Who knew Stuart Wells could write about the city budgeting process with such clarity. If only he and Corda had gotten together and had a conversation about how one should go about creating understanding about a budget. Clarity, however, doesn’t mean accuracy. So let’s take a closer look at what Wells said.

The Department of Public Works needs more money, not less. Our infrastructure suffers from a lot of neglect, and budget cutting, during the Esposito years. Under Mayor Knopp’s leadership the city took on the leaking school roofs and the many other school building needs. This year we have to take care of the flooding. Next year it will be something else.

All well and good but why is Wells confusing infrastructure with school roofs? The school building improvement plan went well beyond fixing leaky roofs, and at the expense of leaky sewer pipes and drains, the usual road paving deferrals, traffic light upgrades, etc. And some of the school roofs still leaked. But maybe Wells is thinking that adding speed bumps at the cost of paving roads was some sort of great infrastructure improvement. So a more balanced assessment of infrastructure spending wold be to say that Norwalk, under any mayor, has not exactly done a very good job of addressing long range infrastructure spending. And as Doug Hempstead pointed out the other night, all this infrastructure spending needs to have an accompanying maintenance plan and funding.
Wells continues:

If we knew how much money Norwalk was going to get from the State, we might not have to cut anything. But we don’t know. Fortunately, some of the uncertainties over labor contracts, energy costs and medical and retirement benefit costs have been resolved, or at least reduced and we are able to reduce these budget items by around $1 million. This took care of the city side of the equation with just one job cut - the Mayor’s assistant position, which was still in Mayor Moccia’s budget request even though he had attacked Mayor Knopp for wasting money by having an assistant in the first place. Hardly any cuts were made to any of the city’s programs. Just to the school budget.

As I remember it there was extensive discussion about energy costs and savings at the BET DPW meeting. It wasn’t a question of uncertainty over energy costs as much as a realization that the budgeting numbers used were perhaps inflated from the current price models. Alvord also went to great pains to explain how those medical benefit costs were reduced by the implementation of a safety training program. In other words. on the City side, there was a back and forth discussion about how to reign in costs and trim from the budget. And Wells is being a little disingenuous here, because the DPW budget was severely cut from the Department recommended budget. The increase is slightly over 1% from last year.

I didn’t spend much time with other department budgets, but I find it hard to believe that the BET singled out just DPW and the BOE, and that all Wells remembers is the BOE recommended increase, which he terms “cut”.

Wells attempts a breakdown of the BOE budget:

Education is a tempting target for cuts because it is over 55% of the city’s budget - about $146 million was requested for 2006-07. About $95 million of that request is for salaries and another $30 million is for benefits. We pay our teachers about the same as other towns, and they work just as hard Maybe harder. Norwalk (and Stamford) have greater ethnic diversity that the surrounding towns, and that’s got to make it a littler harder to teach everybody. In any event, the teacher pay is locked-in by their labor contract. That only leaves $20 million for everything else, like building maintenance, equipment, special education costs, utilities and so forth. There is no way to cut $4 million from the remaining $20 million. Obviously staff will have to be cut; and programs. These cuts will fall mostly on the high schools because teachers can’t be cut from elementary and middle schools. There are rules governing maximum class sizes.

Here Wells breaks down the crux of the problem. Sort of. Of the salary he neglects to point out the administrative versus the educational breakdowns. Corda should have provided that level of detail in the first place. The BET in fact, if you refer to the 32 questions, was satisfied that the teacher requests were adequate, and at no point did the BET ask for teacher reductions. But the BET did ask about all sorts of expenditures that showed sharp increases over the previous budgets and this is where Corda failed to make an argument about why not a single item was trimmed back. Wells is correct to point out that the city can’t say what to cut out of the BOE budget. But Corda has made it perfectly clear, nothing in his budget can be cut. And he states this despite the fact that Opdahl has admitted that no budget reconciliation has taken place. Corda has no real grasp of what the budget needs really are because there are no financial controls in the school system because the one administrative position that Corda cut was a financial director.

Wells concludes by saying that good schools make for good property values. What he doesn’t say is that there is no correlation between spending more money and good schools. We can all agree that good schools come from good educational programs and personnel. But more important that the Tonye aspect of that, is good management. And bad management has a greater impact on the quality of our schools than anything else. Corda has demonstrated bad budget management. He is asking taxpayers to buy into his faith based accounting of a budget.
Norwalk public school teachers are still buying classroom supplies at their own expense. The teachers union is notably silent on the prospect of real impact of the proposed budget. Corda has created an understanding of the budget, just not the one he intended.