Seymour First Selectman Kurt Miller has been doing some thinking.
After it took four referendums for residents to approve town and school budgets for 2012 – 2013 — with voters rejecting the spending plans until they were trimmed to increases of about 2 percent — he’s concluded that’s the number “palatable” to voters, and is asking department heads and commissions in town to think the same way.
To that end, Miller presented a “preliminary” 2013 – 2014 budget to the Board of Finance Tuesday that would increase town spending about 2 percent.
The preliminary budget is subject to some very big ifs — like whether it’s remotely feasible to expect the biggest chunk of the spending plan, the $30 million school budget, over which Miller has no control, to rise at the same 2‑percent clip. If that happens, taxes would go up somewhere “in the neighborhood” of .5 to .6 mills.
It is very early in the annual town and school budget cycle.
The plan itself is still very much a work in progress — the numbers Miller presented Tuesday are basically targets for town departments and boards to aim for when formulating their budget requests, which are due back by Jan. 15.
If a commission or department feels they need more than Miller would be willing to recommend, they can make a case directly to the Board of Finance, which has the ultimate say over what the town will ask residents to approve at referendum.
Miller’s plan envisions restoring the police department’s community and school resource officers, as well as its emergency services unit, among other initiatives.
Miller stressed in an interview at Town Hall Tuesday that the plan is tentative, especially with regard to things like state funding for schools. The state is still in the process of getting its fiscal house house in order, so towns have no idea how much money they’ll be receiving in aid.
The town’s current budget totals $51,558,192, of which:
- $15,947,873 is spent on town operations,
- $30,398,026 is spent on schools, and
- $4,890,293 services the town’s debt.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Miller presented a spending plan with a bottom line of $52,562,499, with:
- $16,322,144 for town operations, up 2.35 percent
- $30,998,062 penciled in for schools, up 1.97 percent, and
- $4,967,293 on debt service, up 1.57 percent.
Schools
Of course, Miller can’t dictate the school budget — the Board of Education controls it. But he can, and has, asked them to try to come up with a budget request that he thinks will be palatable to voters.
Yashu Putorti, the chairman of the Board of Education, said Tuesday that their budget process has just begun as well.
The school board will meet twice next month to hammer out a plan, he said, but the numbers will be tight.
He said Superintendent Christine Syriac on Monday told school board members a “level services” budget for next year that would maintain programs where they are now would take up all of the increase Miller envisions.
The “level services” plan would increase spending 2.2 percent year over year — and that’s without any new initiatives or areas of concern the school board wants to address.
“The level services budget is already higher than what Kurt wants to begin with,” Putorti said. “We’re going to work pretty hard to keep those numbers as low as we possibly can.”
Syriac will bring a proposal to the school board next month that its members will use as a starting point, he said.
“She’s going to add some stuff that she thinks she really has to have in the school system, and then we’ll work from there,” Putorti said.
School board member Kristen Harmeling said Tuesday that it’s “too early to say” whether Miller’s 2 percent request is workable.
“We just haven’t had the conversation,” she said. “There could be things that we’re comfortable taking out. There might not be.”
She said the board will try to strike a balance between what the schools need and what voters will approve at referendum.
“It’s always a balancing act,” Harmeling said.
Another school board member, Fred Stanek, also said it’s too early to know whether a 2 percent figure would be feasible.
Stanek said the board can’t put off addressing its needs forever, and said he’d like to see a proposal he made last year that was eventually cut — adding two teaching positions to improve fine arts at the high school and middle school — taken up this year.
“How much that will cost I don’t know,” he said, adding that it wouldn’t necessarily mean an increase — the board could cut money elsewhere and shift it to other needs.
“I understand very well it’s important to keep taxes down,” he said. “I feel the same way, too.”
‘Challenging’ Process
School officials won’t be the only ones having to get creative to keep an increase below 2 percent — Miller said doing the same on the town side of the budget is proving to be “challenging.”
“We are handcuffed with some very difficult contracts that do not allow us any flexibility,” Miller said.
The town has just begun negotiations to renew several of those contracts — with the unions representing public works employees, and clerks and administrators at Town Hall — representing about 50 to 60 percent of the town operations work force, he said.
With the numbers for major-ticket items like those union members’ salaries and benefits essentially up in the air, Miller said he estimated those numbers with figures he thinks would be reasonable to expect as a result of give-and-take negotiations — and that he won’t reveal publicly.
