North Stonington cuts Town Budget by 8.1%

According to the Westerly Sun’s Chris Sheldon, North Stonington, the Town RIGHT NEXT TO US across the State Line has dropped their Municipal budget from $5,923,323 to $5,443,768.  Hopkinton is about $380,000 short in its budget, North Stonington is only $181,000 short.  So our CT neighbor lost less in revenue and was able to cut almost $500K from their budget.  If we were able to do that, our taxes would decrease by >3%, instead of increasing by that amount.  So far, Hopkinton has only been able to cut $41,000 from our budget.

So North Stonington is proof that it CAN be done.  Why CAN’T we do it?  Any answers, Town Council?  Town Manager?  Are we just fat and lazy, as I suspect?  Or are we going to keep blaming contracts, the same type of contracts that North Providence has gotten a judge to overturn?

Good job Town Council!  Or not.

This is also made more amusing by Felkner’s letter to the Sun.  He bemoans the fact that the title, “Seniors could lose free lunch”, was unfair to the Town Council and apparently pissed him off.  Welcome to Rhode Island, Bill. Despite the fact that I quote the Sun incessantly, as a newspaper it is self-serving and generally of pretty poor journalistic quality.  Although in the past year, the new editor has improved things quite a bit.  But that is besides the point.  My point is, stop being such a whiner.  I was thinking of titling this post, “Felkner continues to whine”.  In the context of the pissant cut that removing the meals director will result in, you are making a mountain our of a mole-hill by writing a letter to the Sun.  So go take a look at the North Stonington budget and then make some real “change” in Hopkinton instead of pretending that you are doing something when you are CLEARLY not.

Oh, and how’s that fight with the School Board going?

Thank You, Mr. DiLibero

The Westerly Sun reports that the Town Council is proposing to cut the Director of Senior Meals (is that the official title?) but the seniors will still get their meals. The only change will be administration.  The current Director, Mark Radicioni, is pretty pissed and intends to see if the union can help him keep his job.  Personally, I think he should be put in charge of the GIS Department and save us some money that way.   But the article goes on to say,

 Because the meal site director was a position included in a union contract with the town, DiLibero told the council Radicioni may be able to file a grievance.

Well, we only have one person to blame for the union contracts:  William DiLibero.  Ok, that may not be entirely true.  DiLibero may not have been involved in all the current Town contracts, but he has been involved in some.  I would like to know if he was involved in this one?  And if so, why is it written in such a way to permit a person to file a greivance/etc. if they are let go when their department is closed down?  It seems like a pretty simple contract clause to me:  If your department is shut down for any reason, you can and will be fired.  Apparently not.  Bill, please write that down and keep it in a safe place for future reference (ie the next contract negotiation).  Here is a better thought, hire a professional to negotiate our contracts next time.  Preferably one from out-of-state!  Lets stop being pennywise and pound foolish, shall we?

Analyzing the Hopkinton Budget

Since Mrs. Buck was happy to tell me that voting down the current Hopkinton Budget would increase our tax rate from 3% to 4.5%, I thought this might be worth a little investigation.  Luckily, the budget is posted online and she passed on the link:

http://www.hopkintonri.org/pdfs_downloads/Finance/budget0910PublishedDraft_all.pdf

 

Now lets pick it apart:

2008 Total Budget:  $23,500,248   

2009 Total Budget:  $23,446,077

 

So based on just the totals, we will be spending $54,171 less this year than next.  Now that should relate to a flat budget, assuming Chariho holds to the numbers listed in the budget.  However, I have no idea if those numbers are a guess or are an actual commitment from Chariho.  But hey, that’s great!  But if we reverted to last years budget, however, that $50K does not amount to a 1.5% increase, does it?  The math:  50K/$23,500,248 = 0.25%.  It’s even less when we consider that amount is probably a percentage of $15 million, but I’ll get there in a minute.

