I want to thank the members of the Board of Apportionment for their hard work in setting our city budget.
Like most other local communities, Ansonia faced very difficult choices in preparing this year’s budget. As the nation and state recover from the devastation of the 2008 economic collapse, we see that local tax bases and revenues cannot keep up with pent up demand for services and salaries.
Therefore, tough choices must be made.
Here in Ansonia, we made a judgment that a 1.4 mill tax increase – the single largest of any during my time as Mayor – represented the upper limit of what our citizens could handle. I am not happy at all with this increase but I understand fully that increasing educational funding by more than $600,000 while maintaining the ability of our police department to continue its very successful anti-crime initiative – is critical to our city’s future.
If we could have given more money to the police and schools, we would have. Their work is absolutely critical.
Now, that the department budgets have been set, it is up to those departments to make the tough and right choices to make their departments work most effectively.
With respect to the Board of Education, I want to restate my praise for the good work that they have done in raising the performance of our students and successfully removing Ansonia from the state Priority list. Unfortunately, that success is penalized rather than rewarded by state policy with a significant loss in state priority school funding.
This important fact must be kept in mind – local funding for education went up while state funding came down.
We will continue to do the best we can at the local level to support our schools and our police within the limits of our taxpayers’ ability.
James Della Volpe, a Democrat, is the mayor of Ansonia.
