Yegads $400k In Savings In An Election Year
Tonight we differ from our normal Common Council coverage because, sadly, the battery on my macbook was expended on the whirlwind of meetings concerning pARTy in the park. What’s that? Norwalk’s Art Commission is hosting a one day arts festival on June 20th. Click over here for more details.
So it was the old fashioned, blogger with a pen in the council chambers. And the common council meeting only ran long because of an executive session where they discussed something with no action. See the agenda here for details.
Everything was on consent except for a minor accounting transfer of about $23k which Bill Krummel wanted you to know that the money was for ordinance employees, that would be non union employees, in 5 departments. Otherwise known as Directors of departments. The money was to cover raises voted on in April of 2008. Krummel wanted to know why they should get raises when the city was facing layoffs. The Mayor wanted to know why Krummel was bringing up layoffs when the city had been working on avoiding layoffs.
This line of questioning and was the most excitement of the meeting, but in the end, the issue was merely an accounting transfer, as Phylis Bolden stated, “to balance the books.” Apparently the city puts money in contingency accounts until it is needed. But before then, based on the routine employee activities, payroll accounts typically accrue unspent funds. In this case there wasn’t any accrual they could automatically use, so they needed to dip into the contingency account.
Meanwhile one of the items on the agenda that should have sparked discussion was the apparent $400k in bond refinancing savings. Remember when there was all that concern over bonding refinancing on Waypointe?
Well here’s the item on consent:
6. Resolution with respect to the issuance and sale of not exceeding $18,700,000 city of Norwalk,Connecticut General Obligation Bonds, series 2009.
Note that there’s nothing there to indicate that there’s a $400k savings. Nothing on the May 14th Finance Committee agenda either. Were it not for the Mayor and Council member Doug Hempstead actually mentioning to me that there was this savings, I wouldn’t have known about it, and neither would you.
The amazing thing is that its an election year. The Mayor and the council members are running for reelection. You’d think that they’d all like to grab some positive news items every once in awhile! Especially when cities all around Norwalk are making lay offs, and hiking property taxes by double digits.
Channel 79 will provide all this scintallating council action.
