Thomas Breen photo
Karen DuBois-Walton (center) at Thursday’s tax presser, part 2.
A PILOT promise has been broken, mayoral challenger Karen DuBois-Walton claimed: More state aid has come in, but local taxes haven’t dropped.
A PILOT promise has been kept, Mayor Justin Elicker replied: More state aid has come in, and local taxes haven’t spiked.
That campaign-year back and forth took place Thursday afternoon, first during a press conference held outside City Hall by DuBois-Walton, then in a follow up phone interview with Mayor Elicker.
DuBois-Walton is challenging first-term incumbent Elicker for the Democratic nomination for mayor this year.
Her press conference outside of the Amistad memorial in front of City Hall repeated a critique she offered two weeks ago while outside of a campaign supporter’s house in the Annex.
She said city property taxes are too high. She said the roughly $50 million bump in state aid through the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program should have resulted in a lower local tax burden. She said Mayor Elicker’s failure to make that tax cut happen is a dereliction of duty.
“PILOT’s purpose is to take some of the burden off of city taxpayers,” DuBois-Walton said. “It’s not a slush fund for this mayor to do whatever he wants to do with it. PILOT has a purpose. To double our PILOT and see no property tax relief for the city is a failure.”
Just as during the previous Annex presser, DuBois-Walton declined to propose any specific cuts to the city budget to accommodate lower taxes.
Instead, she argued that the mayor should have been able to find “efficiencies” based on changes to City Hall operations during the pandemic. DuBois-Walton also refused to identify any specific “efficiencies” she would implement if she were mayor.
She did say that taxes should be reduced by at least one mill.
Just as he said two weeks ago, Mayor Elicker (pictured) responded by criticizing DuBois-Walton for campaigning in bad faith.
“If she says she’s going to cut taxes, she should have the courage to tell you what services she’s going to cut. It’s shocking to me that she would insinuate promises that she knows she can’t deliver.”
The Fiscal Year 2021 – 22 (FY22) budget proposed by the mayor and amended and adopted by the Board of Alders keeps taxes flat at the current mill rate of 43.88. It also includes all $49 million-plus of the increased state aid towards funding city services and higher pension fund contributions, which the mayor has argued will result in a lower tax burden (and more sustainable public employee retirement accounts) in the future. The budget also assumes a $4 million increase in aid from Yale University.
When asked about PILOT’s big-picture purpose of lowering the local tax burden for residents of municipalities with lots of very valuable tax-exempt property, Elicker responded that the current roughly $50 million increase in state aid is being used to stop what otherwise would have been a significant tax increase.
“As people who have followed the budget know, if we had not gotten this funding, we would have seen a very dramatic increase in taxes and a cut in services,” he claimed.
The mayor was also asked about another line of critique from DuBois-Walton: that he has kept the city’s ongoing negotiations for more aid from Yale University too secretive. During Thursday’s presser, she said the mayor should be providing more frequent updates to the public about how those negotiations are going.
“When there’s an appropriate time to update,” he will, Elicker said.
“The important thing here,” he concluded, “is results.”
Click on the video below to watch DuBois-Walton’s press conference in full.