As promised, Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin’s first ever budget contains steep cuts, including layoffs, but no property tax increases.
Facing a $48.5 million budget deficit in the fiscal year that starts July 1, Bronin on Monday proposed cutting 100 city positions (including 40 layoffs), squeezing concessions from labor unions and virtually eliminating all cultural and arts grants.
He said he remained unwilling to raise the city’s 74.29 mill rate, which is by far the highest in the state.
Combined with efforts to reduce police overtime pay, across-the-board cuts in city departments and other measures, the job cuts would amount to a total of $15 million in savings. Bronin has not proposed laying off police officers or firefighters.
The mayor has also penciled in $15.5 million in labor concessions, which could include changes to benefit and pension design, wage freezes, furloughs and other measures.
City unions this month said they could offer somewhere between $8 million and $12 million in savings next year, which Bronin said at the time would not be enough.
Bronin’s budget also includes $1 million in concessions from non-union workers.
The entire budget, including city and school operations, is $557 million. He said he would flat fund the city’s school system, and that some schools may be consolidated. The mayor has also slashed the city’s capital projects budget from $110 million to $48 million. He said renovation work on Weaver High would move forward.
The budget contains no plans to borrow money in fiscal year 2017.
The measures proposed by Bronin would close the 2017 budget gap, and lower the projected deficit in fiscal year 2018 from $69 million to $30 million, and the fiscal year 2019 deficit from $88 million to $53 million, he said. But those numbers will only hold true if the council enacts all of Bronin’s recommendations, or finds equal savings elsewhere.
Bronin, who has criticized his predecessor (Mayor Pedro Segarra) for selling city assets to help close budget gaps, was clear that his budget proposal – which will now go to the city council for negotiation – was unable to avoid relying on some one-time revenues. He said approximately one-third of the deficit-mitigation measures were from unsustainable one-time funding sources, including exhausting the city’s $21 million reserve fund. Nearly half that amount will close the current fiscal year deficit, while the rest would be used for fiscal year 2017.
Of the city’s required $41 million pension fund contribution in the coming year, $5 million would come in the form of a transfer of ownership of Batterson Park to the fund, Bronin said.
Bronin said his biggest criticism of past administrations is that they largely ignored what they knew would be mounting costs, such as debt service and pension contributions, in the years ahead.
“What I’m most critical of is that nobody’s been pulling the alarm bell and sending out flares and saying ‘we cant keep doing this,’ ” he said. “So I’m going to be very clear. We can’t keep doing this.”
As he has done in recent weeks, Bronin stressed that the city was on an unsustainable track that would require state intervention, perhaps as early as fiscal year 2018, when the city will have even fewer options to close an even larger projected gap.
Hartford’s government is already running lean, he said, with its employee counts down nearly one-third since 2000, to 1,337 employees.
Bronin said regionalization measures like cost sharing among surrounding communities, full PILOT payments by the state and local-option taxes could help Hartford avoid insolvency in future years. But the city will need the legislature’s help, he said.
Bronin said he kept funding for city shelters and food pantries, and that libraries would remain open, although the Hartford Public Library system would take a $600,000 hair cut. A $1 million summer youth employment program would remain intact, he said.
