City Hall department managers should have received a call from Mayor Anthony Staffieri’s office Tuesday morning saying something like this:
That budget request the tax board was talking about giving you? Take it back and make it at least 3.5 percent smaller.
“The budget is too high,” Staffieri said Friday, referring to department heads. “If they don’t want to make the cuts, we’ll make the cuts for them.”
City Hall was talking 5 percent Friday, but indicated they’d settle for 3.5 percent.
Staffieri is making the request after a marathon meeting of the Derby tax board that started 6:30 p.m. Friday (May 25) and ended at 12:11 a.m. Saturday (May 26).
The mayor and the tax board are scheduled to meet tonight (Tuesday, May 29) at 6:30 p.m. in City Hall to once again go over the city’s proposed spending plan.
The tax board — not the mayor or the Board of Aldermen — make the final decision on the Derby budget. They are scheduled to adopt a spending plan on either Wednesday (May 30) or Thursday (May 31).
Background
The Derby tax board is trying to finalize a budget for 2012 – 2013.
Right now there are two proposed budgets circulating in City Hall.
One budget was created by the city’s Board of Apportionment and Taxation (tax board) and totals $37,297,386 — and reflects the initial requests of department heads who were told Tuesday to cut their proposals.
The tax board adopted that budget as its preliminary budget earlier this month and hosted a public hearing on it.
The tax board mill rate — 36.6 mills.
The second budget was created by Mayor Anthony Staffieri and Phil Robertson, the mayor’s chief administrative assistant. That budget totals $36,691,746. It was made public May 23, two days after the tax board’s public hearing and on the day the tax board was scheduled to finalize a spending plan.
The mayor’s mill rate — 33.2 mills.
The rate the mayor and the tax board were looking at as of Friday — 34.6 mills.
Tension, Then Cookies
At Friday’s marathon meeting, the tax board, the mayor and Robertson tried to explain their budgets and find common ground on a spending plan for next year.
The meeting started with the tension and mood swings of a large Thanksgiving dinner with family.
Tax board chairman Jim Butler bickered with Staffieri. Staffieri told audience member/Democratic Registrar of Voters Louise Pitney to “be quiet.” Later, Staffieri brought out boxes of Girl Scouts cookies to share with the tax board.
During a public comment period, school president Ken Marcucio, Sr. spoke bluntly about why the schools need more money.
“Many of our students can’t read at the proper level. We are passing them from grade to grade. By the time they get to high school the failure rate is 20 to 25 percent,” Marcucio said. “It is ridiculous.”
“I’m retired. I’m on a fixed income,” Marcucio said. “I don’t want to pay more taxes. But we have to get together and do something. Otherwise, everything is going to fall apart.”
The Highlights
Butler went through the mayor’s proposed budget with Robertson, line by line, asking Robertson to explain how he arrived at numbers different than the tax board’s in some places.
The tax board and Robertson spent the largest chunk of time talking about the budgets for the Derby school district, the Derby Public Library and the Derby Police Department.
Robertson and the mayor want the library to use money from private endowments to lessen the burden on Derby taxpayers. The library board explained they are already doing that — and that the endowments have very strict rules attached to them regarding how they can be used.
Butler, the tax board chairman, took issue with the Police Department’s overtime number of $400,000. Elected officials and Derby Police Chief Gerald Narowski indicated the city is locked into a police union contract that has resulted in overtime costs that are too high. Management will attempt to address the issue when the contract comes up for negotiation — but that’s not until next year.
The School Budget
Robertson and the mayor were worlds apart from school officials when it came to the proposed Derby school budget.
The tax board, in its preliminary budget, allocated $15,969,000 for Derby schools.
The mayor’s budget allocates $15,547,984 for the schools — a zero percent increase over the current school budget.
The mayor and Robertson said the school district has a $400,000 surplus they can use for next year, plus an additional $280,000 shot in the arm the schools will receive from the state’s education reform initiative.
The state is giving extra money to back education reform programs at the state’s worst-performing schools, such as Derby.
Regarding the surplus, Derby Schools Superintendent Stephen Tracy said a chunk of the school district’s surplus will be returned to the city at the end of the school year. Some of the surplus is also being used to replace lockers in the school that date back to the Vietnam War.
Tracy said the surplus this year wasn’t expected — $100,000 of it came from the city, after the tax board voted at the last minute last year to pay health benefits for school employees and then took too much money from the district.
Click here for a column from Tracy about the proposed budget.
If Friday’s mega-meeting was a Thanksgiving meal, Tracy was the red-headed stepchild.
Tracy, Staffieri and Robertson debated about Connecticut’s education reform initiative.
The superintendent argued that the money for education reform isn’t supposed to be used as an excuse for the city to give less money to schools.
“Phil (Robertson) seems to be concerned that if you give us an adequate budget now and then we get this money from the state, we’ll have too much money,” Tracy said.
“But that’s the point,” the superintendent said. “The point is to have additional money to do things you were not already doing. To look at this as an opportunity to cut the budget to as low as a zero-percent increase … this was not put forward so cities could cut education spending.”
Watch the video below for more comments from the school superintendent:
Tracy also repeatedly pointed out that the only new spending in the mayor’s budget was on city services — $600,000 in new dollars for the city side of the budget, and zero dollars for the school district.
Robertson said about 50 percent of the increase on the city side of the budget was coming from the Police Department.
Tracy offered to split the difference — increase the school budget by $300,000 and the city budget by $300,000.
Staffieri was steadfast on his insistence that the schools didn’t need more money. Robertson was of the belief the school district’s surplus was indicative of over-taxing — taking money from taxpayers the school wasn’t using.
An informal poll of the tax board showed the majority does not want to give the school district $15,969,000 — even though that’s the number the tax board adopted in its preliminary budget.
Is This Legal?
Further complicating the issue for the school district — if the district trims 3.5 percent from its budget request, the Derby school budget could dip below the amount of money the city allocated last year.
That could get the city in trouble with the state’s minimum funding requirements. School officials were researching the issue Tuesday.
