Finance Committee Chips Away At Budget

While they didn’t exactly take a chainsaw to City Manager Denise Rose’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2012, members of New London City Council’s Finance Committee did manage to chip away a little from each department that came before them at Thursday night’s meeting.

Committee Chair Robert Pero and Councilor Adam Sprecace’s stated goal was to trim $1.95 million to keep funding levels on par with the 2011 budget. They didn’t make it to the finish line last night but they did clear the halfway point, mostly by opting not to fund requests for new positions in the fire, police, finance, and planning and development departments.

The was first on the chopping block but councilors didn’t break new ground by rejecting a request to create a new deputy fire chief position, at a salary of $120,200. Although Pero told New London Fire Chief Ron Samul that he had trouble saying no to him, “no” has been the answer to Samul’s request for a deputy chief for years now. The Finance Committee approved the fire department’s budget at $7,240,615, a little higher than the 2010-2011 level of $7,103,854 to accommodate projected overtime costs and increases in water rates.

Chief Margaret Ackley walked away with less than she’d hoped for when the committee declined to add 12 new police officers to bring the police force closer to the 119 target set by a city-commissioned study aimed at improving New London’s Police Department. As a compromise, Pero and Sprecace proposed funding for six additional officers but that motion failed.

Ackley didn’t go away empty handed, however. After Ackley told councilors that a number of police officers, including a captain, were spending time away from patrol duties because they were typing up the General Duty Manual, councilors agreed to fund a new secretarial position. The committee also strongly favored hiring a part-time crime analyst to help the department know when to dispatch officers to areas in which certain crimes seem to be occurring on a predictable basis.

“It seems to me the most critical position is the crimes analyst,” said Mayor Martin Olsen, noting that it would help increase the efficiency of the department. “We’re six square miles. It’s hard to fathom that we need over 100 police officers.”  

The debate over the police budget request for $11,682,045 grew heated when Councilor Michael Buscetto III questioned the wisdom of including a proposed $10,000 raise for deputy chief Marshall Segar and a possible $18,000 raise for Chief Ackley, even though the city manager pointed out these are merely “placeholders” and not actual commitments.

“I made a motion last night for salaries that no employee would receive a raise of greater than 3 percent,” said Buscetto.

“That motion failed last night,” said Pero, who stands by his position that people should be rewarded based on their job performance. Buscetto countered by rattling off the names of people who are not receiving pay increases in this budget but who he thinks deserve one. “I don’t know that we should be giving $18,000 or $10,000 raises when, in union negotiations, we’re talking 1 percent," he said. "It’s not consistent. It’s not balanced.”

In the end, the Finance Committee voted to approve a police department budget that, without additional police officers, came in at about $590,000 less than the City Manager’s proposal. “I would like to have these 23 officers and support staff but we’re going to continue to move forward,” said Ackley. “We’ll make it work, either way.”

Other city departments had an easier time of it. New London’s Emergency Management Department was funded at $20,200, in part because it anticipates receiving $12,500 in reimbursements from the state. The information technology department received the $766,073 it requested after Finance Director Jim Lathrop pointed out that every city department depends on IT expertise to function and would probably cut from their own budgets before they’d cut from this one.

Uncertainty over what a newly-elected powerful mayor might want to do stalled a proposal to consolidate development and planning, building inspection, and building maintenance under one director. “We’re being asked for a budget decision but it’s a policy decision,” said Olsen.

Accordingly, the Finance Committee voted not to fund a proposed $140,000-a-year position for a Facilities, Planning, and Development Director and asked to take a closer look at the line items for each individual department at another meeting on April 25.

Councilors continued to look for and find additional places to cut the budget. Lathrop told Pero that removing $200,000 from the worker’s compensation fund made him “nervous,” but he was comfortable with the $100,000 cut that the Finance Committee ultimately approved. He was equally comfortable with the committee’s decision to trim $50,000 from retirement liabilities, to reduce the money the city pays into an unemployment fund by $25,000, and to cull $25,000 from a grant contingency fund.

The Finance Department, meanwhile, promised to offer suggestions as to how it might trim from its own budget at the next meeting. The Board of Education will be the focus of the next Finance Committee meeting, which is scheduled to be held at 6 p.m. on Monday at City Hall.