The City of Ansonia has been underfunding its pension plans for the school secretary and custodian unions, officials said June 17.
The shortfall is somewhere in the region of $4 million to $6 million, City Comptroller William Nimons, who is also the president of the Board of Education, told Aldermen June 17.
Nimons and other Republican members of Mayor David Cassetti’s administration blamed the past administration of Democratic Mayor James Della Volpe for “kicking the can down the road” when it comes to funding the pension plan.
But Democratic Alderman Edward Adamowski said the finger-pointing was political gamesmanship from officials who knew or should have known about the shortfall years ago.
Aldermen voted June 17 to lease a city-owned cell tower on Wakelee Avenue near Nolan Field for a cash injection of roughly $1.45 million with an eye toward putting some of the money toward the underfunded pension plan.
But just how the city plans to close the rest of the gap is up in the air.
‘They Just Ignored It’
Nimons briefed the Board of Aldermen on the shortfall during a special meeting of the board June 17, where he said the pension fund for custodians and secretaries had not been properly funded.
Click the play button on the video above to see a portion of the discussion.
“It used to be overfunded, and then all of a sudden … it became unfunded, and that’s when they stopped putting any money in it,” he said. “They just ignored it.”
Nimons said in a subsequent interview the shortfall would affect 31 to 35 school secretaries and custodians. He said he’s trying to pin down an exact number.
He said he could only ballpark the shortfall at between $4 million to $6 million because he’s waiting for a new audit of the city’s funds. The city’s total budget, including the school district, is roughly $63.3 million.
Mayor David Cassetti said he learned about the shortfall soon after taking office last December.
“We found out right away,” he said. “A couple of the employees of the Board of Ed had approached me. I asked them ‘Why didn’t you talk about this the last 14 years and now it’s in our lap?’ They said they didn’t know about it until October, supposedly.”
Marini said the shortfall “had always existed, but apparently was seldom talked about.”
“It’s been in the audit,” Nimons added.
The most recent audit of the city’s finances shows a pattern of sporadic contributions to the pension plan over 15 years.
The city contributed nothing to the plan from June 2001 to June 2004. The city did the same from June 2008 through June 2013.
In the past 16 years, the audit states, the city underfunded the plan by a total of $1.6 million, according to the figures.
Article continues after a page from the audit.
Union Reaction
Lida Princevalli, a secretary at the high school who is president of Ansonia Federation of Education Personnel Local 3543, the union to which school secretaries and media professionals belong, said last week she’s confident the city is dealing with the problem.
“Since we’ve been meeting with the mayor and Attorney Marini and Mr. Nimons and everything, I can’t speak for anyone else, but they’re addressing it and we appreciate that,” Princevalli said.
Princevalli said another member of the union approached her late last year raising concerns about the pension, after which she met with city officials who have been tackling the issue.
Cell Tower Lease
During the June 17 Aldermen’s meeting, Nimons said the city could get the pension plan moving in the right direction by approving a lease of a cell tower on Wakelee Avenue near Nolan Field.
The deal — to Unison, a company that specializes in leasing cell sites from municipalities — calls for a $1.45 million lump sum payment to Ansonia for a 40-year lease.
The city currently gets around $9,000 in monthly income from the site.
The Unison deal came about through a request for proposals from the Della Volpe administration, Nimons and Marini said.
The Aldermen, after discussing the deal in an executive session for about an hour, approved the deal by a 7 – 1 vote at the June 17 meeting without any public discussion.
The closed-door executive session discussion was legal under the Freedom of Information Act, which allows public agencies to discuss real estate deals out of public view.
The deal has not yet closed — Marini is reviewing the city’s contract with Unison — but if and when it does, Nimons envisions at least some of the $1.45 million to go toward the city’s pension obligations.
The money will go first into the city’s general fund, with a view to the Aldermen and the Board of Apportionment and Taxation deciding how to distribute it.
Democratic Alderman: This Isn’t A Surprise
The lone dissenter in the June 17 Aldermen’s vote on the cell tower deal was the First Ward’s Edward Adamowski, the only member of the board’s five-person Democratic minority present.
“I just thought that maybe we could keep the money that (the cell tower) generated and put that into the fund balance (annually),” Adamowski said.
Beyond that, he accused Republicans of “hanging (Democrats) out to dry” by finger-pointing regarding the funding of the pension plan.
He accused Republicans of political gamesmanship, pointing out that Marini is a former Alderman who sat with him on the board’s finance subcommittee, and Nimons served on the school board for years.
He said the pension funding problem wasn’t a secret in previous years’ budget discussions. If Republicans didn’t know about the pension shortfall years ago, they weren’t paying attention very well, Adamowski said.
“But we were the majority and they’re naturally going to blame us,” he said.
“They knew what they were doing all along,” Adamowski said, suggesting Marini is trying to make political hay out of the issue. “He’s not a stupid man, he knows what he’s doing. He could sell sand in the desert.”
The Democrat also pointed out that the Cassetti administration raised the pension concerns only after the budget for 2014 – 2015 was finalized — with a small tax break delivered largely by counting $550,000 of the city’s fund balance toward the revenue side of the spending plan.
If the problem is so urgent, he wondered, why is it only coming up now when the Cassetti administration has known about it for eight months?
“They knew when the budget was set and you could just tell by the way they did the budget this year that they knew it,” Adamowski said.
The Valley Indy left a message Tuesday (July 1) with former Mayor James Della Volpe seeking comment on the issue.
Republican Alderman: Pension Plan?!
Daniel Evans, a Republican Alderman representing the Seventh Ward, raised long-term concerns over the city’s obligations at the June 17 meeting.
He said it’s ridiculous for the city to offer pensions to its employees in 2014.
Of course, he said, if the city promised employees pensions, it has to fulfill those promises.
“We are obligated to pay this money, we have to find a way to pay it,” he said. “But how do we stop this going forward?”
He said the people funding the retirements of city employees don’t have anything near the same benefits.
“These pensions have got to stop,” Evans said. “The people that are paying this don’t have (the money).”