So where does that additional money come from?  In other words, what is different about this years budget that is going to save us 1.5% over last years budget.  If you look at the numbers, this year’s budget is a decrease of 0.25%, yet our taxes are going to go up by 3%.  Now obviously, the tax rate is determined by not only how much we spend but by how much we earn.  If we are spending 0.25% less but our taxes go up by 3%, we are earning less money than we did last year.  This is not unexpected, the economy is in the toilet.  Mrs. Bucks contention is that the savings are actually from Chariho, because they are spending surplus on the operating budget, and we will pay less.  But the budget published online does not bare that out.  In 2008, we paid Chariho  $17,720,106.   In 2009, we expect to pay Chariho $17,720,353.  So as far as I can tell, voting down the budget will cost us exactly $54,418 more than going with the new budget.  So in the end, it is probably better to go with the new budget than the old budget, we are actually spending less.  But only 0.25% less.

What becomes imperative now are the revenue projections.  However, the data in the budget is pretty useless.  The reason that it is useless is that the budget makes the calculation that we will raise exactly as much as we will spend.  Ultimately we will, but it does not show you the numbers that get us to that place.   It does not show us the shortfall and what is required t o make it up, or at least, I can’t find it.

If the Town Council had done a better job of crafting a budget, we would have a 0% tax increase.  But that is not the case.  Some rough math for you.  The budget is about $23.5 million.  We need to raise an additional 3% in taxes to cover this cost (this math is rough, I don’t have all the figures to do this right because the budget does not tell us how much we will earn if we don’t raise taxes, but bare with me).  That amounts t0 $702,000.  Our revenues are $702,000 short of our expenses.  Please dispute this figure if it is in error, I don’t know our actual shortfall so this is a guess.  I suspect the number is actually closer to $450,000, however, because the 3% increase will be on property taxes and the total amount we generated on property last year was $15,069,614, not $23.4 million (3% of 23.4 million is about $702,000).

The reason our taxes are going to increase either 3% or 4.5% is that 1.) we did not generate enough money to cover our expenses, even after we drop $50K from the budget and 2.) we spend too much money.  The only way to make this money up in the short term is to cut departmental expenses or to tax us into the stone age. Unfortunately, the only department that really took a hit was Emergency Management.  They went from $38,000 to $8,000.  That accounts for 55% of the budget cut this year.  And that was because of two one-time expenses.   Examining the budget, it appears that general government, the tax assessor and the tax collector also saw some sizable cuts to the tune of about $70K combined.  Great.  What about everyone else:

Town Clerk 2008 to 2009 increase:  $1497 (0.6%)

Planner 2008 to 2009 increase:  $1178 (1.0%)

Police 2008 to 2009 increase:  $19,281 (1.1%)

Public Works 2008 to 2009 increase:  $127,564 (11%) 

Town Manager 2008 to 2009 increase:  $1102 (0.9%)

Zoning 2008 to 2009 increase:  :  $1500 (46%)

So what does the budget tell us?  It tells us that some departments got cut, other departments got increases and we’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.  What we have here folks, is a classic shell game.  Sure, we cut $54K from the total budget, but not all departments got cuts.  If each department listed was about flat, the budget would have been cut by an additional $152K.  If these departments had been cut, we may have seen an additional $200K decrease.  But we decided that some departments and some people were more important than others. Is anyone in Hopkinton surprised that during the first year of the Second Great Depression, the Hopkinton Police Department continued to get increases?

Warwick is cutting police hours, salaries and uniform allowances.  Hopkinton is not.  I would argue that Warwick needs their cops a heck of alot more than we need ours. All over Rhode Island, Towns are cutting budgets.  North Providence, Woonsocket, Warwick, etc.  But not us. 

For the Town Council to cry about Chariho is disgraceful when the citizens can see how poorly we are managing our money.  In the end, it does not matter if we vote the budget down or not, all the Town Council has done is shift money from General Government into Public Works, from the Tax Assessor into the Police Department.  But I guess the threat of the budget being voted down has kept them from spending more, they just continue to spend what they have inappropriately. 

As Mrs. Busk noted, “Perhaps the 3% can become lower. ”  Ya think?

