Gioiello: Lauretti Hurting Shelton With Tea Party Politics

Shelton Democratic Mayoral Candidate David Gioiello said Monday that Mayor Mark Lauretti is trying to make Shelton the teapot of the tea party” by telling department heads to limit the hours part-time employees work.

The mayor made the move in response to a looming mandate under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare,” that mandates employers provide health insurance to employees working 30 or more hours per week.

Gioiello said the move will hurt part-time employees and result in fewer services offered to residents.

Lauretti responded Monday by blaming the Affordable Care Act itself, adding that the city is just one of many employers taking similar steps to dodge aspects of the law.

The mayor said city services wouldn’t be hurt by the change.

What we’ll do is hire more people,” he said. That’s all we can do. You can’t buy healthcare for someone you’re paying $10,000 to. It defeats the purpose of part-time workers.”

Gioiello: Not The Way To Treat People’

Gioiello held a press conference on the steps of City Hall Monday to unveil his fiscal plan for the city.

But before doing so, he brought up a memo Lauretti recently sent to department heads instructing them not to let part-time employees work more than 29 hours per week.

This is keeping part-time people from being eligible to get (health) insurance through the city,” Gioiello said, charging that affected employees could see their pay cut by as much as 25 percent.

He also said that with employees working fewer hours, city services will suffer, especially at places like the Community Center, which he said relies on hard-working part-time employees.

It’s consistent with how he thinks of employees,” Gioiello said. It’s just not the way to treat people. In my administration we would control our medical costs, but I’m not going to classify and move people around that hurts them in the manner that the mayor is doing.

He’s trying to take Shelton and make it the teapot of the tea party, I think, which is quite unfortunate,” Gioiello said.

Lauretti: More People Should Drink Tea’

Lauretti responded to Gioiello’s criticisms Monday by saying the law itself is the problem.

Obamacare did that, not me,” Lauretti said. Every employer across the country is (limiting part-time employees’ hours).”

If you don’t do it, the costs of those part-time jobs increases exponentially,” Lauretti said.

Asked if he had any response to Gioiello’s teapot” line, the mayor said: More people should drink tea.”

Fiscal Policies

During his press conference Monday, Gioiello introduced former mayor Michael Pacowta and Board of Apportionment and Taxation member Wayne Bragg as the two people he will consult if elected to better manage the city’s finances.

I’ll have a lot to learn in a very short period of time, but I think I have two people who will be able to do that and work with me,” he said.

Article continues after the video.

Beyond introducing Pacowta and Bragg, Gioiello said he’ll reform the city’s management of its finances if elected.

The first of those reforms will entail the creation of a special reserve account to make the budgeting process more transparent.

The city has a reserve account, and those companies that rate us for bonding purposes expect the city to have a reserve account of about 5 percent. The city does that by mixing that in with the regular operating budget, which really clouds the issue,” Gioiello said.

Though legal, Gioiello said the way the city arranges its budget is not transparent to the taxpayers.”

That’s something that we want to change. We want to take this out of the shadows and bring it forward so that we have budgets for the different departments that truly reflect what the departments need to operate and spend,” he went on.

Bragg said that the city’s budgeting process creates confusion, and distributed a two-page point paper” (embedded at the end of this story) with an analysis of the city’s budget surpluses.

It makes it very, very difficult to understand how well a department is operating,” Bragg said of the way the city does business now. It’s not only confusing to the public, it’s confusing to the department heads.”

He also said that two Republican ex-chairmen of the Board of Apportionment and Taxation, Mark Holden and Chris Besescheck, endorsed the reserve account idea.

BOAT implemented the reserve account in the budget it passed to the Aldermen in March 2012, but Aldermen scotched the idea when they passed a final budget.

This is not something that we’re just discovering for the first time,” Bragg said.

Pacowta said the new budgeting method will also take away any suspicion of overtaxation.”

I know there’s a reputation in town that we have low taxes … but we could actually be charging the taxpayers too much,” Pacowta, who served as mayor from 1985 to 1991, said.

Lauretti, who has long lauded his record of yearly budget surpluses, said the creation of a special account defeats the purpose of being able to respond to things.”

If it’s in one line item, you have to reappropriate it,” Lauretti said, adding that the process would involve going to the tax board and then Aldermen, which would take up time in the event of an emergency need for money.

Gioiello said Monday that the city could keep a better eye on its finances with the changes he outlined.

Perhaps if we had had a more realistic budget the city would not have lost almost $1 million in the recent financial scandal that we’re trying to sort through,” he added, referring to the arrest this year of the city’s former assistant finance director, Sharon Scanlon.

Gioiello also said the city should have required Scanlon to file a surety bond with the town clerk.

Another critique: Gioiello said the city uses bonding too much to pay for things like fire trucks and police vehicles, and said he would set aside money each year in the budget to fund such purchases over time.

Lauretti declined to respond to several of the points Gioiello brought up Monday, saying he doesn’t feel he has to.

People know what they have in Mark Lauretti,” Lauretti said. Either they like it or they don’t like it. But what kind of shape are we in financially after all these years? I have a record. He has no record. He has a record of criticism, that’s it.”

Wayne Bragg Point Paper

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