Alders Play Hardball With Mayor’s Raises

The average city homeowner will save around $10 on his or her new property tax bill if alders follow through on plans to strip city department budgets by nearly half of a million dollars and put that money instead towards reducing the new 11 percent tax increase.

The effort represents a direct rebuttal of the mayor’s recent allocation of $483,172 in raises (over two years) to non-unionized city department heads and other positions that hadn’t seen raises for up to seven years.

On Monday night, alders took one step closer to making those plans a reality at the end of a three-hour Finance Committee meeting in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.

The alders on the Finance Committee voted unanimously to recommend approval of an ordinance amendment that would reduce 16 city department budgets by a total of $483,172. The proposed amendment would then reallocate that money towards a newly created line in the budget dedicated to mill rate reduction.

Monday night’s proposed ordinance amendment, which will require two hearings and a vote by the full Board of Alders before it can take effect, represents the alders’ first public attempt this budget season to take actual dollars from the city budget and use those dollars specifically and exclusively for reducing city taxes.

The new budget raised the city’s property mill rate from 38.68 to 42.98. One mill corresponds to $1 in taxes for every $1,000 of assessed taxable real estate. Since the average New Haven home is assessed at just under $140,000, according to the 2016 grand list reassessment, the 11 percent tax increase raised property taxes for the average city homeowner by around $600.

The proposed ordinance amendment would chip around $10 from that average homeowner’s new tax bill by lowering the mill rate to around 42.91.

The alders made clear on Monday night that the $483,172 referenced in the proposed amendment is not an arbitrary number. It corresponds to the exact sum of the raises that the mayor recently gave to 36 city government ​“executive management and confidential” employees, meaning top aides and department heads not covered by a union contract. The total includes raises for the coming year and a retroactive year of raises.

“We were not happy with the way the raises were put out,” said Board of Alders President and West River Alder Tyisha Walker-Myers, one of the drafters and most outspoken proponents of the proposed ordinance amendment. ​“We think this was not the right time to do it. For me, everything is about proper planning. And I don’t think this was properly planned.”

City spokesperson Laurence Grotheer said the mayor’s office will refrain from commenting on the proposed ordinance amendment as it has not yet been approved, let alone voted on, by the full board. He said the mayor’s office will provide a comment on the proposed legislation if and when it becomes law.

The director of legislative services, who is employed by the alders and not by the mayor, also received a raise in the spring. However, alders took no umbrage with his raise because, as they said on Monday night, they had known months in advance that he was going to get a raise and had explicitly budgeted for an increase to his salary line item in this year’s budget.

The vote came as one of the most pointed rebuffs that the alders have delivered to Mayor Toni Harp thus far after passing at the end of May an amended version of the mayor’s $547.1 million general operating budget that preserved the original budget’s 11 percent tax increase for the fiscal year that started July 1.

Later in June, alders voted unanimously to override the mayor’s veto of an order that requires all new city revenue that doesn’t come in with strings attached to be put towards mitigating the tax increase.

Alders consistently received complaints from city residents throughout the budget making process about the difficulties that many will face in shouldering a larger tax burden. Two weeks ago, dozens of disgruntled citizens met up on Whalley Avenue to share and strategize around their concerns about paying higher taxes.

Communication Breakdown?

The eight committee alders present at Monday night’s hearing engaged in a tense hour-and-a-half back-and-forth with mayoral Chief of Staff Tomas Reyes and Corporation Counsel John Rose, Jr. about the $483,172 in raises to 36 different non-unionized executive management and confidential employees.

Reading calmly from a written statement, Reyes said the mayor was well within her right to give out the raises, which took effect on June 11, 2018, with retroactive pay effective July 1, 2017 through June 8, 2018.

The money for the raises, Reyes explained, came from the $1.8 million contract reserve line item included in the Fiscal Year 2018 – 19 (FY19) budget that the alders approved at the end of May.

He said the raises all fit within the salary ranges laid out in the city’s Personnel and Procedures Manual, which was approved by the Board of Alders towards the end of Mayor John DeStefano’s tenure and made effective on Dec. 27, 2011.

“The Board of Alders has not revisited the salary ranges for executive management and confidential employees since 2011,” he read. ​“As a result, bargaining unit employees in certain departments were actually earning more than department heads.”

