Editorial

An open letter to MARB

Dear Municipal Accountability Review Board:

Listen, we get it. The City of West Haven has used a Ponzi scheme of tricks, budgetary sleights of hand, and lots of state money over the last two and a half decades to balance – at least on paper – its annual budgets. Every year since 1989, the budget has had the same number on the debit side of the ledger as it had on the revenue side. But each year, things got worse.

The worst, of course, was 1991, when it was discovered money from the state was counted twice, and what should have been a balanced budget was found to be $17 million short. Politicians knew that going in, but the City Council gave the nation a lesson it would use later in gridlock and refused to, or couldn’t fix it. Part of it was the arcane manner we use to amend budget items, needing a super-majority to get it passed. That might change with a charter revision, but that’s the topic for another day.

When your colleagues came into the city back then, they did pretty much what you’re doing now: taxing the residents to death in order to balance the books, and using the carrot and stick approach of state grant money to force the tax hikes. That forced the second exodus from the city in less than a decade. The first came with the housing bubble bursting in 1988 that set up the failures of 1989 and 1991.

For three years, the state forced the city to have a real, balanced budget. And it seemed for a few years thereafter things were on the right track. But they weren’t. You see, the city suffers not so much from a tax problem as a revenue problem. Loss of big industries, Armstrong and Bayer, for example, which were the largest employers in the city, really hit our tax base.

Then the city went on a bonding spree. For about five years it seemed bonding was the way to go for everything. We bonded for school expansions, parks, roads, you name it. And every time there was a bond, there was money for “administration” and that administration somehow found its way into the “revenue” of the city and bills were paid with it. So, the revenue problems were given a bandage, but the injury never healed.

Then it was found the city had a $10.8 million deficit, which a mayor, John Picard, determined was a paper loss, and would be paid off when the city was in better straits. That never happened. Another housing bubble bursting put off what should have been a four-year pay off into a decade-plus-long albatross. Then in the final hours of 2017, Mayor Ed O’Brien, who couldn’t get the books to balance either, bonded to rid the city of the deficit. That’s where you came in.

Our concern with your “tax us out of trouble” plan is that you are not seeing the human toll. Under the five-year plan you’ve foisted on the city, the mill rate will go up to 40 – not including fire taxes, which will put it up over 51 in all districts of the city. At the same time, we’ve gutted spending to the point there is little return for the dollars contributed. The For Sale signs are already starting to show up.

The result of this inexorable tax-hike policy is the loss of longtime residents, and houses standing unsold for months or, in some cases, years. In pushing taxes, you are losing residents – much like the State of Connecticut.

We understand your job. We understand the city has to get its books straightened out. But this can be done – it must be done – understanding that people, not numbers are the ones involved. Your cure can be worse than the disease, and the city may never recover.

The West Haven Voice