Last night’s council meeting ran on and on. You would think that the hotly debated issues of the night would be over, oh say, the need for the BOE to get $1 million more after getting $600k more (thanks to State Rep Chris Perone’s priority grant funding work), but no. Apparently after the usual shameless criminal defense lawyeresque, “i will say anything to get my client off” diatribe from Matt Miklave over the “draconian” cuts to programs and education that “he told you so” to the rest of the council, the mightier than thou Miklave decided to separate himself from reality and say that only he was right about whether the state would increase its funding to Norwalk and that the real estate conveyance tax projections were underestimated. The big lie was his assertion that the decision by the council to hold the increase to less than 4% was going to result in disruption to education, teachers would be laid off, and programs would be cut.
Miklave is lying because if he had spent any time reading what the Corda produced budget reconciliation was, he would have realized that Corda over estimated the amount of new teachers needed in various schools, amongst other “nickel and dime” budget savings. Exactly the opposite of what Miklave claimed in the spring and claimed last night. This of course set of an endless parade of bombast because political feathers would be ruffled.
Carvin Hilliard had the gall to say he agreed with Miklave and that the council shouldn’t be micromanaging the BOE budget. Hello, earth to Carvin, you are the finance committee chair and that is your job to evaluate budget requests from the BOE. It’s called government and responsibility.
Mike Coffey, Rick McQuaid and Doug Hempstead all thanked Bruce Kimmel for asking questions as a BOE member and standing alone against the tide of Democrat rubber-stampers that want to ensure that Stuart Opdahl mismanages even more taxpayer money. Why is it so difficult for some people to get that for all the funding they wish to give to Corda, the teachers in the classroom are still struggling to buy supplies, just like in the days that Phyllis Bolden worked on grant applications without a computer.
Corda was in a special mode last night. I could easily imagine him holding his right pinky to his lips and saying, “one million dollars” Kevin Poruban would do more than that, stating, “All money should be dedicated to the BOE.” This would later be a rather odd statement considering that Poruban wanted to spend more money on sirens, which presumably has nothing to do with the BOE.
Mayor Moccia attempting to move the meeting along, (because I have condensed the above exchanges in order to spare myself PTSD) said that if anyone was going to say I told you so, it was “that’s we’d get more state aide and we were right to not give more city money to the BOE.” Moccia went on to explain, “[that the] BOE has the fiduciary responsibility of the school system and that the council having a debate over the taxpayer’s expenditures are not ruining our school system.” Ruining the school system was Miklave’s wording, which Joanne Romano also objected to. She gave an example of how peoplein Westport came up to her to ask how Norwalk managed to hold the BOE’s feet to the fire over unaccountable spending, and said that the council should require more transparency and greater accountability.
Miklave wasn’t finished though and said that the city had a AAA bind rating under Esposito and the school roofs leaked and the text books didn’t even talk about the Berlin Wall coming down. He praised the Knopp administration for maintaining the AAA bond rating fixed the roofs about bought textbooks. Miklave claims that basketball shouldn’t be the only thing keeping kids in schools and that there are young future scientists and mathmaticians that were in poor schools that deserved more funding for their schools. Actually it was worse than that, several council people were outraged at the pandering racial remarks, but I didn’t write the exact wording down, so I’ll leave it that.
Coffey responds and points out that in 2002 the bonding money was allocated to Jefferson school and the city still pays interest on that money, the school hasn’t been renovated, and its a good thing that we still have the AAA bond rating.
Hilliard says that Moccia promised that the state money would go to the BOE.
Hempstead said that, “we’ve made politics about education,” and then pointed out that the entire council should have spent the time passing a resolution demaning more state aide. That the state in its continued preoccupation with upstate small towns who get 50% of their BOE budget in state money, keeps neglectin the diverse and challenging needs of Norwalk/ He praises State Rep Larry Cafreo and State Senator Bob Duff for working on getting more funding for Norwalk, and points to the BOE sitting in the audience, “this is your fight” and encourages them to work hard at getting more state money.
Phylis suggests that teachers and administrators have always been able to make do with whatever the budget allows for and gives her example of her time as a BOE employee.
Hilliard says that the ECS formula is beyind the scope of the council and the BOE and that the cities who get the state money won’t give i up. I wondered if Hillaird toook a Rick Fuller stupid pill tonight, with that comment. They eventually voted and Herb Grant and Doug Hempstead voted against the funding going to the BOE, Coffey abstained and the rest voted for it.
The next item was about an emergency calling system. Kevin Poruban had many problems the proposal being voted on, and wanted to enumerate them. Which he did. Stop reading, go mow the lawn, rake the leaves and shovel the sidewalk you can get a time frame of how long the enumeration turned out. Did Poruban have a valid point somewhere in there? Maybe, but the guy who refused to reveal where a typo was in something he was voting on couldn’t be bothered with putting any of these items in writing so that anyone could follow what he was trying to say.
Moccia provided clarity briefly, “No sirens Kevin.”
We now arrive at the point where I seriously contemplated the merits of a healthy fascist government. Up to this point there had been an undercurrent of childish petty lawyer tit for tat. It started with the Golf Authority appointment earlier in the evening where Joe Tamburri, apparently some sort of saint of golf or something wasn’t going to get reappointed. Then the BOE budget was the gasoline added. The room without air conditioning was hot, so it was only a matter of time before “point of ordering” was thrown down and the cage was lowered from the ceiling, and the death match was about to start while Tina Turner was warming up in the wings. Or, we got the usual he said this, he didn’t do that, the rules say, and so on. It doesn’t matter what they actually said, because at this point everybody in the room except Matt Miklave, Mike Coffey and to some degree Doug Hempstead wanted them to vote on the resolution to form an affordable housing committee and go home.
But here’s an interesting thing, apparently Miklave remembered the ability to suggest text changes to a thing they were voting on, and made the appropriate motion in order to get a vote to get that made. I was chuckling to myself over this, since when it came time to improve the ethics code, he somehow “forgot” that he could do stuff like that and preferred only to say critical things of the language. And I suppose he wasn’t being ironic when he apologized for distributing the draft of the resolution to the council that night, on their chairs, so no one had time to review it. If all these guys were so “deeply disturbed” about all of this they would have been wiser to voice that in private because I found it deeply disturbing that they were going on and on about procedures and who said what instead of saying anything about the resolution. Here’s a news flash, no one cares who does or doesn’t follow procedures. Take it back to the playground.
But no, they go through some stunt over tabling or something and Moccia sighs and announces, “I’m referring the Democratic caucuss.” Somehow a vote gets made which ends up being unanimous.
You might have noticed that Bill Krummel was awfully silent during this meeting. That’s because he fell asleep somewhere during Corda’s claim that he runs a tight perfect school system and that Opdahl is a brilliant financial guy and that he doesn’t want to get too top heavy with the addition of a finance director. I don’t blame Krummel, he was after all sitting closest to the podium, and it must be part of Corda’s ability to bamboozle people with boredom.
Eventually they managed to vote to adjourn without whipping out the rock’em sock’em robots.
