(Opinion) The financial challenges confronting Hamden are well known to its residents and taxpayers. Hamden is among the most fiscally distressed municipalities in Connecticut, with the highest per capita liabilities in the state, bond ratings that teeter just above junk status, and a general fund balance that, after years of being perilously low, actually went negative at the end of FY20. We remain unable to meet the normal expenses of running the town, relying instead on expensive debt restructurings to temporarily and artificially lower our debt service payments. All this despite taxes that are already among the highest in the state.
The good news is that a path to financial stability does exist. By controlling costs, attracting new development to Hamden, and refusing to continue kicking the can down the road, I believe we can reach a point where we are able to meet our expenses in a sustainable way. This will allow our mill rate to stabilize and ultimately come down.
However, to navigate this path we need effective leadership on financial issues, especially from the Mayor. Unfortunately, this is not something that our current mayor has been able to deliver.
When I began following Hamden’s financial situation in 2019, I found myself wondering how such a lovely town could have gotten itself into such an awful mess.
After spending almost three years observing how Hamden makes decisions, I now realize that despite the hard work and good intentions of many involved in running the town, the process by which Hamden weighs its financial options has too often been chaotic, rushed, and plagued by an absence of clear and complete information.
Since starting to follow the town’s finances, I have witnessed more episodes of dysfunction than I can count.
I have served on a town Fiscal Stability Committee that wasn’t even told that town officials were appearing before a state financial oversight body until months after the fact when that information finally leaked out.
I have watched an otherwise deeply divided Legislative Council unanimously reject budget transfers in an attempt to force the mayor to provide the information the Council needs to do its job.
I have seen the Finance Department provide incomplete, misleading, and in some cases outright inaccurate information to the Council during deliberations.
I have watched time and time again as those deliberations have stretched past midnight, with the Council told that unless it acted immediately some problem that the town had known about for months would reach catastrophic levels.
This is not the way to run a town, especially not one that is as fiscally distressed as Hamden.
Much has been made of the problems of the Legislative Council, and there are absolutely steps that the Council and its members must take to improve the Council’s functioning. But I am convinced that the lack of leadership from the mayor is a significant cause of the Council’s dysfunction. When Council members routinely have to make rushed decisions about complex financial issues with limited and/or confusing information, the process becomes predictably chaotic and tensions flare.
It is also worth emphasizing that Council members are part-time volunteers. The mayor lives and breathes the town every working hour and has a level of detailed knowledge about how the town is operating and whether there are opportunities for efficiencies that Council members will simply never have.
Again, none of this absolves the Council of its own responsibility for our problems. It is undoubtedly true, however, that no Council will be able to successfully tackle Hamden’s financial challenges without effective leadership from the mayor.
Several candidates have already announced their intention to run for mayor in the next election. Good. Competing campaigns will provide us with a better opportunity to identify the individual capable of leading us on the path towards financial stability. While I am obviously interested to hear the candidates’ substantive ideas for confronting Hamden’s challenges, even more important to me is the process they will follow. Hamden needs a mayor committed to a collaborative, deliberative approach to financial decision making. No more manufactured crises. No more incomplete information. The candidate who can best deliver this type of leadership will have my support regardless of age, background, and party affiliation.
Christian McNamara (pictured), director of the New Bagehot Project at the Yale Program on Financial Stability (YPFS), is a member of Hamden’s Fiscal Stability Committee. The views expressed herein are his own and not those of the FSC.