Not Hamden's Best Day ....

Not Hamden’s Best Day - Reflections on the Budget 2006/2007

By: Curt Leng, Finance Chairman

Last week, I voted against the 2006-2007 budget. I was one of three Council members to vote against the budget. While there are many reasons that I made the choice to oppose this budget, the main reason is because I think it burdens Hamden residents with a tax rate that they don’t deserve following a flawed Reval.

We worked hard as a Council to cut the Mayor’s initial budget proposal. This became even more difficult once we were informed that there was a $500,000 typographical error in the Finance Department’s budget, followed by the almost impossible exercise of cutting an additional $3,000,000 in revenue as a result of the failed State car tax proposal that was in our original budget proposal and lastly a $600,000 error caught one day before the budget vote. With over $4,000,000 to make up before the tax rate went down a penny – this year was nearly impossible.

After this year’s flawed revaluation of property, where property was overvalued by the tail end of the housing bubble, while most commercial property wasn’t increased to the proper level because the Reval was statistical instead of hands on, we leave our residential property owners to pay for the vast majority of our increase in the Town budget. We could have done better.

I want to make it clear that I am accusing anyone of not trying to improve this year’s situation – the Administration and my fellow Councilmembers - worked very hard and made many tough choices. This was the most difficult budget that I have seen in my decade of service to the Town. We faced incalculable fiscal “messes” that needed to be cleaned in numerous areas of Town government in order to put the Town back on the road to financial recovery. The Administration took the lead on this and the Council backed the plan 100%. All items that our independent auditors recommended for improved financial health were implemented.

Still, I feel we could have done more to help our residents.

Some Council members were exploring the idea of giving residents true relief in this difficult Reval year. Two ideas that I supported were;

1) A phasing in of the Revaluation over a 2-year period. This would have lessened the immediate sticker shock of massively increased taxes in one year and allowed families, especially our seniors and working class families to plan for the increases over a two-year period;

2) The other plan that I strongly advocated for right up until the day we voted on the budget was a progressive plan that would have provided all Town residents with a reduced mill rate. This plan would be implemented with a new and interesting taxation approach of approving two mill rates – one for motor vehicles and one for residential property. This split mill rate would have kept our car taxes the same as they are now – as they do not increase in a Reval year, and would have reduced the residential mill rate by over another mill.

This plan, along with the Council’s hard work, would have resulted in a 2+ mill reduction for all residential property. This is a plan that I would have proudly voted for – been proud to be part of. Unfortunately, we were not given the opportunity to enact it.

We were told on the day that we needed to vote on the budget that the Town was unable, I believe unwilling, to implement the improvements to our financial system for the two-tiered progressive tax – even though improvements to the system were already planned for this summer. There were 4 and ½ months to make the improvements.

Instead we only cut the mill rate by one mill. Because we didn’t implement progressive “outside of the box” plans, because we didn’t make deeper cuts to certain areas of the budget, such as overtime, new positions and some purchases, I voted against this budget.

In my opinion, we failed. We failed despite hard work and effort given by all. But in the end, we failed.

If you have ideas or comments about the budget, please contact me at councilmancurtleng@sbcglobal.net.

(In the coming weeks I will try to elaborate on where I believe we need to go from here. To be continued ….)