The Board of Education and Town Council hosted the second of two budget hearings last night. It can be seen on West Hartford Cable TV's website on demand.
TOWH watched the proceedings and hopes to present you with a helpful recap.
It was not the usual public hearing format as the first public hearing was. This public hearing was presented in a very different format in that there was dialogue allowed and a microphone handed around for comment. There was a presentation in the beginning by the Mayor and the BOE Chairman and then the Town Manager.
It was revealed that the bargaining units in town have all come to the table and have offered some concessions - although it was not made clear what those were entirely, other than relinquishing wage increases for this coming year. That was a welcome announcement by the Town Manager.
The public comment opened with a concise presentation by resident Robert Sisk who spoke about the problem of benefits expenses and the need to make some significant changes to that.
Boris Kantor talked about the decline of school scores and rankings in conjunction with raising school expenses and taxes. He offered to share his research finding with the BOE. He doesn't believe that the declining quality of education can be fixed by just throwing more money at it.
After chastising BOE Chair Terry Schmitt for misrepresenting recent events (and even called him dishonorable), West Hartford Educators Association leader Dave Dippolino claimed that he, and not the State Union (CEA) made the meeting negotiation decisions and although the teachers union representatives skipped the meeting (due to Dippolino's health) they were supposed to have with the Town last Friday, they claim that they will be picking up negotiations this coming Monday. He claimed that his union offered $600,000 of cost saving measures including health insurance savings, and heard nothing back from the town. He said the WHEA is supporting the superintendents budget. Terry Schmitt said he would meet anywhere, anytime, and any place to reach some solutions.
There was actually much discussion about the education budget and teachers salaries and Open Choice students. Schmitt said that if every bargaining unit gave concessions, then every single job could be saved and they could come in with a zero increase education budget. Minority leader Leon Davidoff said the town is looking for wage freezes from everyone, for one year, in order to save services and help bridge the deficits the town is facing.
There was a recognition of federal stimulus money available to the town but nothing immediately, and much of it has lots of strings attached and targeted to specific programs not to be used to offset general fund expenditures.
The Taxpayers Association members were there, and Ms. Aron spoke about the amount of union dues paid to WHEA, $80 a month per teacher, and suggested that instead of opening up contracts that the withheld union dues paid to the union by the Town be used to offset possible layoffs to save jobs and services since the total paid into the WHEA union is $677,000 a year. The amount of all union dues for all bargaining units is over a million dollars withheld from salaries and collected by the town and paid to the union. Terry Schmitt then defended the WHEA and a speechless Dave Dippolino responded by saying that the education budget increases every year and always has. He attacked WHTA members by claiming they had lots of money and live in million dollar homes. The Mayor and Terry Schmitt quickly moved to diffuse a possible verbal scuffle.
Moving right along.
People also spoke about value of education, changes in education and not wanting to cut certain services. WHTA president George Kennedy said that adding money to the budget and raising taxes is not the solution to better education performance. Mr. Kennedy also mentioned that WHEA head, Dave Dippolino, had visited a WHTA meeting last yearsayinghe was a teacher in town, and admitted at that meeting that there was a lot of waste in the school budget. Mr. Dippolino did not dispute that at the hearing and said that was true; there is waste in the system. Kennedy suggested that we need more business people on the Town Council and Board of Education and that he is calling for a due diligence audit on the Education budget. He wants to eliminate tenure and reform binding arbitration and reminded everyone about how our test scores and rankings have dropped despite how much more money we seem to spend. The Mayor blamed the declines on changes in demographics and that our teachers face bigger education challenges.
Tom Devine asked - why should teachers give concessions of no salary increases for a promise of no layoffs and giving up what they just negotiated for when WHTA could force a referendum and possibly be looking for even more cuts which might result in the loss of jobs anyway? Terry Schmitt said it would be foolish for concessions to be yanked away by a referendum and he then talked about possible teacher concessions with a "poison pill" clause which would say that if a referendum on the budget came about then all bets on those concessions would be off. Schmitt said that he doesn't want to jeopardize teacher salaries "for nothing", and that if a "zero increased education spending budget" wasn't enough for the WHTA, then the teachers current negotiated contract should remain in place, otherwise the teachers should make the concessions to save their jobs and produce "no increase spending in the budget".
John Hardy was looking for some cuts based on a document that he produced with many suggestions after going through the education budget line by line and seeking efficiencies.
Councilman Tim Brennan spoke about the energy savings initiatives of the town.
Other speakers called for working together and being open to some new ideas and also talked about demographic and comparative issues. John Joyce spoke about some suggestions. One interesting idea was to have one sports team between Hall and Conard for each gender for each sport, as well as early graduation of students in high school.
Councilman Joe Visconti offered this factoid: 375 children are absent every day from West Hartford schools which is the equivalent to an elementary school a day. Unfilled classrooms and buses certainly cost us.
Seems as if there were some interesting comments and ideas floated and things for the Town to consider between now and April 23rd when they vote on the budget. Hopefully some further reasonable reductions canbe made, and workable agreements can be reached between the bargaining units, the town and the taxpayers.
One thing is for certain: we have a great town filled with people who care and a Town management willing to work to bring everyone together to solve our fiscal problems.
2 WH Responses:
One thing is for certain: we have a great town filled with people who care and a Town management willing to work to bring everyone together to solve our fiscal problems.
I actually agree with ToWH about something.
I hadn't gotten around to sending you a copy but thanks for posting my presentation from the other night.
Perhaps I should explain the slides as they fail to communicate the whole message without the accompanying text.
The Expense Categories slide is intended to explain that the Town and BOE budgets, when combined, can be broken into these four categories of expense. The first three are expenditures made within the community to provide goods and services to the community. The fourth - benefits - is generally paid outside the community (Hartford, Folsom CA, Florida, etc) and is not related to the provision of goods or services to the community.
The next slide shows the 2010 budget as it was at the start of the meeting Thursday evening with about $700k in reductions in capital spending and operating expenses, a projected $1.6M increase in wages and a projected $2.6M increase in benefits, broken out as shown. It is important to note that the increase in employee healthcare, which everyone faces, is a relatively small amount of the total benefit increase.
With Mr. Van Winkle's announcement of wage concessions on the Town side, the wage increase can be reduced by up to $1.2M which results in wages, operating expenses and capital expenditures netting out to $0. The $2.6M increase in benefits remains.
The next slide is an update of the projection I presented last year and shows the projected increase in all four categories as well as the total budget from 2008 to 2013. Note that benefits will continue to rise at double or triple the rate of the other elements of the budget.
The next slide displays the "average" property tax increase over the same period. As has been often stated before, some will see property tax increases lower than this while others will see property tax increases double, or more, than that shown. The good news is that the reductions in capital expenses, wages and operating expenses made in the past year have reduced the 5 year average increase from 44% to 33%.
It should be pointed out that if the BOE and Town are able to reduce the budget increase to $0, as hoped, the reduction will not come in benefits. Indeed, the reduction will come in services, wages, headcount or some combination of these to offset the $2.6M increase in benefits. Regardless of what is sacrificed this year, benefits will increase even more next year, the year after that and so on until the Town and BOE dramatically change the benefit packages offered to employees - benefits which are no longer found in the private sector because they are unaffordable and unsustainable.
The last slide merely highlights that WH is not alone in facing these benefit issues. The situation described in the Courant article exists in WH, as well. Something like 15% of our 92 firefighters make in excess of $100,000/year and will receive taxpayer-funded defined-benefit pensions based on this income for the rest of their lives.
Post a Comment