enormous non-economic development spending that taxpayers are paying for has been masked through borrowing and savings account spending from Mayor Cassetti. What’s worse is that there has been no attempt by Mayor Cassetti to present a future where we do not continue to operate in this unsustainable fashion.
Something else very strange appeared when we were looking at the savings account balance (reserve fund). From 2013 to 2016, the budget shows the city’s savings account increased from $8.7 million to $13.5 million, an increase of $4.8 million. However in the same period the city spent $5 million from the saving account. Spending $5 million from the savings account and managing to increase the savings account by $4.8 million would require a $9.8 million investment into the savings account. So has the city invested $9.8 million into the savings account?
If they did it’s not in the budget, but what we do know is that the city sold tax liens for $1 million in 2015 and sold the cell tower rights at Nolan for $1.5 million in 2014, but that leaves us with $7.3 million unaccounted for in the budgets that we can’t reconcile. Ansonia Democrats are calling on Mayor Cassetti to help us and all taxpaying residents of Ansonia understand where the $7.3 million invested in the savings account reserve fund came from. This is a huge amount of money that is unaccounted for in the publicly available budgets, and we would all greatly appreciate the financial transparency. Additionally we are calling on Mayor Cassetti to start providing future projections of where his budgets will leave the city in five years if held constant. By our measure it would leave us headed for crippling tax increases and disastrous cuts to city services.
The taxpayers and businesses of this city deserve to know what your plan is to succeed in growing this city, with or without additional funding from the state, and we need to be fully prepared for either scenario.
This essay was authored by the Ansonia Democratic Town Committee.
