Vote April 27, 6 am To 8 pm—

Selectmen Split

On Budget Proposal

By John Voket

The three members of the Board of Selectmen weighed in ahead of the April 27 budget referendum, and all three offered differing views and ideas on why they either support the spending plan, or not.

On Tuesday, April 27, the Newtown Middle School gym will be open from 6 am to 8 pm for qualified voters and taxpayers, who will be asked to decide the fate of the proposed budget.

The single referendum question asks voters to approve or reject a spending plan for the 2010-2011 fiscal year that would impose a 2.99 percent increase in the tax rate. The total 2010-2011 budget proposal anticipates revenues and expenses totaling $104,687,615, requiring a tax rate of 24.13 mills. A mill equals $1 taxation on every $1,000 of assessed property value.

Independent Selectman Bill Furrier says he will vote No at next Tuesday’s referendum. This, even though in his official capacity, Mr Furrier voted to support the selectmen’s portion of the budget proposal, as well as an unprecedented budget amendment he has since criticized as illustrating “flawed” and “misleading” accounting processes.

Conversely, Republican Selectman Will Rodgers believes a Yes vote April 27 lends a voice of support recognizing a lean but appropriate spending plan. Mr Rodgers recognized that the budget proposal took weeks of dedicated work on the part of the first selectman and finance director to refine. And he said it was crafted in an unprecedented period of state and federal fiscal upheaval, where promised revenues and authorized fees to offset tax increases were diverted, delayed, reduced, or eliminated.

Having immersed herself for months in the minutiae and detail of the overall plan, First Selectman Pat Llodra was more conflicted in her recommendation on the budget. When asked, she struggled with the question of whether to urge taxpayers to vote Yes or No next Tuesday.

While she acknowledges a movement among some residents to vote the budget down as a means of sending a message to add spending back in, along with its corresponding level of tax burden, she said history has consistently proven that a failed budget is viewed as a call to cut more, not to increase spending and likely taxation to cover the cost.

Disproportionate Hardship

In an interview with The Bee, and in a subsequent letter to the editor, Selectman Furrier states that he will not support the budget because subsequent handling and decision making by the Board of Finance and the Legislative Council placed undue and disproportionate financial hardship on the school district.

And since only a tiny minority of taxpayers stood up at local meetings calling for a freeze or reductions in spending, versus a vocal contingent calling specifically for increases to the school side of the proposal, Mr Furrier said the number of taxpayers who truly feel the budget is too high “are undocumented and thus their status as a majority holds no power.”

He also is on the record saying a budget amendment to the current budget required only “90 seconds” of discussion before the selectmen approved the $800,000 accounting adjustment.

Both Mr Rodgers and Mrs Llodra take issue with those more recent public assertions, which were all made since Mr Furrier voted to approve the town side budget proposal and prior budget amendment. Mr Rodgers said he was bemused by Mr Furrier’s contention that it “only took about 90 seconds to discuss the budget amendment, therefore the budget must have been padded.”

“He’s either engaged in some type of hyperbole, or speaking to the amount of time the issue was debated once the motion was on the floor,” Mr Rodgers said. “We had a number of long meetings as a board [which Mr Furrier attended], along with the first selectman and department heads putting in an enormous amount of time and energy to provide the documentation we all considered before unanimously approving the amendment and the selectmen’s side of the budget.”

Mrs Llodra said that Mr Furrier may have taken 90 seconds to consider his actions, but that he was “off-base” to suggest the entire process resulting in the proposed amendment that he approved only took that abbreviated amount of time.

Comparisons

In comparing the levels of funding taxpayers approved last April for the current budget to the proposal they will consider next Tuesday, budget proponents note that there is a school spending increase of $679,000 and an increase on the town side of $58,000.

Mr Furrier and other budget opponents have taken another view, however, saying the increase in town spending is far greater — more than $1.3 million — when comparing the actual 2009-2010 budget revenues and expenditures with the proposed 2010-2011 budget.

Mr Rodgers said he also takes issues with anyone trying to overlay the current amended budget against spending proposed in next year’s budget. Critics including Mr Furrier have said that the current administration used the amendment to divert attention from substantial amounts of earmarked funds which they say represent specific line item budget increases.

“In regard to his and other IPN representatives’ contentions that the $58,000 proposed spending increase on the town side is disingenuous is complete and utter nonsense,” Mr Rodgers said, adding that the budget amendment was initiated because the town was trying to be more transparent in presenting an “apples to apples comparison” of spending between what the voters approved last year and what they are being asked to approve this year.

“To say we are $800,000 over the final budget proposal is misleading,” Mr Rodgers concluded. “A revenue shortfall was applied to the current budget as an accounting measure — and we may have to do it again next year depending on the shortfall against what we expected to receive from the state.”

He also takes issue with Mr Furrier’s contention that the budget amendment proposed from the town side’s “unilateral hit on revenues” precipitated so-called “Enron accounting” when it was designed to illustrate a true budget.

Mrs Llodra echoed that sentiment, also taking into account accusations that any kind of unscrupulous activity was designed to hide robust increases in the highway department budget, when in reality that department’s net budget is down for the second year in a row — reduced in the coming year’s proposal by $205,000.

An Approved CIP

Mrs Llodra said that Mr Furrier was on hand during selectmen’s discussions regarding all the variables of the highway department’s capital and operating plans, including a presentation by Public Works Director Fred Hurley particularly explaining the shift of the bridge repair funding to the Capital Improvement Plan, which was also then approved by Mr Furrier in another unanimous vote.

Mr Furrier said that his opposition to the current budget proposal is also rooted in a contention that savings realized this year from refunding or refinancing bonds provided revenues exclusively to the town side of the budget and ignored the fact that about half of the savings came from bonding school district projects.

He believes the town should have then funneled the proportionate amount of savings as revenue to the school district to offset cuts already proposed in the district’s budget. But Mrs Llodra said since the entire town shares in the positive benefits when savings are achieved, shouldn’t it also share the burden when promised or expected revenues come up short?

The first selectman acknowledged that Mr Furrier had a fair argument, but that to affect the type of changes he hoped to see in the current proposal would require a complete restructuring of how the town as a whole handles both revenue windfalls and shortfalls.

“This should be a lesson learned,” Mrs Llodra said. “The way we do the budget is no longer serving us well as a town.”

She said the town and school district have already begun having conversations about sharing deficits as well as revenues, and that in the future, Mrs Llodra hopes the results will continue to produce “one town budget that meets the broadest needs of the community.”

This may precipitate the school district adopting the same kind of budget amendment the town used this year, if the district is faced with substantial and anticipated revenue shortfalls in the 2010-2011 fiscal cycle.

“We already know we are going in with a deficit because of the end of federal stimulus money,” she added.

Ultimately, on the town side, Mrs Llodra said she and Finance Director Robert Tait, with the approval of Mr Rodgers and Mr Furrier, “identified an aggressive savings initiative so we wouldn’t have to pass increasing operating costs on to the taxpayers,” in an environment where “the community never faced a revenue deficit [in 2009-2010] of that magnitude before.”