Monday night Fred Wilms, Chairman of Norwalk’s BET held a round table discussion about municipal finance issues. Last year Wilms’ held a similar discussion to great acclaim. Because Connecticut doesn’t have a county government system in place, regional issues seemingly get ignored. With all coastal towns suffering from major flooding these days, one would think that a regional flooding discussion would be a worthy examination. Traffic, and emergency issues would be other good examples.

While not as much a hot button item, municipal finances practices are just as important. From the Hour:

“There’s a lot for (residents) to digest. They do know that they pay in their taxes,” said Greenwich Board of Estimate and Taxation Chairman Peter Tesei, summarizing the town’s annual budgeting process. Our old budget practice “was all unclear to the person, whereas now we say we’re going to keep the increase to the mill rate, the tax rate, to between 2 and 4 percent. We consider that to be the (Consumer Price Index) for the urban area.”

On Monday night, Tesei, Stamford Board of Finance senior member Joseph Tarzia and Norwalk Board of Estimate and Chairman Fred Wilms shared their experiences hammering out annual operating and capital budgets for their communities. Wilms hosted the roundtable discussion, which also was attended by several residents.

While the three found similar challenges, they also learned how their budget processes differ. The Greenwich Board of Estimate, for instance, sends its annual budgets to the town’s 229-member Representative Town Meeting for approval. In Stamford, the Board of Finance votes on the city’s annual budget — capital and operating — in early April.

“The only action is leave it as is or reduce … and it requires four votes to change it,” Tarzai said. “You have to have four votes to change even the Board of Education budget. At that point, it goes to the Board of Rep(resentatives.) The Board of Reps votes in early May.”

Education spending, to be sure, consumed much of Monday night’s discussion. The three finance board members compared notes on how well they’ve worked with their respective school boards.

Wilms said the Norwalk Board of Estimate “had a really contentious year” working with school officials to craft a 2007-08 operating budget for the Board of Education.

“‘If you don’t give me everything I want, I’m going to slash the high school athletic programs,’” said Wilms, summarizing his view of school officials’ response to the city’s move to reduce the school board’s requested budget by roughly $6.2 million. “I really respectively disagree with that approach.”

Some Democratic members of the BET were felt that they were not invited to participate at this discussion. Fred Wilms’ responded via email, “I did not specifically invite any of my fellow BET members (GOP or Dem). Mary Roman expressed the concern that if a majority attended, then the event would have be publicly noticed (like the bipartisan council meetings). So to keep it simple and fair, I did not invite any of my colleagues.” He also noted that the meeting was open to the public and was in mentioned in the newspaper. He had hoped that more people would have come.

source: The Hour Finance leaders discover challenges they share, By ROBERT KOCH, June 27, 2007