BOF Chair Says Public, Critics Demanded Budget Savings Data, Methodology

By John Voket

The chairman of Newtown’s Board of Finance, who worked with a group of elected Republican officials from the Boards of Education and Selectmen and the Legislative Council to produce projections of commodity savings and other options in the heat of budget season, said this week that the information was developed and presented because of public demand.

Finance board Chairman John Kortze reissued a spreadsheet that was first introduced at a press conference just before the second-round budget failure in May, during a press conference also attended by school board Vice Chairman Kathryn Fetchick, Legislative Council Chairman Jeff Capeci, and Vice Chair Mary Ann Jacob.

That spreadsheet was part of a package of information Mr Kortze provided to The Newtown Bee earlier this month, which included sheets of backup material, including a spreadsheet that was circulated in May by Councilman Kevin Fitzgerald; references to statements made about imminent teacher layoffs in school board minutes; projections about personnel actions on the school superintendent’s blog; and the Board of Education’s final budget.

Mr Kortze said this week that neither the press conference in May, nor the re-release of projections made by local Republicans represented an act of political grandstanding.

“And it was not provided to illustrate any disparities,” Mr Kortze said July 14. “This was presented to illustrate the series of methods we used to come up with our savings projections in May, and how we utilized past experience and current information to try and draw some reasonable conclusions.”

He said the press conference was designed exclusively to show taxpayers who were preparing to vote on the second of three 2010 budget referenda anticipated additional savings elected leaders calculated, how the panel came up with those figures, and to respond to anyone questioning how they came up with those savings projections.

“Members of the Boards of Selectmen, Education, Finance and the council all sat down and did their due diligence,” Mr Kortze said. “And the spreadsheet we presented at the press conference in May was the exact same one we provided after the budget [and the fiscal year] passed.”

In an initial report last week, Independent Party of Newtown (IPN) Councilman Fitzgerald took issue with the GOP’s documentation, and comparisons drawn to a series of spreadsheets he said he made available to the public, and updated eight times as new information was provided to him on applicable savings in process.

Mr Fitzgerald said that comparing the GOP savings forecast with what the school district’s positions were at different points of time is like comparing “apples to oranges.” And he contended that the review of the final budget comparison, even in its incomplete form, is flawed.

Mr Fitzgerald compared a list from his Final Budget Comparison document referencing, “11 line items missing” from the Republican Town Committee (RTC) data — “items 14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, and 27 — that the RTC valued at $1.7 million in savings the BOE could take.

“You may want whoever sent the Final Budget Comparison to you to include the entire list,” Mr Fitzgerald added, despite the fact that items 14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, and 27 do not exist on the RTC spreadsheet, nor are the dollar amounts tied to those items referenced in RTC projections.

Mr Kortze countered that the 11 items Mr Fitzgerald is referring to are his alone, and that the IPN councilman characterized his spreadsheet as a work in progress through the end of the 2009-10 fiscal year, versus the GOP’s data the finance chair said represented information presented at a certain point in time.

Mr Fitzgerald also told The Bee that a number of his early projections on his spreadsheet came from collaborating with Republicans, including Ms Fetchick, the school board vice chair.

While Republican officials’ projections resulted in the most accurate outcomes of true school district commodities savings once the fiscal year ended, a version of Councilman Fitzgerald’s spreadsheet that corresponds in time with the original release of GOP data states that there was no basis for Republican recommended health insurance savings, and that there would be no projected savings from reductions in unemployment payouts.

In the end, the district realized substantial savings from these and other areas, and ended the budget year with more than a $300,000 surplus.

“We offered options and commodities, and we were very clear about which ideas were options,” Mr Kortze said, adding that any additional items Mr Fitzgerald referenced that were left off the final GOP spreadsheet represent even further savings that the district should have considered before “scaring the daylights out of parents with statements like, “to fill the [school budget funding] gap it can only mean teacher cuts.”

“We did not manipulate any data through the budget process,” Mr Kortze said. “The Republicans who were involved didn’t want to do anything except understand what savings were possible, and to make informed decisions. We didn’t want taxpayers to be afraid that passing the budget would mean teachers would lose their jobs.”

As the 2009-10 budget year closed, not a single teacher lost his or her job because of reductions made in process to the school district’s requested budget increase. The district added a teaching position, which was driven by higher than expected enrollment at the kindergarten level.