Simsbury First Selectman Mary Glassman, left, with other town leaders from Connecticut towns and cities outlines during a press conference at the Legislative Offce Building problems her town and others are having budgeting without a state budget. (MICHAEL MCANDREWS / HARTFORD COURANT / May 27, 2009)

Keith Robbins, town manager of Winchester and a member of COST (Connecticut Council of Small Towns) outlines during a press conference. (MICHAEL McANDREWS)

How can families plan a year's budget without knowing how much income they can expect?

They can't — and neither can towns or cities, according to frustrated municipal leaders who might have to start their fiscal year with just a guess about their revenues.

With less than a week to go before the General Assembly's session ends, municipal leaders on Wednesday showed up at the Capitol to press lawmakers and the governor to end their stalemate and produce a budget — fast. They fear that if legislators don't lock in municipal aid now, it will be too tempting from them to slash those grants later if Connecticut's tax revenues continue to plummet over the summer.

"We've done our job, we've made the difficult choices," said Simsbury First Selectman Mary Glassman, whose town had to furlough staff, freeze wages, lay off workers and cut services to balance its new budget. "Now we're asking the governor and legislature to do their job."

Until a new state spending plan is negotiated, communities throughout Connecticut will have to gamble on how much state aid to build into local budgets that take effect July 1. Most are banking on getting the same amount as last year, but they fear that local aid will be cut if the state revenue forecast continues to decline while Gov. M. Jodi Rell and lawmakers debate a new budget.

In the scenario that town officials fear the most, Rell and lawmakers will take until August or longer to settle a budget. By then, plunging state revenue might drive lawmakers to cut municipal aid — even though towns and cities would already be deep into their new budgets. If that happens, communities would have to respond with either drastic service cutbacks and emergency layoffs, raids on their reserve funds or, perhaps, supplemental tax bills, said James Finley Jr., executive director of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities.

For cities that have already slashed staff and chopped services, more cuts would be crippling, said Andrew Nunn, chief administrative officer in Bridgeport.

"Any further cuts would dramatically affect public safety," Nunn said. "The mayor signed a budget [Tuesday] that's got $3 million less spending than this year. We've ordered a 10 percent reduction in all departments, we've sold city property, we have a hiring freeze, a travel ban and [agreements for] zero percent wage increases from 11 of our 13 unions."

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, the Council of Small Towns and the Capitol Regional Council of Governments sponsored Wednesday's press conference to urge Rell and ranking legislators to let municipal leaders attend their closed-door budget negotiations.

The Republican governor and Democratic lawmakers seem to be playing a game of political "chicken" with the state budget, and the stalemate threatens to drag on into the summer or even later, according to the mayors and first selectmen who attended Wednesday's session. During bitter disputes in 1991 and 2003, the state did not set budgets until mid-August. Unlike towns that must adopt budgets before July 1, the state may simply pass the deadline and then pay its bills through short-term funding plans or executive orders.

Rell and legislators have said they want to keep local aid steady, but municipal lobbyists worry that they might renege on that pledge if Connecticut's projected $8.7 billion two-year deficit grows.

" New Haven will close its second elementary school in a year. We've closed three senior centers, cut 225 positions and we're maintaining our parks with 40 percent less personnel than five years ago," New Haven Mayor John DeStefano said. "But with all of that, I can't tell my city residents that their budget is balanced."

Neither Rell's staff nor Democratic leaders attended the session.

Local leaders express concern with state budget
By Ken Dixon
Connecticut Post, May 28, 2009

HARTFORD -- Connecticut's mayors and first selectmen want a half-hour of face time with Republican and Democratic budget negotiators in the General Assembly before time runs out on the legislative session at midnight June 3.

They're worried that lawmakers will eventually balance the state's two-year spending package, which takes effect on July 1, by cutting local aid that has already been built into the local budgets throughout the state.

The local leaders also are worried about nearly three dozen bills that are still alive in the General Assembly that would increase local costs to cities and towns.

