Mayor Joe Ganim’s nearly $600 million proposed spending plan for the fiscal year starting July 1 is now before the City Council’s Budget & Appropriations Committee. Ganim is dropping the tax rate by just over 10 mils from the current 54 in a revaluation year. See budget document here. See capital plan here.
City fiscal planners assert based on this plan most homeowners will receive a cut or no tax increase with some outliers based on the adopted assessments required by state law every five years.
The most telling initial view of the budget is the flat funding of the Board of Education. Essentially Ganim is telling the school district the federal government is providing Covid-relief money, be creative with that to meet your needs.
This is an election year for the City Council so there’s a bit of a winking game going on to defend the honor of constituents and school advocates. Look for the budget committee to debate adding more school loot while trying to trim the tax rate about another mil or so.
The budget committee is chaired by Scott Burns and Ernie Newton.
Lennie, you sum it up good, “This is an election year for the City Council so there’s a bit of a winking game going on to defend the honor of constituents and school advocates. Look for the budget committee to debate adding more school loot while trying to trim the tax rate about another mill or so.” This is te usual dog and pony show, both sides play the game, the city council will look like they are pushing back on Ganim’s budget, they have already know what the final number is so that they can campaign and say that they may the cuts against Mayor Ganim. The City Council is at the mercy of the mayor because they don’t have a outside expert to challenge the mayor’s numbers.
Burn’s Flucked us once with Fig Newton hold on to your ankles Taxpayers !
The first thing to realize in the Mayors budget is that it contains a broken promise made in front of hundreds at faith acts to fund education to the tune of an additional $2million per year at an event on November 18th 2019 https://fb.watch/4L4-EDZXH8/
The second thing to realize about the budget, especially the pie chart is that it is very misleading. This pie chart will have you believe that 39% of the budget is going to education. This cannot be further from the truth. The total overall budget proposal of $597, 703,281 contains $164,195,346 state tax dollars that go directly to education. These are not Bridgeport taxpayer dollars. When you remove those dollars and divide the new number the city share to education drops to 15.92% (597703281-164195346)/433507935
Recalculating other department, all of which received increases, the percentages go up.
Public Safety increase to 42.10% almost tripled your Bridgeport tax dollars go to public safety than to education.
More to follow this evening. I
Most of the Council members look at the budget figures and have no idea what they’re looking at,they just wait for Joe’s instructions on how to proceed.
They’re listening to the wrong Joe.