For the second time in less than a month, a Wall Street ratings agency has downgraded the city of Hartford’s debt ratings.
On Friday, Moody’s Investors Service announced that it downgraded Hartford’s general obligation debt rating from Baa1 to Ba2. The outlook remains negative.
The announcement comes on the heels of Standard & Poor’s downgrading Hartford’s bond rating last month.
In its ratings decision, Moody’s said the downgrade reflects “the challenges the city faces in achieving structurally balanced operations, closing its current year (fiscal 2017) budget gap and subsequent year projected shortfalls. The city has limited operating flexibility, exacerbated by weak and declining reserves and rising costs (including debt service and pension payments) over the next several years. The rating action also factors in narrowing liquidity and expansion of the current year budget gap since our last review.”
In a written statement following the debt downgrade, Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin said, “For many months, we’ve been shouting from the rooftops what Moody’s independent assessment reinforces today, which is that the City of Hartford cannot cut or tax its way out of a fiscal crisis that’s structural and has been decades in the making. With less taxable property than small suburbs like Glastonbury or Manchester, and with more than half of Hartford’s property non-taxable, the fiscal structure is fundamentally broken.”
