Markeshia Ricks Photo
Alder Evette Hamilton reads the measure aloud before Tuesday night’s vote.
Top Harp administration employees will get to keep their raises, but it will cost some city departments thousands in operating dollars.
A vote Tuesday night by the Board of Alders made that official.
The alders voted to approve a plan that will pull back nearly half a million dollars from city departments in an effort to minimize the burden of a new 11 percent property tax increase. Alders voted unanimously in a roll call vote Tuesday during their regular bimonthly meeting at City Hall to reduce the funding it had previously approved for 16 city departments in the current budget, which went into effect July 1, by a total of $483,172.
That figure equals the amount of money that the mayor gave to 36 non-unionized department heads and aides who had not received raises in as many as seven years. The raises were revealed only after the alders had approved the new fiscal year’s budget. (Read more about how alders of the Finance Committee arrived at this decision here.)
The money is to be transferred to a new line item in the budget dedicated to reducing the city’s property mill rate, which was raised in the new budget from 36.68 to 42.98. (One mill corresponds to $1 in taxes for every $1,000 of assessed taxable real estate. Since the average New Haven home is assessed at just under $140,000, according to the 2016 grand list reassessment, the 11 percent tax increase raised property taxes for the average city homeowner by around $600.)
The amount cut from the various departments includes $133,124 from the finance department’s Office of Technology Maintenance Agreements, $78,786 from Human Resources other contractual, $22,500 from Corporation Counsel other contractual services, and a combined $52,260 from Economic Development.
The Harp administration has maintained that the mayor was within her right to give out the raises, which took effect on June 11, 2018, with retroactive pay effective July 1, 2017, through June 8, 2018. The money for the raises came from the $1.8 million contract reserve line item included in the Fiscal 2018 – 19 (FY19) budget that the alders approved at the end of May. Alders accused City Hall of sneaking through controversial raises without public debate at a time of a controversial tax hike.
Esther Armmand, who serves as the mayor’s liaison to the alders, said Tuesday night there is still concern that alders took this step after the process of setting a budget for the year had already ended. She also raised concerns that this step might be outside the standards of good budgeting practices and might have trouble withstanding the scrutiny of an audit.
“There is a question of how to implement this after the fact,” she said after the meeting. “But we will work with the Board of Alders leadership to work this out.”
Board President Tyisha Walker-Myers said that the expectation is that Acting Budget Director Michael Gormany will begin adjusting budgets to reflect the alders’ decision and that those adjustments should show up in his reports starting next month.
“They did what they did and we’re doing what we’re doing, and we’ll see what happens,” Walker-Myers said. “I think we were clear on our intent and what we were doing.”
The ordinance amendment would lower the average homeowner’s tax bill by an average of $10.