Town Manager Ron Van Winkle presented the proposed 2011-2012 fiscal year budget to the Town Council complete with a proposed increase of 5.8% over the current budget. That is equivalent to approximately $308 in additional taxes to a $250,000 home assessed at 70 percent. Van Winkle claimed “we are across the deep abyss” known as the recession.
Personally, I'd like to know what he's smokin' because there is no real recovery yet. The housing sector is a mess nationwide, businesses continue to file for bankruptcy and companies are leaving CT, among other indicators. Oh but wait, West Hartford MUST be doing OK since so many residents are on the government payroll. They actually don't live in the real world called the private sector.
The state of CT has an enormous budget gap to fill, and the economy is not looking too terribly good if you dig through the numbers. So exactly where is this recovery Van Winkle speaks of? and why is West Hartford raising taxes over 5% when every other community is coming in with 0% or very very minimal increases?
West Hartford has wage increases in the amount of $1,631,935. Seventy-five percent of which is attributed to pay raises for public safety employees as a result of contract re-negotiations. It is truly amazing that these employees scored yet another increase in such a dire economy. Chalk another one up for the poor negotiating skills of Town Management.
Then there is the MDC. The Metropolitan Water District raised its tax on the town by a whopping 7.3 percent! We are literally flushing that money down a toilet.
West Hartford's largest source of revenue is property taxes (88.3%). Now the town keeps crowing about how wonderful their tax collection rate has been. It seems that as long as about 98.9 percent of the people pay their taxes that this gives the town carte blanche to keep raising taxes. Perhaps we will see no increases once people stop paying (i.e. are unable to pay) their taxes. For the record, A one tenth change in the collection rate equates to $198,682 in revenue.
As far as the education lobby goes, they are praying to Saint Dannel to keep Education Cost Sharing level so they can continue to reap their cool $16 million in revenue for education (12% percent of the Board of Education budget). And if Saint Dannel comes through with an increase in sales tax to 6.35%, West Hartford would get $236,000. Note to Town Council and BOE: Just keep raising those taxes. To hell with reining in spending!
In order to finance the proposed budget, an increase in current year property tax revenue of $9,745,077 or 5.2% is required. A mill rate of 40.14 is needed to finance the remaining property tax revenue, representing an increase of 1.76 mills or 4.6% from the current mill rate.
Come to the budget forum in Town Hall on April 6th.
.. and while entering the building - you may want to check out the pictures of the proposed new entryway into Town Hall, complete with a cool new revolving door! You see, we can waste money on stupid things like new entryways because your taxes are just going to go up to pay for them.
Article: West Hartford News
Budget in Brief - published by the Town of West Hartford
