Hartford businesses are breathing a sigh of relief after the city council last week approved a $552 million fiscal 2014-15 budget that reins in government spending and, more importantly, holds the line on further tax increases.
Mayor Pedro Segarra and city council members deserve credit for reaching consensus on a budget that originally proposed raising the city’s tax rate by 2.5 mills. They also made real efforts to cut city spending by about $24 million. Few departments are spared from the cutbacks and 99 city jobs are being eliminated.
While next year’s budget is set, there is still much more work to be done, something even Segarra acknowledges with his call to form two new committees that will offer recommendations on restructuring city government. The committees will look at several cost-cutting measures including potentially changing or eliminating city services. More importantly, they will need to tackle the issue of rising pension and benefit costs, which have hamstrung town, city, and state governments across the country.
One logical step is moving all city employees to 401(k)-style benefit plans, which most of the private sector has done already.
Forming these committees is a wise move, but actions ultimately will speak louder than words. City government has tried using special task forces in the past, only to ignore their advice.
Recommendations by a city panel earlier this year to fix Hartford’s broken property tax system, for example, seem to have been overlooked.
The truth is, if the city doesn’t dramatically change course, future tax increases will be inventible. To avoid further eroding Hartford’s economic competitiveness, tough decisions need to be made now, or businesses and residents will pay the price later.
Keep trash above ground
The state legislature and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy have decided it’s time for the state to stop burning so much of its trash. It sounds like a great idea, but only if policymakers have an alternative plan to dispose waste.
Currently, they don’t and that’s a major concern.
For 40 years, Connecticut really has been the only state to burn the majority of its garbage for electricity, a practice common in countries like Germany and Denmark but shunned in America in favor of burying garbage in landfills. Even though trash-to-energy creates significantly less end waste and a useful electricity resource, U.S. environmental groups prefer landfilling because those facilities can capture the methane created by rotting garbage, despite the fact that most U.S. landfills don’t bother collecting that harmful greenhouse gas.
Connecticut isn’t saying it wants to move toward landfilling; instead Malloy is pushing the state to adopt an eye-popping 60 percent recycling rate in the next 10 years. It is a laudable goal and a better strategy than both burning and burying trash. However, as the recycling rate increases and the amount garbage to burn decreases, the state’s six trash-to-energy plants become less economically viable. Once those plants start closing, the state proposes moving to a disposal technology more environmentally and fiscally beneficial than burying and burning. Problem is, state officials don’t know what that technology is yet.
Our advice: Look before you leap. Aspiring to some grand new disposal technology is great, but Connecticut shouldn’t cut off the legs of its existing disposal industry before state officials are sure what will replace it. Whatever Connecticut does, it can’t fall into the never-ending pile of garbage that is landfilling.
