Use Common Sense to Manage Towns Budget (Like we all do at Home) This is my third budget season as a member of the RTM, and the pattern is familiar. Departments construct their budget requests by starting with what was spent the previous year and then add costs that are “uncontrollable” – like contractual increases in salaries, actuarial increases in pension/healthcare benefits, mandated increases from state and federal government, and necessary increases to our reserves. Unfortunately, all of these add-ons are very real expenses and have to be covered. What’s missing is a recognition that, if increases like those listed are inevitable, we have to cut somewhere else to make the budget affordable. Since we didn’t do that in the past, what we have today is taxes that have increased over the last 15 years at 3x the rate of inflation. Just recently, the BOE submitted their 2014-15 budget asking for an increase of 3.9%, which is over 2.5x the current 1.5% rate of inflation. This request will have to go through the approval process and hopefully there will be the needed cuts. Some say that the BOE should spend more on world languages, or music, or gifted-student programs and the town should stop the draconian slashing of our education budget that has gone on for years. But history shows that the BOE budget has gone up every year (except 2010 when it was flat) and currently represents over 54% of the town’s total spending. In fact, over the last fifteen years the number of students went up 37% while the spending per student went up 57%. And these numbers don’t include the annual cost of servicing our debt (that now represents almost 10% of the overall budget) which is heavily devoted to building, expanding, and remodeling our schools. Advocates for BOE budget increases say that Fairfield spends much less per student than towns like Greenwich, Darien, New Canaan, Westport, and Wilton. The problem with this argument is that Fairfield simply doesn’t have the same spending power as those other towns. The state uses a gauge called the Public Investment Community score (PIC) which measures the “relative wealth and need” of all Connecticut towns. It’s based on five criteria — per capita income, per capita grand list, the mill rate, per capita aid to children receiving Temporary Family Assistance, and the unemployment rate. A review of these PIC scores shows that the towns most comparable to Fairfield are ones like Madison, Avon, Guilford, and Farmington and we spend more per pupil than any of them and our test results are no better. Everybody wants an excellent school system and, yes, the children are our future. But whether you are among the 70% of households that do not have children in our schools or the 30% that do, you should understand that we can’t spend the same per student as some of the wealthiest towns in the entire country. To do that we would have to impose substantially higher taxes, and, when our property taxes rise too high, not only will our home values suffer but we will drive out more and more residents who are already making daily sacrifices to live here. Many local realtors will confirm that this is exactly what is happening now. Simply put, raising our taxes faster than the rate of inflation is not sustainable. We need a new approach to how we budget. It should be a top-down approach that first determines how much we can afford to spend. A good start would be to simply restrict budget growth for the town, including the BOE, to no more than the rate of inflation. The First Selectman and the BOE should adopt this goal at the outset of the budget cycle and then determine what programs can be provided more efficiently and which programs need to be cut or streamlined in order to offset the “unavoidable” increases and still live within our means. We live in a wonderful town. To keep it that way we need to apply the same common sense budget restraints that every family does in managing their personal finances. It’s not too late. Let’s do it before we so over-price the cost of living in Fairfield that our property values go into the kind of long-term decline that has befallen other once thriving towns. David Mackenzie, RTM, District 3, Fairfield fairfieldtaxpayer
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 12:47:19 +0000