Unlike Congress, where C-SPAN tightly focuses its television eye on the congresscritters that speak to mostly empty seats, the seats in the Common Council chambers were filled last night. While the public could speak to the Common Council on any topic, the crowd distinctly fell into one of two camps, camp flood and camp-education administration- self-preservationists. So that’s what a $246,367,103 operating budget comes down to. But actually, the allocation of the budget is really up to the Board of Estimate and Taxation.
Much of what the people who spoke in support of the BOE budget was emotional pleas to not “cut” $6 million from the schools. People were at turns terrified at the devastation that would occur if the proposed BOE was not left intact. Of course, they didn’t say proposed budget increase, which is what the BOE requested. They used the language of emotional blackmail, “spending cuts”. The thing is, Mr. Haney of Green Acres used to trot out that line about all the money that would be saved if you just spent more on this or that. Snake Oil is what the Norwalk Board of Ed is selling.
The flood victims on the other hand, were in their 6th month of fighting city hall. They’ve videotaped, documented, itemized, and budgetized all the details of what they’ve experienced and what it will take to prevent the next big flood. There wasn’t a single Council member who was unsympathetic to their plight.
Superintendent Corda spoke at great length about the budget and somehow managed to say, in about 16 minutes of laundry listing all the teachers, extra curricular activities and the oddly named Parent Information Central Officer, that no, nada, zilch, nyet, nein cuts will happen to anything that goes on in the third floor of city hall, which is where the vast spending empire is managed. Ah well, there are some who blame teacher unions for the high cost of school systems, but teacher unions aren’t responsible for bloated management layers that breed like mold on wet carpet.
And these school administrators certainly like to circle the wagons and ignore the mouldy thinking that dominates how they spend money. In the corporate world, a spending cut is when you take last year’s budget and reduce it. A spending increase is when you take last year’s budget and increase it. Apparently Corda, in addition to the two co-chairs of the PTO, and a principal of one of the middle schools who each spoke last night, would fail this simple word math problem. Perhaps that is why they have concluded that No Child Left Behind mandates translates into No Administrator Left Behind. I’ve always wondered how now State Rep Bruce Morris has managed to hang on to his job as Director of Human Relations at the Board of Ed. If he’s up in Hartford during the day, who’s doing that administrative job that Corda says can’t be cut?
Councilman Matt Miklave-D didn’t see any fat in the BOE budget. I wonder if he read it thoroughly because in the face of stagnant enrollment over the last 10 years, a $52 million operating increase at the pace of 57% sure looks fat compared to the $31 million increase or 33% that the city operating budget experienced. Buried in that budget are items like $350k for new math text books that will replace ones purchased three years ago. Miklave moved to increase the cap by $5.25 million in an amendment that was supported only by Doug Sutton-D, Kevin Poruban-D and Miklave.
Fred Bondi pointed out that the proposed BOE of budget included an 11% pay increase to administrators and noted that the when the schools are closed for a snow day, no one at the administrative level shows up to work. School kids have to make up the days at the end of the school year, but this apparently does not apply to administrators. Perhaps that’s why they propose hiring consultants for many tasks, because consultants do work on snow days.
Rick McQuaid asked how it was that Corda could prepare his 16 minute speech for the night, with it’s list of cuts when he had not responded to a list of 32 questions that was asked of him by the chairman of the BET, Fred Wilms. I asked Wilms about that list of 32 questions, and he said that it was given to Corda over a month and half ago. Wilms went on to say that Corda provided solid rationale for why 255 elementary school teachers were needed. But, Wilms pointed out, Corda did not provide comparable analysis for the number of middle, special ed and high school teacher staffing levels.
So for all those remedial social studies educators out there, when the chair of the committee who decides budget allocations, asks questions about line items in your budget do you . . .
- a) ignore the request
- b) send an email to rally support for your budget at a public
hearing not concerned with line item spending - c) spend time writing long speech
- d) all of the above.
Corda’s answer was D.
The Council’s answer to the budget cap question was to vote for it 10-5, after Gwen Briggs switched her vote from supporting the cap, as she did when voting for it out of the finance committee, but then voting against it as part of the full council vote. Apparently she decided to sustain the wrath of the Rowaytonites against tax increases over the wrath of school administrators with a spending addiction. That means that the usual suspects of the Norwalk-outers all voted against the cap, continuing their quixotic mission to provide reasons for voters to vote them out of office.
Following the vote an interesting discussion was held on a line item relating to WIFI surveillance cameras requested by the police department. The debate centered on need versus privacy concerns. Privacy concerns should have been more of a hot issue for the council members the minute they heard that video taken by these cameras was going to be transmitted via WIFI to a network node that then directed the images to a server deep within the server room at the Norwalk police department. The 4th amendment has been steadily chipped away by those that want to record everything in hopes of preventing or reducing crime.
Recording images of people in public places, as proposed for Calf Pasture Beach should have raised privacy concerns. For example, if these images are stored on hard drives, how are those hard drives then disposed of at end of life?
The tech world is filled with stories of computers and drives purchased at government auction that can be harvested for data because the original government entity did not understand that magnetic images stay on a drive long after they are superficially erased. And why would the police department store 90 days of daily video if no warrant was executed for such evidence? And why would the cameras use 802.11a, with its weak encryption over 80211n? And what encryption was going to be used to prevent a data hijacker from picking off these images as they travel the WIFI cloud?
Later council action included a vote 10-4-1 with Kelly Straniti abstaining on a vote to proceed with an eminent domain seizure of a small strip of land needed for right of way for a bus stop shelter. Mike Coffey-D, Carvin Hilliard-D, Herb Grant-D, and Nick Kydes-R voted against it.
The last action of the night was to vote on a resolution to continue the nonpartisan meetings. All council members voted in favor of the resolution. Two amendments were proposed by Matt Miklave, one formalizing up to 15 minutes of public participation at the meetings. That amendment passed unanimously. The other was about requiring 3 council members from any party to initiate discussion on an agenda item. There was much confusion about this amendment, and with midnight looming, it was voted down, 10-5, with the Norwalk-outers voting in lock step even though Kevin Poruban was clearly confused about what the amendment was about. Solidarity in confusion apparently more important than clarification and lucidity.
