Laura Glesby photo
Finance Chair Marchand: Budget balances optimism, restraint.
A housing agency focused on inspections, a separate parks department, a designated affordable housing development officer, and a 38.5 mill rate.
Those changes and others are coming to New Haven in the 2024 – 25 fiscal year, by way of a new budget passed by alders on Tuesday night.
The budget, which takes effect on July 1, allows for $679,104,165 in general fund expenses — slightly lower than the $680.4 million that Mayor Justin Elicker had proposed in March, though a 2.66 percent increase from the current general fund budget of $662.7 million.
The mill rate, meanwhile, will rise from 37.2 to 38.5, or by 3.49 percent, accounting for the expanded budget as well as expected fluctuations in state, Yale, and fixed asset sale revenue. The mayor’s originally proposed budget called for a mill rate of 38.68. (The mill rate translates to $1 in local taxes owed for every $1,000 in assessed real estate value.)
The final budget also preserves the mayor’s proposal to splice “Parks and Public Works” into separate city departments, reversing a 2020 merger of the teams that steward city parks and streets, as well as a proposal to refocus the Livable City Initiative (LCI) department on anti-blight and housing code enforcement and not affordable housing development.
Of the 27 alders present at Tuesday’s special meeting in the Aldermanic Chamber on the second floor of City Hall, all but West Rock/West Hills Alder Honda Smith voted to pass the budget.
During the meeting, Finance Committee Chair and Westville Alder Adam Marchand said that the new budget had been crafted around an “optimistic” vision of New Haven, though he said his committee exercised “restraint” in denying 12 of the mayor’s proposed new positions and offsetting the costs of six new police, fire, and dispatch positions.
He warned that “difficult budgets lie ahead” as federal American Rescue Plan Act funding dries up, more vacancies are filled, and structural costs rise.
The final general fund budget approved by the board Tuesday night was the exact same as the amended version endorsed by the Finance Committee earlier this month.
What The New Budget Means
Four major changes in the FY 25 budget will affect schools, parks, housing, and traffic safety.
1. Public schools will get more funding, though not as much as school leaders had sought.
The FY 25 budget raises the city’s general fund contribution to New Haven Public Schools to $208,263,784 — a $5 million increase.
This increase falls $12 million short of what schools Superintendent Madeline Negrón had requested from the city, in what she termed a “keep the lights on” budget.
Students and staff have rallied around this request for $12 million more than what the city had proposed. Elicker, meanwhile, has said that while this funding is needed, it should come from the state rather than the city.
In the end, alders kept the budget bump at $5 million.
“Raising taxes by another 1.5 mills was deemed too much,” said Marchand at Tuesday’s meeting. He suggested that a rise in property taxes would prompt landlords to offset the costs onto tenants. “Rents are high enough.”
In the audience sat Leslie Blatteau, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers.
“We understand where the city’s coming from,” Blatteau said after the meeting. She argued that schools should receive much more funding from wealthy institutions like Yale University and wealthy towns in other parts of Connecticut.
Still, without the extra $12 million requested, Blatteau said, “We need to be real on the impacts that those constraints will have on our students.”
Those impacts could include, she said for example, a shortage of school social workers, an increase in class sizes, and buildings left in disrepair.
2. The Livable City Initiative (LCI) will refocus on landlord accountability and blight.
The FY 25 budget restructures LCI so that the department will work exclusively on housing code and anti-blight enforcement.
The department’s current efforts to spur affordable housing and homeownership opportunities will move to a new subsection of the city’s Economic Development Administration, called the Neighborhood and Community Development division.
That new Economic Development division will be spearheaded by a new deputy director, focused entirely on affordable housing.
Outside of the general fund budget, the city is also planning to hire five new LCI housing code inspectors with outside funding, in the hopes of better keeping up with tenants’ housing complaints.
This restructuring arrives as New Haven tenants have become increasingly vocal in calling for the city to better enforce safe living conditions, following a wave of growth and consolidation among the city’s largest and most-criticized landlords.