The pending unfunded mandates range from mandatory in-school suspensions for troubled students, to the currently planned hike in the age that juvenile are prosecuted as adults, from the current 16 years of age, up to 18.

New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said that next week his tax office will send out 85,000 property tax bills to finance the city's $464-million budget, but if state aid is cut he'll have to make more layoffs beyond the 225 full-time jobs he already has eliminated.

"Connecticut municipalities need at a minimum two things: current funding levels from the state and it would be nice to have a budget," DeStefano said. "I just don't see how a minimum of flat funding and a budget is too much to expect from state government."

Among the local leaders who participated in a news conference sponsored by the Council of Small Towns and the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities were Andrew Nunn, chief administrative office for Bridgeport, Trumbull First Selectman Raymond G. Baldwin Jr., Shelton Mayor Mark A. Lauretti and Westport First Selectman Gordon F. Joseloff.

Nunn said Bridgeport has been rocked by back-to-back years of $20 million deficits and this year's budget is $3 million less than last year's.

"We have a 10-percent reduction in spending across departments and that might not be enough," Nunn said. "We have done an aggressive tax collection and foreclosure litigation against some of the poorest people in the state."

Lauretti and Baldwin said in a joint interview after the news conference that the flow of the federal stimulus money for local road construction is actually being hindered.

The funding, they complained, is flowing through the governor's office and Gov. M. Jodi Rell is creating an additional layer of bureaucracy by hiring more employees in the Department of Transportation to oversee the local projects.

"We're told that we can't get any funding until April of 2010," Lauretti said. "The cost with having to follow state and federal mandates to get the money is probably about 40- to 45-percent higher than what we'd do at the local level."

"We thought the stimulus money would be coming directly to the towns and would be monitored by the state of Connecticut," Baldwin said. "We know how to take care of our infrastructure. We don't need the state DOT telling us what to do and controlling what we do."

"We were told that we'd get road-paving money maybe in October, now maybe next spring," Joseloff said in an interview. "That doesn't help us. This is not what [President] Obama meant when he said 'shovel-ready,' for the state then to take off a percentage of the stimulus money for administrative fees.

"That's a slap in the face for the taxpayers of Connecticut."

Local leaders rally for budget answers
Story by: Alan Cohn
WTNH_TV, May 27

Hartford (WTNH) - Local leaders say they need to know how much state aid they're going to receive in order to balance their budgets. They rallied at the State Capitol, Wednesday, hoping to get some answers.

This may seem a little hard to believe but municipal leaders from around the state, including New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, say one of the reasons they all gathered at the State Capitol today was to beg for a meeting with state budget negotiators.

With just a week and a half left in the legislative session, the state's cities and towns still don't know how much state aid they are going to receive. And that uncertainty is reeking havoc on the local budget process.

"We have an obligation by law to send out tax bills in the next two weeks," said Mayor DeStefano. "So, yes, we have no idea whether we are going to have to cut services further. So, a lot of us feel, on behalf of our residents, up against the wall having made tough choices. We still don't know whether we will be able to balance our budgets."

The group is asking for legislators to meet with three municipal leaders -- one from a small community, mid-size, and a city to talk about where things stand when it comes to the state budget and aid to cities and towns

Forget About Paint Ball. Let's Get A Budget
Helen Ubiñas
Hartford Courant

Outgoing Wethersfield Town Manager Bonnie Therrien and I were having a refreshingly candid conversation about the legislature's staggering multibillion-dollar budget paralysis when a press release came across my desk.

A small army of municipal leaders was headed to the Legislative Office Building the next day to ream the governor and state legislature for failing to put together a workable budget with less than a week left in the session.

The mayors and selectmen had made cuts, set budgets. Some were about to send out tax bills — and thanks to the stalemate over at the Capitol, they'd done it all in the dark.

"We still have no clue what state aid to municipalities will be," New Haven Mayor John DeStefano told reporters Wednesday.

