When the BET passed the final budget, Matt “Mad Max” Breslow looked around and saw that the room was nearly empty. Which is a shame because it turned out that BET member Stuart Wells had a good idea about sending more money to address flooding issues. From Breslow’s Advocate report:
Before the BET voted, Democratic member Stuart Wells made a motion - which failed - to reduce the amount of money the city will take from its undesignated fund balance of reserve cash next fiscal year.
Finance Director Thomas Hamilton has proposed taking $3 million from the balance next year and $3.5 million the following year to help pay operating expenses. The plan is designed to offset the tax impact of peaking debt service from a major school renovation project.
Citing increased revenue projections, Wells suggested using only $2.5 million from the fund balance next fiscal year. The other $500,000 Hamilton proposed using could be spent instead on infrastructure improvements such as flooding solutions and road repair, Wells said.
Republican BET member Michael Lyons said he was sympathetic to the needs Wells wanted to address but preferred to adhere to Hamilton’s plan. The budget includes contingency funds for unplanned expenses, and the city could make a special appropriation if necessary, Lyons said.
Other towns seem to manage to send video cameras down pipes, determine they are blocked or broken, and then hire specialists to unblock or replace pipes. I look at Fairfield and Westport in specific. The blockage seems to extend past the pipes themselves here in Norwalk.
Meanwhile, Corda decided to continue his dimissal of the PWC report that says that there are no financial controls and no written management plans in the school administration operations. Funny how he keeps skipping over that part, repeated page after page after page, to instead say effectively, “hey these consultants didn’t create my understanding of school operation so I will ignore them”. Maybe he needs coupons or something, that tell him what the savings are.
Here’s Corda’s response printed in the Hour:
Dear Mayor Moccia:
Thank you for your letter of May 3. 1 can assure you the Board of Education and I share your concern about potential reduction of teachers, programs, and sports. Our goal is to minimize the impact on these areas to the extent we can. I would also respectfully remind you we are in the process of identifying $6.7 million dollars in reductions that have to be made to conform to the budget approved by the council and the additional costs in electricity, pensions, and requisite nursing services. The total disregard of last year’s decision to favorably impact the 2006/2007 city budget at the expense of this year’s education budget, as I warned on several occasions, has made this task exceedingly difficult.
The Board of Education’s Finance Committee has met to review potential areas of reduction. We are still in the process of examining all budgeted figures to see where revisions can be made. You can be assured that areas like travel, consultant fees, etc. are being examined very carefully. As we come to a more definitive list, I am sure the committee would welcome any suggestions that elected officials and Board of Estimate might have about our ideas as well as any suggestions that we, perhaps, had not considered. I shall be happy to provide you with our recommendations as they become more definite. I am also assuming that these individuals will take the time to inform themselves about our program. Recognizing that elected and appointed officials are not educators, I would be happy to spend the time necessary to give them an overview about our programs, current research about system improvement, and the work we have been doing in curriculum revision and improving our supervision/evaluation process.
Your reference to the Pricewaterhouse Coopers study is worth noting. When received, we studied it in detail. I would res-pectfully remind you of the following: 1. At the public presentation in February 2002, the consultants from PWC made clear that they did not identify any “fat” or “waste” in the Board of Education budget.
2. The principal areas where the PWC felt there might be the potential for savings (which any good manager would know from experience) included three major areas:
a. Outsourcing custodial services. This was a repetition of an earlier recommendation that had been made by a different group. PWC conducted no study to determine if any savings could, in fact, be realized. Furthermore, because the PWC consultants were totally unfamiliar with Connecticut law, they did not take into account the requirement for impact bargaining when such ideas are considered or the cost involved in negotiating the elimination of a major bargaining group in moving to contracted services. Nor were the consultants from PWC aware that the majority of school districts who had moved to contracted cleaning services had moved back to in-district operations because of cost and efficiency reasons.
b. Returning special education students who were being educated outside of Norwalk back to the District. Again, there was no study conducted by PWC of the particular needs of special education students educated outside of the district to see if this was viable; it was a suggestion. We, based on what we know as good management practice, assessed every student who was served outside of the district and many students are now being educated in our schools. While this has saved on tuition, it has also increased costs because we had to hire personnel to provide services that were being paid for in the tuition we paid. Overall, however, we have realized savings.
c. Negotiating contributions by our bargaining groups to offset health insurance premiums. We, of course, did just that as each contract expired and was negotiated for renewal. Again, this was not because of the recommendation that PWC made but because of experience and understanding of the negotiations environment in existence at the time of the negotiations. All current contracts include our employees contributing to health insurance premiums and we have saved millions of dollars through those successful negotiations.
Outside of these three areas, there was very little that PWC recommended that had cost-saving implications. I remember discussing in the exit interview that their recommendations consisted of nothing more than good administrative practice and their response that they, “were only doing their job.” I would also respectfully remind you that the PWC consultants recommended that we add instructional specialist positions to the district because of the lack of support in our instruction department, a decision that some are now criticizing as creating excessive administrative staff.
The biggest problem with the Pricewaterhouse study was that it was conducted not by the request of the Board of Education but by the city, and there was no effort to solicit our input into the parameters of the study. As the superintendent who had only come to the district in April of 2001, I unsuccessfully requested that no study be conducted until I had sufficient time to examine the organization and procedures of the district, consider what changes might help to make us more efficient and effective, and allow them to be put into place for a period of time so they could be assessed. I believe now, as I believed then, that the city would have been able to use the $475,000 it paid for this study for more productive purposes. However, we will certainly re-examine the report to see if it contains any recommendations that we might find useful.
Please be assured that we will do all we can to revise our budget with as minimal an impact on our programs as possible. As soon as we have more definitive information that you and your colleagues will find useful, I shall forward it to you for response and suggestions.
Salvatore J. Corda, Ph.D.
Superintendent of Schools
source: Norwalk Advocate, Board finalizes city budget at $262.3M, , May 8 2007
