Thomas Breen photo
Alders hear public budget testimony Wednesday night.
Doyens slashes away.
Opposed to a tax increase, Gary Doyens slashed New Haven’s proposed city budget Wednesday night. He zapped a new social media expert. Canceled the “Escape” teen center’s lease. Killed a health clinic expansion. Took an axe to the police force.
And those were just four of eight specific cuts he announced.
Doyens is not a city official. He can’t actually make the cuts.
The outspoken city budget watchdog offered the cuts as suggestions as he and other New Haveners sounded off during a surprisingly speedy public hearing about the mayor’s proposed $547.1 million operating budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1.
Around 50 people showed up to the Troup School auditorium on Edgewood Avenue Wednesday night for the hearing, which despite covering the biggest proposed tax hike in recent memory lasted only 50 minutes, rather than the hours some previous such hearings have gone on. The Board of Alders Finance Committee held the hearing.
Many in attendance were alders, reporters, and city employees. Only 11 New Haveners offered their thoughts and concerns on a proposed budget that includes an 11 percent tax increase and cuts to a majority of city departments. No one spoke in favor of the budget and the tax hike, which Mayor Toni Harp has said is essential to provide needed services in a slimmed-down government facing crushing state funding cuts and hobbled by the inability to tax the 54 percent of local property that is tax-exempt.
The crowd at the public budget hearing in the Troup School auditorium.
Doyens, a sharp-tongued critic who regularly comes to public budget hearings to voice his concerns over what he sees as excessive spending, told the alders that his recommendations would add up to over $10 million in savings in the mayor’s proposed budget.
Citing a recent analysis from the Financial Review and Audit Commission (FRAC) that argues that the city deficit is greater than that projected by the city’s finance department, Doyens said that the city should cut services to match its income.
“I’m not saying that we do more with less,” he said. “I’m suggesting we do less with less.”
Doyens laid out an eight-point plan for the alders to heed as they scrutinize the mayor’s budget. He applied a projected savings numbers to each item on his list.
• Cut the proposed new position for a public relations specialist who will focus on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and other social media communications for the mayor’s office. Doyens said that this cut would save $75,000 each year: $50,000 in salary and $25,000 in benefits.
• Combine the Youth and Elderly Services departments. Doyens said this would save $180,000.
• Cancel the lease for the Escape, a planned youth center and homeless shelter on Orchard Street that is over two years behind schedule due to myriad structural problems with the facility. Doyens said this would save $48,000 each year in lease fees, as well as $250,000 in capital rehab costs.
• Move the Dixwell/Newhallville Senior Center from its current rented location on Goffe Street and into the planned new community Q house on Dixwell Avenue. “Let’s combine things in a facility that we’re going to be investing in,” Doyens said.
• Don’t expand hours and operations for the city’s public health clinic, which the city projects will cost $468,002 from the general fund budget before it can start generating enough revenue to sustain itself.
• Invest in ambulances and paramedics, so that the New Haven Fire Department (NHFD) can answer the 25,000-odd medical calls it receives each year with ambulances, not fire trucks.
• Cut the Board of Education’s $5 million requested budget increase and consolidate two schools.
• Cut the police department’s budget by $5,250,000 by reducing its total number of budgeted officers from nearly 500 to around 400. Doyens cited a 2016 article in Governing Magazine that ranked New Haven 20th in the country in its number of police officers per capita, and said that new officer classes will not be able to fill the 77 current vacancies and 80 prospective retirements. “You’re not ever going to fill the 500 officers,” he said. “Why budget that?”
In addition to Doyens, 10 other New Haveners spoke out at Wednesday night’s hearing against the proposed tax increase, the proposed new public relations specialist position, and the proposed expansion of the Health Department’s public health clinic.
“I’ve seen a lot of changes in this city,” said longtime Hill resident Dora Lee Brown, “and right now I’m very disappointed. We’re all strapped.” She said that city residents should not have to bear the brunt of what she saw as administrative inefficiency.
Barbara Smith.
Barbara Smith said that the taxes on her Carmel Street home, where she’s lived for 20 years, increased in 2016 during the citywide property value reassessment.
She said that, as a senior on a fixed income, she could not withstand another tax increase. “I’m going to lose my house,” she said. “What am I going to go?”
East Rock Community Management Team Secretary Deb Rossi said that she bought her home on East Street 22 years ago because it was a decent house on the edge of a decent neighborhood.
“Unfortunately, the good neighborhood has encroached,” she said.
Rossi said that she paid one quarter of her income on house taxes last year, and that any further tax burden would hurt the economic, ethnic, religious and educational diversity she and her family so love about New Haven.
Pierrette Comulada Silverman.
Pierrette Comulada Silverman, an employee at Planned Parenthood of Southern New England (PPSNE), singled out the Health Department’s proposed expansion of hours and services for its public health clinic at 54 Meadow St. as unnecessary and untenable.
During her testimony, Silverman offered rebuttals to some of the reasons that Health Department Director Byron Kennedy offered during last week’s budget workshop for why the clinic expansion is needed, and will ultimately pay for itself.
She said that the clinic does not need to ramp up its treatment of residents with tuberculosis, since only three TB cases were identified in the city in 2016 and only six cases identified in 2017.
She said that, instead of bonding $250,000 in capital funds for diagnostic imaging equipment, the city should work with ride-share services to transport patients to a specialized, Yale-operated clinic on Howard Avenue. She said that reproductive healthcare and sexually transmitted disease (STD) testing are already well covered by the Fair Haven clinic, Cornell Scott Hill Health Center, and Planned Parenthood.
Silverman also said that the Health Department’s goal of seeing 5.5 patients per hour is “really lofty.” She said that most providers struggle to see four patients per hour, and that a 2013 survey by the American Academy of Family Physicians put that number at closer to 2.7.
“A $1.4 million financial request is basically indefensible at this time,” said Silverman,who served as an elderly services director and deputy chief of staff under former Mayor John DeStefano. “I hope that the committee will send a recommendation back to Dr. Kennedy and Mayor Harp that instead they work with the current healthcare providers in the system to extend hours and support that work that is already being done in New Haven.”
The Board of Alders must approve a final version of the budget by the first week of June.
The next budget workshop, during which the Finance Committee will interview department heads about their respective allocations in the mayor’s proposed budget, is on Monday, April 9, at 6 p.m. in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.
Click on the Facebook Live video below to watch a recording of the entire public hearing Wednesday night.