Thomas Breen photo
Mayor Harp with department heads at Thursday’s budget presser.
No tax increase. A marginal bump, not a new $30 million, for the Board of Ed. Bigger pension investments.
And a 1.75 percent overall increase in spending, to be covered by debt savings and a host of small new sources of revenue.
Those are a few of the highlights from the mayor’s proposed $556.6 million operating budget for the next fiscal year.
Mayor Toni Harp and a dozen city department heads revealed some of those Fiscal Year 2019 – 2020 (FY20) budget details during a a 20-minute press conference in the second-floor atrium of City Hall.
The final budget book itself wasn’t on hand at Thursday’s presser. City spokesperson Laurence Grotheer and Acting City Budget Director Michael Gormany said the final document is still being tweaked, but should be available later Thursday night or by Friday morning at the latest.
The city charter mandates that the mayor publish a complete first draft of the budget by March 1. FY20 begins on July 1 and runs through the following June.
Acting Budget Director Michael Gormany.
Despite the absence of the document itself, Harp and her budget team had plenty of details to share about what the public can expect as the alders prepare to embark on their own three-month-long budget-making process before they return a revised version of the budget to the mayor by the first week of June.
Harp, Gormany, and City Controller Daryl Jones all stressed that next year’s budget contains no new tax increase. The current year’s budget saw an 11 percent increase to the property mill rate (or how much property owners pay in taxes for every $1,000 worth of assessed value). It was widely expected that Harp, who is facing a reelection campaign challenge from Justin Elicker, would not raise taxes this year.
With this budget, Harp said Thursday, “we send a clear signal to city residents, property owners, business operators, generous partners, private sector investors, and everyone else that New Haven stands tall.”
The total proposed general fund budget will be $556.6 million, Harp and Gormany said. That’s an increase of $9.5 million, or around 1.75 percent, over the current year’s general fund budget of $547.1 million. It’s also $1.4 million more of an increase to the general fund than what the current budget saw last June.
Grotheer said that the $9.5 million increase will not be paid for by new local property taxes or by essentially flat expected state aid.
Mayoral Chief of Staff Tomas Reyes, CEO Interim Director Angel Fernandez-Chavero, Asst. Police Chief Luis Casanova, Fire Chief John Alston, and Gormany.
Instead, he said, the revenue will come from a variety of smaller sources, including increased car towing fees, projected increases in building permit revenue thanks to anticipated development projects, projected increases in city investment earnings, and the anticipated sale of city-owned vacant lots and old equipment.
Grotheer did not have any details on how much money any one of those initiatives will bring in, pointing instead to the imminent release of the final budget for details.
Grotheer also did not say how much of the expenditures increase sans tax increase could be accounted for by the short-term revenue boost the city saw last year when it refinanced $160 million in existing debt, pushing debt payments decades into the future through a process known as “scoop and toss.”
Highlights
City Controller Daryl Jones.
Following are a few other expenditure highlights from the forthcoming budget:
• The city will not lay off any current employees, and will add 13 new full-time positions to the city budget. Those will include two new tree trimmers and a tree foreman in the Parks Department; a new field utilization monitor in the Commission on Equal Opportunities (CEO); four new positions in the Police Department, including two police mechanics, a public information officer, and a body camera specialist; a new field representative for the Fair Rent Commission, as recommended by the city’s Affordable Housing Task Force; a new permitting officer for the transit department who will help with collecting permit fees for e‑scooter services that might soon come to town, among a few others.
• A marginal, $750,000 increase in funding to the Board of Education, which is currently staring down a potential $30 million budget deficit over the next few years.
• A combined $4.5 million increased contribution to the city’s two public pensions, the City Employees Retirement Fund (CERF) and the Police & Fire Pension Fund (P&F). The two funds currently face roughly $700 million in unfunded liabilities.
• A $1 million increase to the city’s healthcare fund.
• A switch from one-year capital budgeting to two-year capital budgeting, meaning that the city will only bond for capital projects every two years, thereby saving a few hundred thousand dollars every year in fees paid everytime the city issues new bonds. The proposed two-year capital budget for FY20 is around $70 million, Gormany said on Thursday.
• Increases to the police and fire overtime budgets, and decreased to the police and fire budgeted staff. Gormany said the mayor has proposed increasing the police overtime budget from $4.4 million to $6.5 million. The department is expected to spend over $8 million on overtime. Gormany said that the mayor has also proposed increasing the fire department’s budget by $435,000. The current fire overtime budget is $2.17 million, though the department is expected to spend well over $3 million in overtime by the end of the fiscal year. As for staffing, Gormany said the budgeted number of police positions will drop from 490 to 429, while the budgeted number of fire positions will drop by nine.
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch part of the budget press release.