One after another, leaders from Mansfield to New Haven — which had just approved its budget — said the same thing: They'd done their job. Now it was about time that Gov. M. Jodi Rell and the legislators did theirs.

It's not a lot to ask when you consider some of the issues they've busied themselves with — taxing plastic bags, regulating paint ball, banning smoking at the casinos — or not. That bill died a fairly unceremonious death.

To be fair, legislators have tried to tackle some important issues this year. There were heated debates about decriminalizing marijuana and, just last week, both chambers voted to abolish the death penalty. Although you have to wonder about spending that much time on something everyone knew was going to end with a gubernatorial veto.

Because that's the big issue here, isn't it — time?

With the kind of time they're devoting to everything but the budget, you'd think they'd already figured out how we're all going to get by with 6 or 8 billion dollars less.

Not that there aren't any budgets floating around — the governor has hers, the Democrats have theirs and even the Republican lawmakers have one.

But apart from moving some money around to close this year's deficit, all they seem to be able to agree on is that someone else is being unrealistic and uncooperative, that someone else's version of a state budget is unacceptable.

You know what's really unacceptable? The fact that the lawmakers charged with making the tough decisions are doing anything and everything but.

The towns aren't the only ones in trouble. There are lots of people and agencies waiting to make some important and difficult decisions of their own — about which jobs to keep, which programs to eliminate, who gets helped, who doesn't.

But they can't make those choices until they have some real numbers to work with.

Look, I think everyone gets that our legislators are in the unenviable position of making things work in an economy worse than we've seen in years. Nobody wants to be the heavy here, and so it's no wonder that distractions are getting the best of them.

But guess what? Everyone's been forced to make these decisions, to have these discussions with their families, their spouses, even themselves, about what stays and what goes.

And at the end of the day, it's the legislators' responsibility to make these tough calls. It's why people voted for them. Anywhere else if you don't do your job, you'd be out.

Paint ball could have waited. The plastic bags aren't going anywhere anytime soon. And as much as we have to either fix or dump the death penalty, that decision won't be made this year.

Now it's time to walk into a room, lock the door, forget the petty distractions and make the dollars line up.

Bottom Line, A Standoff: Clock Running On State Budget Deal
Hartford Courant Lead Editorial

The legislature adjourns from its regular session next Wednesday, June 3, with the likelihood that no state budget for the next two fiscal years will have been adopted and signed by the governor. That would reflect a failure of leadership that ill serves Connecticut's people.

Budget negotiators representing the Democratic-controlled legislature and the Republican governor are making some progress in their meetings behind closed doors. They are reviewing agency budgets, and Democrats reportedly have accepted a few of the spending cuts proposed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell. Only days ago, Mrs. Rell and state Senate President Don Williams each said they wanted a budget signed by adjournment day.

But huge differences between the two sides apparently remain. They still can't agree on the size of the projected deficit for the next two years. Disagreement on the bottom line makes it hard to plan a budget. Democrats want to tax and borrow too much. The governor is equally unrealistic in refusing thus far to consider tax increases. Lawmakers and the governor have hunkered down with their respective positions for most of the session, and now deadline day is nearly upon them.

Chances are slim that Democrats will pass their own version of a budget before next Wednesday. Even if they did, it surely would attract Mrs. Rell's veto, which likely could not be overridden.

The next deadline, and perhaps the more realistic one for an agreement, is July 1, the beginning of the next fiscal year. If lawmakers and the governor miss that one, they'll have exhibited a level of dysfunction usually reserved for New York's hapless State Assembly.

These elected leaders have repeatedly said Connecticut faces the worst fiscal crisis in memory. Yet the highest priority of each side has been, thus far, to avoid doing anything politically risky, to do as little as possible so that the other side "errs" first by proposing unpopular spending cuts and tax increases that will be needed to bridge the record budget deficit and run state government for the next two years.

That's not the kind of leadership in a crisis that Connecticut needs.