Mayor Slifka's Drop In The Bucket For A Burning Budget

West Hartford Mayor Scott Slifka decided to make an announcement the day before the West Hartford budget referendum to "immediately cancel or delay $20 million in routine work on schools, parks and streets" in order to save some tax dollars. He claims this is because of the anticipation of less funding from the state for next year. Nevermind the $615,000 PILOT grant shortfall between what we thought we'd get for this budget and what we actually got. The Mayor didn't see, or didn't want to see, the handwriting on the wall along with those who already have. Even as far back as when Mark Sinatro sat on the Town Council and warned about what was going on in the financial markets, the Mayor and his gang turned a deaf ear. They just kept spending and bonding. Where was this decision to halt or delay these projects last year?

The pre-referendum move by the Mayor, claims to save taxpayers a total of about $2.5 million in 2010 and 2011, even though it won't affect the current budget which residents will be voting on tomorrow. (But he just wanted to show the public that he was "doing something" about our tax plight right before a referendum)

The Hartford Courant reported:

The town borrows against the sale of bonds to pay for public works projects. By not bonding the $20 million, the town avoids paying interest on that money. Slifka didn't have calculations for the savings beyond 2011, but it would be several million dollars more.

The council's six Democrats and three Republicans are to vote on the action Oct. 14. Minority Leader Leon Davidoff said Friday it "absolutely makes sense to defer these projects until the market settles down. This has been a bad time for a lot of people."

A $2.5 million tax savings is a drop in the bucket, but it's a start. It looks like the Mayor is finally facing some stark realities. Most people recognized long ago that funding from the State was going to get scarcer, and that we were pretty much on our own. Our State delegation (Senate and House representation) have been ineffective in getting us meaningful State funding, and year after year our community has been short shrifted, especially in ECS funding.

"We're on our own," he [Mayor Slifka] said, referring to expected cuts in state aid, including a reduction in reimbursements on school construction projects next year. "We're going to have to see what residents want to do. The community may not be able to afford the current level of services."

The news is that "we've been on our own" for quite some time now, as evidenced by the return of money on our State tax dollar. For all the money that West Hartford residents send to Hartford in the form of State taxes, we get very little back.

Nevermind the current level of services, the community is not able to afford,and sustain, the current level of employee compensation is more like what the picture looks like! Residents in town have long been talking about the issue of sustainability of these town budgets, but our elected leaders were just as satisfied to continue taxing and spending and very freely compensating Town employees, both union and non-union. Even though the Town Manager was requested to talk to union heads earlier this year to seek concessions, the result was that they were not at all interested.

"That wasn't going to happen," Louis Glanz, head of the firefighters union, said Friday. "We wouldn't reopen unless there was a dire financial situation — a bankruptcy or a takeover like Waterbury was facing. When we negotiate, we give up things and the town gives up things, and we hold each other to those terms."

It is too bad that these union heads feel that they would wait until they put us in dire straits, before they would help the town prevent a financial crisis from happening in the first place.

As West Hartford works through "negotiated contracts" as we speak, they better get the message that the unions will have to take much less or we will be forced to do with less of their employees, that is if the Mayor and his gang have the stomach to do some very tough dealing on the behalf of the people that elected them to office. Otherwise, we will see the loss of many other Town programs and services at the expense of salaries and benefits, because we simply can no longer sustain the types of budget increases that we have seen in the past bunch of years.

While the Mayor could be commended for this announcement, it seems like it's too little too late and certainly a pre-referendum move to make West Hartford voters more at ease with the current 6% budget increase.