3. Parks and Public Works will once again be separate departments.
The new budget separates Parks and Public Works into two departments, undoing a merger enacted in 2020.
Park volunteers and advocates, as well as consultants at the Urban Resources Initiative, had called for this separation. They argued that a separate department focused just on parks would be better able to take care of the city’s green spaces.
The FY 25 budget adds six new positions to the parks department: two forepersons, two field technicians, an executive director, and a superintendent of fields.
It does not include four other new positions that Elicker had proposed: three “district managers” and a deputy director of administration and planning.
4. Two new employees will be tasked with rolling out traffic camera infrastructure across the city — although the details are in flux.
Now that both state and local enabling legislation has passed, the city is working on a new red light and speeding camera system to automate traffic violation enforcement by sending $50 to $75 tickets to the owners of cars caught running red lights or speeding at 19 different locations citywide.
Elicker had proposed four new city positions to implement this program: a traffic safety engineer, a systems technician, a traffic safety enforcement officer, and a program coordinator.
Alders approved two out of these four positions: the traffic safety engineer and the systems technician. (They also approved two new parking enforcement officers, one full-time and one part-time.)
Finance Committee Chair Adam Marchand, who had proposed adding only two camera-related positions at the final committee meeting, said at the time that he sought to include the core positions required by the state in order for a traffic camera program to operate.
It turns out that one of the rejected positions, the traffic safety enforcement officer, was intended to carry out a state-mandated function. The enforcement officer would have been charged with reviewing the traffic violations caught on camera and deciding whether to issue a ticket — a process that the state requires of any municipal traffic camera system, according to State Rep. Roland Lemar.
Lemar said the city may need to redefine the responsibilities delegated to the two new positions in order to ensure that someone is reviewing the camera footage.
“I think it’ll be fine… They’ll have time to figure it out,” he said.
On Tuesday afternoon, hours before the budget vote, Marchand said that no one from the city had reached out to alders indicating that there had been any error in the positions they approved.
“We kept the ones that we thought were required for the implementation of this program,” Marchand said, adding that the committee intended to satisfy the state statute.
City Spokesperson Lenny Speiller did not directly answer questions on Tuesday about whether a budget with just the traffic safety engineer and the systems technician positions would be enough to satisfy state requirements.
“Everyone obviously wants to make sure of two things: One, that we are sufficiently staffed to ensure that we can effectively run the program, and two, that we’re staffed by state law,” Speiller said. “How that works out exactly? We’re still figuring that out.”
One Alder Votes No
Alders Furlow, H. Smith, and Festa disagree on LCI restructuring.
West Rock/West Hills Alder Honda Smith was the sole alder to vote against the budget Tuesday night.
She specifically opposed the restructuring of the Livable City Initiative (LCI), indicating that she did not believe it would improve LCI. She cited her own experience with departmental restructurings, which she deemed ineffective, during her tenure working for the Public Works department.
“I don’t believe in throwing money out the window,” Smith said.
East Rock Alder Anna Festa also offered concerns about the restructuring.
She introduced an amendment that would have delayed hiring for the new affordable housing development deputy within the city’s Economic Development Administration — which would take over some duties currently under LCI’s purview, a key part of the restructuring — until a recently hired consultant, former mayoral candidate Liam Brennan, completes a review of how LCI can more effectively enforce habitable housing conditions.
“I feel as though we’re putting the cart before the horse,” Festa said.
In response, Westville/Amity Alder and Majority Leader Richard Furlow argued that Brennan’s report is expected to focus on housing code enforcement, not on the affordable housing development position that Festa had proposed delaying.
Only Beaver Hills Alder Tom Ficklin and Honda Smith supported Festa’s amendment.
In the end, Festa voted for the budget in the spirit of “compromise,” saying that she supported the vast majority of what it included.
After Tuesday night’s vote, Elicker sent out an email press release expressing his support for the alder-amended budget. “A budget is always a balancing act between the need and demand for services and the ability to pay for them,” he said in that email, and I believe this budget strikes the right balance.”