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02/21/2018 11:01 PMWell, Governor Dannel Malloy has dropped the hatchet on Madison once again. In his Feb. 5 budget address/press conference, he zeroed out our PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) money, which is intended to reimburse us for hosting Hammonasset State Park. For this privilege, we’re obliged to provide police services for traffic and crowd control, fire response for the Dumpster fires and medical calls, and, most expensive, emergency medical services, which usually aren’t compensated for their response. He also cut all of our ECS (education cost sharing) funds. The only state aid he hasn’t proposed to cut in this speech is some roads and infrastructure money, which he has threatened by his proposed cuts to the Special Transportation Fund.
Will all of this happen? We don’t know because the legislature can still restore these cuts (which he can then cut by special order), so we assume the worst and deal with it. What that means is that we need to fill a gap of roughly $1.2 million in this year’s budget. That’s more than one percent of our budget. To make that up, we have to grow our Grand List by more than $60 million. This year! Since we won’t be able to do that, we’re finding places where we can trim the fat—hard to do in a budget that’s already very lean.
In order to deal with that cut, the Board of Selectmen (BOS) is proposing a budget that increases by only $84,000 in spite of contractual increases far above that. We’ve denied almost all of the extra requests by departments, in many cases choosing to study the need more. The Assessor’s Office asked for another person, as did the town clerk and Beach & Rec. The Engineering Department asked to fill a vacancy created when one engineer left. In all these cases, we’re doing a manpower study to determine what’s needed. I can tell you that we are down overall in our body count from 10 years ago, in spite of many unfunded mandates from the state that require us to do more (with less).
In this context, we are working with the library to make sure it has the funding it needs during the time it’s in transition. At some point in the near future, the library will close for renovations. When it does, its operations will change in some way that’s as yet undetermined. We on the BOS, in our budget proposal, have cut the library budget by $300,000 during this time to reflect a reduction in operations that we anticipate. This is a one-time cut that will be restored when it’s again fully operational, and is based on our best judgment.
We’re trying to deal with an unreasonable situation thrust upon us by a state government that has been fiscally irresponsible for years. It’s now trying to pay the piper with funds that are rightfully ours. While it’s unfair, we’ll continue to deal with it and make the most out of a bad situation.