Joe-So: What Would Have Been Said – City Hall’s Backdoor Clawback

In his latest commentary Board of Education Vice Chair Joe Sokolovic flags “about last night” that focuses on municipal law fees.

From Joe-So

When the item concerning the establishment of a full-time City Attorney position funded by the Board of Education was tabled last night because the city attorney was not present, an important conversation was postponed, hopefully forever. If the subject had made the floor, I would have exposed reality that I warned about when the recent Charter revision was put before Bridgeport voters. Very few read or understood the ramifications of the fine print in Chapter 7, but for me it raised a serious warning flag. I cautioned that explicitly writing the Board of Education into the Charter alongside city departments would hand the Mayor and City Hall a mechanism to assert administrative control over the school board, and undermine the district’s independence. The voters were assured that would not happen, yet here we are with another attempt by city to make Bridgeport’s kids pay for Legal overhead.

The revised City Charter explicitly named the Board of Education under the exact same legal provisions as the Police Department, the Fire Department, Public Facilities, the Office of Policy and Management, and the Mayor’s Office. Under Chapter 7, Section 4, the Office of the City Attorney is legally mandated to serve as counsel to all municipal departments. Yet we must ask ourselves a simple question. Is the Police Department, which generates millions of dollars in legal settlements and defense fees, sent a bill by the City Attorney for legal representation? Is Public Works paying out of its operational budget for standard legal advice? Is the Mayor’s Office expected to transfer funds back to the Law Department to cover staff salaries? The answer across the board is an absolute no. Every single municipal department receives baseline legal representation funded entirely through the City’s central General Fund. Singling out the Board of Education to fund its own City Attorney position out of its operating budget is not applying the Charter, it is abusing it.

If anyone attempts to point to public/private partnerships like the WPCA to justify billing departments, we must be completely clear that WPCA legal costs are offset by private operator contracts and sewer fee revenues, not taken from operating funds meant to educate children. This attempt becomes even more alarming when viewed through the lens of state law. Under Connecticut’s MBR requirements, C.G.S. 10-262j, municipalities are legally prohibited from reducing educational appropriations. The spirit of the MBR is to ensure that dollars appropriated for education actually reach students in classrooms. If City Hall uses the Law Department to pressure the Board of Education into funding municipal attorney salaries out of its school budget, it is nothing short of an indirect clawback. It is a fiscal sleight-of-hand designed to satisfy MBR on paper while dragging education dollars right back into City Hall’s general pot.

The Law Department cannot have it both ways. It cannot claim the Charter mandates its legal authority over the Board of Education while at the same time ignoring the Charter’s requirement that the Law Department is funded by the City to provide that representation. If the City Attorney’s budget is insufficient to cover its charter-mandated obligations, the legal and proper path is clear. The City Attorney must go to the Mayor and the City Council to request increased budget appropriation. You do not rob resources out of Bridgeport’s classrooms to cover City Hall’s budget deficits.

When this item inevitably comes off the table and back before this Board, we must demand direct answers to fundamental questions on the record. We must ask whether the City Attorney’s obligation to represent a board stops if her operating budget runs low, whether the public was ever told that the Charter revision would come with bills for schools, and why the Board of Education is being treated like an outside paying client while the Police Department which costs millions in lawsuits, pays zero dollars. We must ask whether forcing the school board to reimburse City Hall violates the spirit of state MBR and why the Law Department has not followed standard protocol by requesting a budget increase from the Mayor and City Council. Every dollar taken from the Board of Education to cover a municipal attorney’s salary is a dollar stripped from special education, classroom supplies, paraprofessionals, and student support services. When the city attorney comes before this Board, we must stand firm, keep municipal overhead where it belongs at City Hall, and protect our children.