Reyes said the mayor decided to issue these raises now because of the recent approval of the new Local 3144 contract, which granted hundreds of unionized management and professional city employees a 7.25 percent cumulative raise between 2015 and 2018. He said the bulk of the beneficiaries of the mayor’s raises received 7.5 percent lump sum salary increases.

The alders, led by Walker-Myers, were having none of it. They criticized the mayor for not being public or transparent aabout her decision to issue the raises, for doing so at a uniquely inopportune time as the city stares down a projected $15 million budget deficit and an actual 11 percent tax increase, and for not being present at Monday night’s Finance Committee hearing to explain and defend the decision. (The mayor was at the regularly scheduled Board of Education meeting on Monday night.)

Nearly all of the criticism the alders levied at Reyes had less to do with the actual dollar amount of the raises and more to do with the process by which the mayor issued them.

“Why wasn’t this talked about during the budget season?” Walker-Myers asked.

Reyes said the mayor had been advised to tie the executive management salary raises to the timing of the Local 3144 contract. He said many of the department heads had not seen a raise since 2011, and that, while he and the mayor had spoken over a year ago about issuing the raises, they decided to hold off until the new Local 3144 contract was approved.

Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison said the mayor’s office should have engaged aldermanic leadership throughout the spring as to their plans to issue the raises after the union contract was complete.

“This is supposed to be a relationship,” she said about the collaboration between the mayor and the alders. She said the mayor’s decision to give out these raises without seeking approval or even input from the alders showed a lack of respect for the alders and the people they represent.

“To throw a dagger in the people’s back,” she said, ​“to backdoor the people was wrong. … We represent the people. You represent the people. But you’re acting like you just represent yourselves. And that’s not nice.”

Westville Alder and Finance Committee Co-Chair Adam Marchand asked Reyes about the sizes of the salary increases.

Reyes (a former Board of Alders president) said the bulk of the 36 recipients got 7.5 percent increases. He said some received less because they had gotten other raises within the last four years. Some got more, he said, because the mayor issued ​“equity increases” on top of the standard 7.5 percent because those employees were making significantly less than the workers they supervise and than comparable employees in other cities. He said five employees received those types of ​“equity increases.”

Throughout the hearing, the alders piled informational requests upon Reyes to provide a fuller explanation of the mayor’s actions and intentions. They asked him for the list of ​“equity increase” recipients and the legal justification for pulling non-union raises from the contract reserve line item.

They asked him to provide examples of how previous mayoral administrations have handled executive management salary increases. Reyes said this was Harp’s first time issuing this type of raise, but that Mayor DeStefano had on multiple occasions issued similar raises without getting aldermanic approval.

East Rock Alder Anna Festa said city residents are giving up a lot with the new 11 percent tax increase. ​“What is the mayor giving up?” she asked. ​“What are the department heads giving up?”

“This should have been a conversation,” Walker-Myers continued. ​“The administration was told: This is not the right way to do this. But you did this anway.”

During a brief public testimony that followed the alders’ grilling of Reyes, city budget watchdogs Gary Doyens and Nadine Horton and Downtown Alder Abby Roth took their turns voicing similar criticisms of the raises.

“To intentionally hide it and just claim the authority is wrong,” Doyens said.

“Now is simply not the time to give these raises,” Roth followed.

”Wrong Time”

Ultimately, the alders voted to recommend approval of an ordinance amendment that doesn’t necessarily retract the raises, but nevertheless takes aim at the department head beneficiaries to the tune of the exact same amount that they collectively received from the mayor.

The proposed ordinance amendment pulls $483,172 from 16 different departmental budget line items, including $133,124 from the finance department’s Office of Technology Maintenance Agreements, $78,786 from Human Resources Other Contractual, $22,500 from Corporation Counsel Other Contractual Services, and a combined $52,260 from Economic Development.

Walker-Myers said the alders decided not to pull any money from smaller departments like the Fair Rent Commission or the Assessor’s office because those departments are already so small, even after the mayor’s raises.

Marchand said the proposed ordinance amendment represents the alders’ priorities of communication, transparency, and working to find potential savings for taxpayers. ​“I think that stands in contrast to the priorities of the administration as revealed in this matter,” he said.

“Putting this amendment in now forces a different kind of communication and conversation with the administration,” Walker-Myers said. She said she actually believes that many of the department heads are deserving of the raises. But, she said, the process by which the raises were given out warranted a strong push back from the alders.

“I just think that it was the wrong time,” she said.