New taxes anyone?

According to Ms. Vicki Goff of the Westerly Sun, Hopkinton’s tax rate may increase by as much as 3%.  Initially, the Town was predicting a marginal raise of less than 1% but obviously, things have changed.  I am not surprised.  The Town kept the tax rate stable last year by using some overly optimistic numbers about how much money we would actually collect.  When you monkey around with the numbers, you can expect to eventually pay the piper.  But the Town Manger did not still expect to be in Hopkinton, so the hit-and-run tactics are completely understandable.  This year we are losing a good bit of state aid and we can expect to collect fewer taxes.  So unless we spend less, you and I need to come up with the cash.

But there is a bright side.  You can keep your taxes stable by voting down the budget in June.  Other Towns are cutting staff and laying people off and THE COURTS ARE LETTING THEM!  If the Town Council is hesitant to lay people off, we can do it for them by voting the budget down.  It’s that easy.  A rejected budget means a flat budget, the same one as last year.

The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

In yesterdays Westerly Sun, the following sentence led off an article about Hopkinton and Chariho:

HOPKINTON — Members of the Town Council criticized the Chariho Regional School District’s proposed $53.32-million spending plan for 2009-10, accusing the School Committee of not following orders from town officials to slash expenses below those allocated for this year. [Following orders?  I did not realize that School Board reports to the Town Council- wouldn't that be a hell of a conflict-of-interest for Felkner, to have to report to himself?]

Followed by:

Councilors said they fear that if potential cuts in state aid are not set off by reductions in education expenses, they will have to cut town services. Education is about 75 percent of Hopkinton’s spending plan for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1. [I wonder how much goes towards duplicate policing, you know, the work we pay the Hopkinton Police to do that the State Police already do?]

With this sprinkled in for good measure:

Capalbo also noted that taxpayers in Stonington rejected the town’s proposed budget four times last summer, forcing officials to make further reductions, including education funds.
  “If that’s what it takes, I would like to see that,” she said.

 

Now here is the thing:  I don’t give a rats furry ass about “Town Services” in Hopkinton.  I don’t use them.  And since this seems to be the rationale we use to assail Chariho (despite how stupid this rationale is), I can use it here for my purposes.  The Town of Hopkinton proposes to raise our taxes on municipal services this year.  Admittedly, I think the Town has done a good job by proposing a small raise, but it is still a raise.  Hopkinton IS NOT laying anyone off to keep the municipal budget level funded, nor are they cutting salaries like up in Northern RI.  So why should Chariho do any better?  Chariho is planning a small increase (about 1%) and Hopkinton is planning a small increase (less than 1%).  And in fact, Hopkinton’s share of the Chariho budget is down 0.23% from last year.  Obviously, we have no idea how much state-aid is going to get chopped so theoretically, we could be on the hook for a 5% tax increase (can’t go higher than that, State law, right-  HA HA HA, like they won’t just get a legislative over ride and screw us for 18% again).  But if Hopkinton can’t clean up its own house by dumping useless positions (I mean you, GIS guy) and cutting to the bone, why should the school district?  On a single day, Chariho SERVICES more people than Hopkinton does in a month (albeit most of them are small and can’t vote and are thus considered worthless citizens).  

This is a case of the Hopkinton Town Council saying, “do what we say, not as we do”.  When the Town Council (and Mr. Manager) can cut Hopkinton’s budget, then they can strong-arm Chariho with the appropriate amount of self-righteousness.

Oh, and Mrs. Capalbo, how about we vote down the Hopkinton Budget in June?  Should we obstruct all those important Town Services by voting against the Hopkinton budget and forcing you to deal with level funding?  And even if we do, Chariho will still get their cut!  The only way to stop them is to vote down the Chariho referendum and I doubt we’ve got the votes for that.  Besides, threatening Chariho has gotten so passe.  Foist the blame on someone else all you want, you are doing nothing to solve our Towns financial woes and have become quite transparent in your scapegoating.