No Tax Hike In Mayor’s New Budget

(Updated) Parking-meter monetization is dead. Cops are spared more layoffs — for now. The mill rate stays the same. But New Haveners get less from government, and some more tough long-term fights loom, as a result of Mayor John DeStefano’s newly proposed $475 million city budget.

DeSefano revealed the details of that budget, which would take effect July 1, at an 11 a.m. City Hall press conference.

His budget would raise city spending by $4.182 million, or 0.89 percent, over what the current year’s budget turned out to be after mid-year changes.

But that can actually be seen as a cut in city spending, at least on city services. That’s because the cost of health care and pensions leaps $12 million in this year’s budget. So actual net spending on city services — once those health and pension increases are factored in — decreases by $8 million. Pensions and health care combined have risen from 12 percent to 22 percent of the city’s budget over 10 years, or $44 million to $105 million, according to the mayor.

“They are the PacMan of our city budget, consuming everything in sight,” DeStefano said.

The mill rate will remain at 43.9 if aldermen approve the proposed budget. The city will again freeze the phase-in of the property revaluation, so homeowners’ tax bills would stay the same.

Click here for a summary of the budget as well as a department-by-department breakdown.

Click here to read the full proposed budget.

The proposed budget includes $173 million in education spending from the city general fund, the same amount as the prior two years.

Union leaders at DeStefano’s city budget announcement Tuesday expressed skepticism.

“There’s no shared sacrifice [in this budget],” said Kevin Murphy, the chief negotiator for AFSCME Council 4, which represents five city unions. ​“There’s no increase in property taxes. These people [city workers] are residents of the city.”

The budget includes four layoffs of parks employees; and up to 190 school layoffs. (The city won’t know until the summer how many of those layoffs can be prevented through attrition and receipt of federal, state and private grants.) It projects getting rid of an unspecified number of custodians — perhaps through privatization — to reduce overall cleaning costs from $15 million to $8 million. The budget also builds on 82 layoffs, including 16 cop layoffs, the mayor made last month to help wipe out a $5.5 million gap in the current fiscal year’s budget.

DeStefano said he resolved not to raise taxes. Gov. Dannel Malloy’s proposed state budget already would send the city needed millions for schools and PILOT (payments in lieu of taxes on tax-exempt property) thanks to hikes in income and sales taxes. Since New Haveners will already be paying those new taxes, the city needed not to add property taxes on top of that burden, DeStefano said.

“Malloy made our jobs a lot easier,” DeStefano said. ​“He was very fair to us.”

The mayor said he avoided having to lay off more people in the new budget also in part because tax collection remains high (98.2 percent) and because revenues from the grand list grew by $6.2 million.

He also avoided more layoffs based on a big if — creation of a stormwater authority that would save an estimated $2.6 million in part by levying a fee on not-for-profit property owners. Right now the Board of Aldermen appears poised to kill the idea. (“Their choice is to raise taxes by $2.6 million,” find another $2.6 million in cuts, or approve the idea, DeStefano said.)

Finally, he avoided further layoffs by deferring a couple of tough decisions.

One is to stop relying on one-time revenues. The new budget assumes that the city will sell a second parking facility for $7 million.

The bigger decision is whether the city can cut its health care and pension costs. That question will be resolved this calendar year but will have more of an effect on subsequent years’ budgets.

Eleven city contracts expire June 30. DeStefano said he expects the city to end up in arbitration with many of those unions in order to resolve whether it can change retirement rules and health plans — to require workers retire later, contribute more to their retirement funds, and pay more toward their health care. Last year, the average cop retired at 49 years old with a $74,000 annual pension, thanks to terms of contracts DeStefano previously struck with union officials.

If the city loses in arbitration on those issues, cops especially should expect to see more layoffs in the coming fiscal years, the mayor said. He said he plans to issue a longer-term projection of the city’s finances in coming weeks that will show what kind of gaps loom without pension and health reforms.

One budget quick fix that has apparently died was a plan to ​“monetize” the revenue from city parking meters. Basically, the city wanted to sell away 25 years’ worth of revenues, an estimated $120 million, to a private firm in return for a quick up front $50 million to plug near-term budget holes. DeStefano acknowledged Monday that he may not have successfully sold that plan to the aldermen and the public.

DeStefano said he made a point of preserving two main city missions in this budget: school reform and economic development. He did the former in part by preserving academic line items through the trade-off of slashing the cost of cleaning classrooms.

Meanwhile, pretty much every city department cut its budget in DeStefano’s proposed plan. The mayor’s office budget drop 7.5 percent from last year’s budget, for instance; City Plan by 9 percent, parks and rec by 10.9 percent, the libraries by 10.9 percent. Click here for a chart of the whole departmental breakdown. (Labor relations and human resources show 100 percent cuts because they’re being folded into the chief administrative officer’s budget.)

Some of those savings come from the layoffs announced last month. The average citizen will see fewer library hours (and no branch hours on weekends) and fewer property inspections and maintenance operations by the Livable City Initiative, for instance.

One DeStefano critic, West Rock Alderman Darnell Goldson, offered cautious praise for the plan, especially the ​“no tax increase” feature. ​“Now the taxpayers of the city are being heard,” he said.