Norwalk Facing Budget Woes

With the municipal election concluded, we now focus on the real issue facing Norwalk for the upcoming year. Money. Rather, the lack of it filling the general fund. Chief Finance Director Tom Hamilton outlines the problem thusly; pension funding is going up, state aide likely is going to be less and forget about seeing any relief from real estate conveyance fees or an increase in the grand list.

So what’s a city to do? According to Hamilton and Moccia implement a hiring freeze and tell City departments to plan for �getting a zero percent pro forma budget increase. Oh were running a municipal budget all so simple.

The problem here is the rather one sided conversation we are having about the budget. It’s all about cutting back, the same story we’ve been hearing for 4 years. What we haven’t been hearing about is the investment into city infrastructure that will ensure that our tax dollars are being leveraged to gain increased services. Usually these types of arguments fall to the folks that are into actual governing. But since the Norwalk Democrats have sort of abdicated their future relevance, we don’t have anyone from that side of the aisle talking up the point counter point debate, and so nothing like the counter argument to the prevailing we will leave nothing uncut mantra.

It’s not hard to do. Let’s take garbage. We pay $70-something a ton to haul the stuff away. From a budget standpoint you could try to lower the cost per ton, or lower the tonnage you haul. The first bit, lowering the cost per ton was already tackled. The administration did the right thing there. The second bit is being ignored. Famously by the BOE, but I think the new peeps will kick that one around by getting the BOE janitorial services to recycle the recycling bins instead of tossing them into the garbage bins. But more mundanely, you and me need to toss less stuff into our garbage bags. Left to our own devices, we have a poor track record. Which is why other cities and towns around Connecticut have adopted a more carrot stick approach with a “pay-as-you-throw” program.

The Courant reports on the program here, but essentially it is designed to increase recycling, which ends up reducing the tonnage of garbage that is hauled away. Town like Granby have seen a 50% drop in garbage put out for pickup. They make it happen by giving people a 95 gallon Recycling bin, and a 65 gallon garbage bin. If you throw more than your 65 gallons of trash, you have to buy special bags from the city at $2 a pop. Granby isn’t alone, there are 29 other towns doing it including Stonington, Mansfield and Putnam, who all offer curb side pick up. Stonington, with a population of about 20k apparently has saved $140k.

But implementing these types of programs take investments. Increasing recycling to reduce garbage waste is something that DPW has been working on. The thing is that it has entirely lacked and funding for the education aspect of recycling. Norwalkers can recycle more, but you wouldn’t know it since no public education campaign in English, let alone in the multiple languages needed to reach many of Norwalk’s residents, has occurred. UPDATE: lo and behold the recycling info distributed to residents in their recycling bins this last week! Click here–>EXPANDED CURBSIDE RECYCLING OPTIONS

That public education component can also mean engaging the public in solving some of Norwalk’s more intractable problems. There’s no feedback from the city whenever you call customer service to register a complaint or concern about something. If residents could see that problems and concerns were being dealt with, or that certain parts of town seemingly generate more problems than others, resources to address them could be better utilized. If the concentration of street trash is higher near fast food restaurants, maybe having more garbage containers with recycling would reduce that.

Meanwhile while the budgets for city departments are being examined, costs of consumables are still rising. We have already seen salt and asphalt prices increase each year. It is not realistic to think that those won’t increase this year, or that there will be less pot holes and less snow storms this year as well. Paper is another cost, and yet the City runs on paper reports. Isn’t it time that residents can obtain applications via electronic forms that never see paper?

It is too simplistic to just reduce operating budgets, there needs to be more thinking on how to engage the public in reducing costs to the city as well. That is a dialog worth having, instead of only looking at one side of the budget equation.