Thomas Breen photo
City Controller Daryl Jones (right) with city Acting Budget Director Michael Gormany.
One of the city’s top financial staffers plans to resign at the end of the month after serving six years on the job.
City Controller Daryl Jones announced Monday night that he plans to resign from his position in City Hall effective March 1.
Mayor Justin Elicker confirmed Tuesday afternoon that Jones has decided to leave his job, which is the top city Department of Finance position responsible for overseeing all city expenditures, bonding for capital projects, information technology infrastructure, and overall city financial planning.
Jones declined to comment for this article. (Click here for a New Haven Register article by Mary O’Leary about how Jones broke the news Monday night to the Board of Alders Finance Committee.)
“Daryl has put in an incredible amount of energy into the city and initiated a number of programs to help the city’s efficiency,” Elicker told the Independent. He singled out Jones’s leading efforts to get municipal departments to go paperless, moving many of their records online and reducing paper waste.
Elicker said he did not ask Jones to step down, but rather Jones decided to leave of his own accord. Jones, like many city department heads still working in the new mayoral administration, was appointed by former Mayor Toni Harp and had a city contract that extended through 2022.
“I’m very appreciative of the work he’s done for the city,” Elicker said.
Jones and Gormany presenting to the aldermanic Finance Committee.
A New Haven native and former manager with the New York State Comptroller’s office, Jones returned to New Haven in Feb. 2014 to take the top city financial job during then-Mayor Toni Harp’s first term in office.
Jones prioritized during his term modernizing the city’s IT, mitigating municipal employee health care costs without sacrificing quality of care, reducing the city’s capital borrowing costs, and balancing the city’s budget come the end of every fiscal year.
He played a key role in one of the city’s more controversial municipal finance moves during the Harp administration: the city’s restructuring of $160 million in existing debt in Aug. 2018, which added $89 million in increased debt service payments over the next 15 years.
Jones defended the move as flattening out a spike‑y debt payment structure that would have had the city paying upwards of $70 million per year in debt service payments in the near future before dropping to much lower levels. He also argued that the actual cost of the bond refinancing was significantly less than the $89 million sticker price because of the net present value.
Critics, including Elicker himself when he was running for mayor, decried the move as a “payday loan” that “scooped and tossed” millions of dollars of current debt into the future for subsequent generations of city taxpayers to have to bear and that produced a false sense of financial security—and allowed for no new tax increase—in an election year.
Jones took a leading role in pitching the alders to issue $250 million in pension obligation bonds (POB) in 2018 to help fill the city’s two underfunded municipal pensions. Alders ultimately turned down the idea as too risky of a financial move.
Elicker said that his administration will look to hire a new controller who is “ethical, hard working, a creative problem solver, and, in particular to controller, I think it’s important to have someone with a background in the structure of municipal government in the way that contracts and municipal finance work. Because we need someone that can hit the ground running.”
He said Jones has agreed to stay in his position through March 1, which is when the mayor must deliver to the alders his administration’s proposed budget for next fiscal year.