By comparison, things he does have sole discretion over are relatively minor in scope, and while he said his main concern was maintaining services expected by residents, he does plan some new initiatives.
“I’m going to continue to push the roads and technology,” he said. “I think those are two places that we have fallen woefully behind. Those were priorities areas last year and will be priority areas this year.”
To that end, he’s recommending a $30,000 increase for computer support at Town Hall and $25,000 for a new website that would allow more functionality, like paying taxes online.
The website redesign is currently out for bid, so the number is a “placeholder” figure, he said.
As for roads, he’s requesting $125,000, up from $75,000 in this year’s budget, with a view to adding to the number every year until it eventually rises to $1 million annually.
Police Additions, Downtown Attendant, Fireworks?!
Miller also wants to bring back certain services to the Police Department, which he said has been “devastated” in recent years by budget cuts that resulted in the department cutting its community police officer, school resource officer, and Emergency Services Unit (the SWAT team).
“The budget that I’m going to be putting forward has additional hirings in the police department to allow these positions to come back, as well as the reformation of the ESU unit,” Miller said. “Which in light of what happened last week I think we can all agree is something we need to strongly consider.”
Miller outlined his goals for the police department to the town’s Board of Police Commissioners last week — the night before the horrific school shooting in Newtown — but said Tuesday he feels “even stronger about them now.”
Like the school board, the police commissioners formulate a budget request on their own, but they seemed receptive to Miller’s input at their meeting. He asked them to try for a bottom line of about $3.8 million, up from the department’s current budget of about $3.6 million.
“It sounds like you have a lot in there that will definitely bring this department forward and put us back on the road of being proactive,” Lucy McConologue, the commission’s chairwoman, said.
“I think it’s a very workable plan,” police commissioner John Popik said.
Another possible addition Miller outlined: the creation of a part-time, “stipend-type” job for a person to maintain the downtown area for a few hours a day, primarily in the spring and summer.
Miller has about $5,000 allotted in his budget for the position.
“If the merchants are going to make that type of investment in the businesses downtown, I think it’s important the town make a similar investment to make sure we’re doing all that we can to make that area clean and safe,” he said, noting that the proposal falls in line with a “Downtown Action Plan” presented to selectmen in September.
Miller said he also wants to create more ideas and events that would bring residents together as a community.
“The more people come together the better,” he said, floating a Memorial Day fireworks display as one possibility, though he quickly added that the idea is a “pie in the sky” notion at this point.
Reaction
Finance board members didn’t have much to say about Miller’s proposal Tuesday, mainly because they had only gotten copies of it the day before.
Board member Dave Bitso commended Miller for following through on his idea of coming up with a preliminary budget giving the town’s different departments and boards a target to aim for in formulating their spending plans.
With recent changes to the town Charter speeding up the budget process, Miller said he wanted to start putting a plan on paper as early as possible.
“Seymour’s always had a bottom-up process with the budget, where the departments themselves are dictating what they want to spend,” Miller said. “Any business obviously has a top-down approach, where the CEO or CFO will say ‘We have X amount of dollars to spend this year, this is what’s allocated to your department, work within it.’”
“We can’t quite run it specifically that way because of the Charter and the Board of Finance, but I feel it’s my responsibility as the CEO to go to my department heads and say ‘I want you to try to work within this budget,’” he went on.
He hopes that by doing so — and by highlighting accomplishments the town has already made — residents will realize town officials are trying to economize and will then vote yes on the spending plan at referendum.
“I don’t think anybody wants to pay more in taxes,” he said. “But I think if people had a better understanding of what their tax dollars are paying for, and if they could actually see the results — if they see better maintained parks, if they see paved roads, if they see a clean downtown — they’re going to feel they’re getting value for their money.”
Bitso said during Tuesday’s meeting that he hopes next year’s budget will move the town forward.
“We can’t keep on cutting to the bone,” he said. “Last year was a difficult year and we had to make some tough decisions. We can’t continue to do that every year.”
Board Chairman Trish Danka said she agreed, but pointed out the decision will be up to residents at referendum.
“It’s not up to only the seven of us,” she said.
Danka said after the meeting that the Board of Finance will review Miller’s proposals in more detail at meetings next month.
