The City Council’s seven-member Budget & Appropriations Committee, led by Scott Burns and Ernie Newton, has released its calendar to review Mayor Joe Ganim’s spending plan that calls for no tax increase.
Mary McBride-Lee, Jeanette Herron, Richard Ortiz, Fred Hodges, and AmyMarie Vizzo-Paniccia round out the committee.
The budget body will spend the next four weeks interviewing department heads prior to a vote on the spending plan for the budget year starting July 1.
Two public hearings have been scheduled, April 17 and May 1.
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There are two budgets for the reviewers to understand, question, and ultimately provide a response to the Executive Branch. Last year’s budget was audited after its close on June 30, 2023. The administration has lived with its improving results without providing real time notice of purpose and plans in a meaningful way in the past couple years. (Our attention may be distracted by City election practices that seem to take extensive time to study and react to by the judiciary.)
Capital budget is the plan for borrowing to afford those efforts and projects like school buildings that are longer term in nature. They look at possible funding alternatives over the next five years, and longer in retiring debt from our City balance sheet. In the meantime does anyone know for sure what City land and building assets are worth at this time?
The operating budget provides the Council committee with the City best estimation of how to deliver current and/or improved services into the new budget year 2025-26. Listening to Department heads selling their plans takes time that is necessary, but also removes time to drill down where experience and intuition leads a Council person to question further. The Education budget, tied up in State process, has always been a barrier that assumes later City adjustment, but has the City made the effort to encourage the Board of Education and Superintendent to be OPEN, ACCOUNTABLE, TRANSPARENT and HONEST over the years. Or is alternating silence, deferrals, and distraction the way to provide improved educational outcomes to 20,000 public school students and families?
Extending the Charter dates for delivery of a budget four weeks earlier can improve budget process, discussion, learning, and citizen participation as taxpayers to a greater extent than currently. Is there any practical reason why the City cannot be ready to present a reccomendation in March, four weeks earlier than now? Time will tell.
About twelve years ago, my pursuit of City financial information caused the CT Post to term me a “financial watchdog”. Following the data and explanations, asking the questions and waiting for answers to appear, building trust in the exercise in the midst of lifetime events is a tall task for citizens. This morning, in the Margaret Moore Annnex City Hall on the second floor you were informed by the above message of the info sharing process, such as it exists currently. Fifteen people gathered in the Legislative Services Offices on the second floor who got down to business with a quorum and extra City Council members by 10:15.
The presentations are being video recorded but where they are available to the public, or accessible is not available from the videographers. And the doors of the Annex were locked until knocking produced a City employee to open the door. There was no signage present at the front door.
There are other meetings to attend and errands to run which is why I am suggesting a longer review period to become part of the Charter review.
My hat is dipped in respect for the members of the City Council on the Budget Committee as well as the others who sit in to the B&A group with their repository of knowledge, history, and previous answers for our current fiscal situation and the outcomes from past spending for operating expenses and bond repayments over the long term. Perhaps a “Table of Contents” should be posted on these archives along with Budget packages of hundreds of pages of information for public access? TIME WILL TELL.