Melissa Bailey Photo
Mayor John DeStefano is working on a Thanksgiving week surprise. The menu features tough talk about the city’s fiscal future.
He said he needs to start talking turkey about “reinventing” government and painful cuts months before another raucous budget season gets underway.
So he plans to make a public statement about how New Haven will navigate what he believes will be a brutal upcoming four years for city governments in Connecticut. He also wants to look at what kind of business New Haven government should continue doing — and not continue doing — over the long term, and how.
“I’m going to offer a clear strategy about what the city’s priorities ought to be,” he said in an interview.
In recent weeks the public has gotten a glimpse of the process underway. Rumors swirled that the mayor had already come up privately with a number of layoffs; DeStefano said that’s not true. Last Wednesday night he told the Westville/West Hills management team that he’s looking at consolidating the number of police districts in town.
The general idea is to look at “how many bosses you have,” and whether fewer are needed, DeStefano told the Independent. He said he won’t be presenting details about proposed cuts or consolidations in his Thanksgiving Week talk, which he described as “table-setting.”
He said he wants to start public conversation about tough budget choices now rather than in March, when he submits the proposed budget for the next fiscal year.
So DeStefano’s team has been crunching numbers to get a long-term look at the city budget. It doesn’t look pretty, with a looming $3.3 billion state budget deficit and mushrooming pension and health care costs.
A five-year study recently completed for the city’s Financial Review and Audit Commission (FRAC) projects an $82.7 million general fund budget gap by the end of 2015. It projects the city’s annual pension liability mushrooming from $29 million to $43 million in that time; health insurance is on track to leap from $49 million to $76 million. Click here to read the five-year study, which includes some ideas for addressing the gap. And click here to read an article and reader discussion about FRAC’s deliberations.
So, with a local political climate averse (to put it mildly) to tax increases, the administration is hunting for ways to make government cost less but still move the city forward.
DeStefano has directed all his agency heads to start early in identifying service reductions and possible new sources of revenues. He’s also asking his appointees to look at new ways to raise revenue. For instance, public works has started bidding on work that technically non-city public agencies like the housing authority and parking authority otherwise send to private contractors. (Click here to read Betsy Yagla’s story about that in the Advocate.)
In addition to agency-by-agency examinations, the mayor said, he’s looking at broader changes with the aim of rethinking who does what jobs and how. He wants to reexamine questions like: “How do we deliver custodial services? How do we treat solid waste? How do we treat storm water?”
The FRAC reports stated that the city could save money long-term by modernizing the fire department and cutting police overtime; and boost revenues for increased fees for activities like baseball in the park.
Hill Alderman Jorge Perez said he looks forward to hearing what DeStefano has to say.
“I’m happy that he’s going to start that dialogue,” Perez said. “It’s critical that this be done in collaboration with the two branches [of city government], not that it be perceived as one person’s idea who is inflexible to other people’s” ideas.