Hamden Faces Fiscal Skeletons

Hamden’s Legislative Council chipped away at a proposed 3.68 mill rate hike in July — with the intention of paving a route to ease residents’ tax burden in years ahead.

The council has been meeting biweekly since April 5 to fine-tune Mayor Garrett’s first proposed operating budget, which when amended and approved takes effect July 1. Garrett’s proposed version included a jump of $15.8 million from the previous year’s adopted budget up to $278 million and suggested upping Hamden’s mill rate from 52.44 mills to 56.12. After Garrett first presented that plan back in March, residents flooded town hall begging the town to cut their taxes — and in some cases threatening to move to Cheshire or North Haven if a fix wasn’t found.

On Tuesday evening, the public — primarily homeowners, many of whom doubled as protesters outside before the session began — returned to Memorial Town Hall for a second public hearing on the budget. Attendees of the hybrid in-person/online session listened to a presentation from Garrett, who offered five-year projections of town finances.

Read through Garrett’s five-year plan here, which outlines how the mayor anticipates municipal revenues and expenditures will change over time.

The memo from town leadership: There’s no honest way around a tax increase this year. But, if the town stays on the track Garrett says she is putting in place, then the mayor claimed Hamden could see mill rate stabilization within the next two years and tax relief around 2026.

Garrett summarized feedback received by the town from The Municipal Finance Advisory Commission, which is run through the state Office of Policy Management. Hamden has been presenting to the MFAC since September 2020 after the town’s fund balance went negative. The third-party consensus: Past budgets overestimated revenue and misplaced funds; this budget shows progress in comparison. Read the full back and forth here.

Garrett argued that the town and its residents could find financial stability in the future through continuing with a plan to refinance and restructure debt, avoid more debt by selling town assets (such as Wintergreen school and other sites that are set to be replaced using state funds, like the Circular Avenue firehouse) to pay for capital projects, and growing fresh sources of revenue (including from newly legalized recreational cannabis).

“This is not a guarantee,” Garrett said. ​“It’s based on those assumptions and based on those assumptions coming true.”

As for this coming fiscal year, a summary of the council’s budgetary changes provided to the Independent by Finance Director Curtis Eatman shows that as of April 26, the Council had worked to reduce the mill rate to a tentative 55.86.

They have voted on the following cost cutting measures:

• Reducing public works’ budget by $395,000 through stripping down waste removal contracts and tipping fees.

• Flat funding the Board of Education, taking back $605,075.

• Lowering community contributions to youth sports by $13,000.

• Shrinking library expenditures by $4,100.

The council has so far agreed to add one government job: A real property appraiser, which they estimated would cost the town $69.609.94 a year. But the Council also extracted $32,500 from the assessor’s office through other means. Those decisions took place on April 28, which means the additive dollars described do not factor into the projected mill rate above.

In total, the council has suggested cutting $980,065.06 from Garrett’s budget. As previously pointed out by local fiscal-crisis analyst Christian MacNamara in this article, it would take approximately $3.7 million in cuts to lower the mill rate by one point.

Residents Tuesday pushed for more fiscal austerity in order to lessen the coming year’s tax load.

George Levinson rebutted Garrett’s five-year plan and expressed doubt over the likelihood of it coming to fruition.

“Unfortunately, if the numbers stay high, nobody’s getting elected for a second term,” he asserted, adding that a new council might return to the mismanagement tactics that Garrett and the council blamed for the current mill rate.

His demands: Follow through on flat-funding the Board of Ed. Remove all vacant positions as well as any new proposed government jobs pending approval by the council. Cut all non-union salaries. And alter the estimate of the anticipated tax collection. ​“Playing this number safely adds too much to the mill rate,” he argued.

Others echoed Levinson, both inside Town Hall and outside. Prior to the meeting, around 25 residents showed up with signs urging the administration to cut taxes. During the public hearing, residents urged the council to do anything to bring taxes down. ​“Get a super Walmart in here!” one woman said. 

The council still has five additional budget meetings before their final vote on May 17, not including a discussion that took place following Tuesday’s public hearing (during which they deliberated on budgets for the planning and zoning and economic development departments).

Here is the schedule for those upcoming meetings, which outlines what will be debated during each session, including some of the town’s more substantial departments, like police and fire. 

In the meantime, many council members are backing Garrett’s five-year approach to budgeting.

Councilman Cory O’Brien said that an honest budget contextualized within a multi-year plan is something ​“I don’t think we’ve seen in my time in Hamden … It’s something I’ve been advocating for.”

He argued that the mayor and council have inherited financial woes stemming from decades of mismanagement: ​“Until that debt, essentially that credit card we’ve been living off of, gets paid, we will not be able to see significant tax relief.”

“Thank you for putting this together,” he said to Garrett.

“This was asked of past administrations and we weren’t able to get that information,” Councilwoman Dominique Baez added of the five-year forecast. 

“We’re going to flatline and then our mill rate is going to drop,” she said. ​“In the future we should be able to have a better budget season.”