Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin asked legislators Monday to give the city the legal authority to right its fiscal ship without asking for a state bailout or receivership.
The freshman mayor told members of the Finance Revenue and Bonding Committee that Hartford is facing “a full blown fiscal crisis” and argued that a “financial sustainability commission” is the city’s best path forward.
Hartford’s estimated deficit for fiscal year 2017 is $48.5 million, Bronin said. That’s up from a recent estimate of approximately $32 million.
If state government faced the same deficit as a percentage of its overall budget, its red ink next year would be $4 billion, Bronin said.
“It’s clear that the gap is massive and catastrophic,” Bronin said. “What I’m asking you for are the tools to take action on our own.”
The proposed commission would be co-chaired by the mayor and the secretary of the Office of Policy and Management or his designee. It would also include the city treasurer, council president, four mayoral appointees and others.
The MetroHartford Alliance said it supports Bronin’s efforts to restructure union compensation and benefits and to reduce the city’s annual pension contribution. But the business group asked that lawmakers add language to the bill, including a gradual increase of the city’s artificially low residential property assessment ratio, a sale-leaseback arrangement for state properties in the city, and caps on a proposed commercial property surcharge.
The alliance is also asking for a seat on the commission, should it be created, and a sunset date of no later than June 2019.
Several lawmakers said they understood the difficult position Hartford is in, but were reluctant about the idea of intervening in city affairs, particularly if that intervention was viewed as a weakening of collective bargaining rights. The Connecticut AFL-CIO opposes the bill.
Rep. Russell Morin (D-Wethersfield) urged Bronin to sit down with union heads to try to avoid the need for the proposed bill.
Bronin said he has discussed the city’s fiscal position with union leaders, but said he left with the impression that the efforts may not bear fruit.
“I believe that on key issues that matter, there would have very likely been an impasse,” he said. “There was a reluctance to acknowledge it and I did not come away from those discussions thinking it was going to be anything other than business as usual.”
The last city to use a similar process was Waterbury, which had an oversight commission between 2001 and 2006. Mayor Neil O’Leary, who was a police captain back then, told lawmakers Monday that the process led to difficult concessions from employees, but that it ultimately stabilized Waterbury.
Responding to Morin’s appeal to sit down with city unions, Bronin said the city’s need is immediate, and that he needed the bill filed when it was, earlier this month, in order to meet the legislature’s deadline. If the legislative session was longer, he said he would have waited.
He noted that the city has not asked the state for a bailout.
“This bill does not have a fiscal note of $60 million attached to it, though I’d really like to ask for that,” Bronin said.
Pushing back against the bill Monday were three city councilors, who argued that the commission would weaken their democratically given authority.
Under the proposed language, the commission would make fiscal and operational recommendations to the city council, which would be under a tight timeline to reject the recommendations, or they would be enacted.
Councilor Wildaliz Bermudez called the bill “too much too soon and a social experiment we don’t need to try.”
To enforce its orders, the commission could ask the Attorney General to seek injunctions on its behalf.
“What SB 464 asks is for measures seemingly unlimited in scope,” Bernudez said.
The commission, she claimed, “is setting itself up as an unaccountable branch of government” that would be exempt from the usual democratic procedural rules, such as accepting public comment on proposals.
The commission would also have the ability to arbitrate union contracts when there is a bargaining impasse.
Fire union president Vincent Fusco likened the proposed commission to a “kangaroo court” that would weaken collective bargaining by giving too much power to the city’s executive branch.
In addition to a commercial property surcharge, the bill also calls for a PILOT program for nonprofits in the city.
Connecticut Children’s Medical Center CEO James Shmerling told lawmakers in written testimony that a PILOT levy could damage the hospital’s financial position, which has been worsened by lower Medicaid payments.
Hartford Healthcare submitted testimony arguing that its own fiscal position was worse than the city’s, and noted that the state has recently decided to withhold certain Medicaid payments, including $58 million for services already rendered by HHC.
