Finance Panel Trims CIP

By John Voket

It is unclear whether enough fellow Legislative Council members will agree, but the council’s finance subcommittee met January 6 and voted to recommend millions of dollars in cuts and adjustments to the town’s Capital Improvement Plan (CIP).

At the same time, the committee voiced support for reinstating a previous cut to underwrite critical improvements to a Parks & Recreation maintenance facility.

Working along with “invited guests” including Board of Finance Chairman John Kortze and Councilman Gary Davis, the subcommittee — Dan Amaral, Jeff Capeci, Po Murray, and Chairman Joseph DiCandido — hammered out final recommendations that were set to be deliberated and acted upon by the full council Wednesday.

The council, however, was forced to cancel its meeting when the Booth Library closed because of icy conditions, leaving the group with no place to legally conduct its meeting.

With the council meeting canceled, presumably those departments will have at least a few additional days to hone any arguments justifying the proposed expenditures. Council Chair Will Rodgers said he plans to reschedule the canceled meeting sometime during the week of January 12.

After being contacted by The Bee for reactions, representatives of most of the departments affected by the cuts promised to appear before the full council to answer questions. The finance committee’s proposed CIP actions include:

Moving $550,000 from the CIP that was earmarked to finance additional modular classrooms for the high school, where their temporary use would be financed for up to 20 years. The committee recommended this expenditure be absorbed into the district’s operating budget, which could approach $70 million in the coming fiscal year.

Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson was not available for comment on the action, but school district business manager Ron Bienkowski said an unanticipated shift of more than a half-million dollars into the district’s operating budget at this point would be “devastating.”

“This means we’re going to have to lay off staff to [pay for] leasing buildings,” Mr Bienkowski said. “We’re already struggling to put together a budget that doesn’t impact people and programs.”

PD Upgrades Shifted

The committee also moved from the CIP into the general operating budget the Police Department’s comprehensive analog to digital upgrade — estimated to cost $490,000.

During a recent finance board meeting, Chief Michael Kehoe said consultants who began exploring the conversion in 2002 had recommended the town hold off on investing taxpayer dollars in an upgrade “until the technology caught up to our particular needs.”

But now, Chief Kehoe said, proliferating communication technology has brought the cost of the system upgrade down and its technical scope up to the level where it can most benefit the town. At about $200,000, the quote for significantly better radio and communications hardware actually costs less today than it was in 2002 when his department began considering what would have been a inferior conversion.

He also pointed out that upgrades to control stations at communication towers around town will be required regardless of whether the town invests in the digital upgrade.

The panel removed $1 million per year for the next five years from a fund that was earmarked to underwrite open space purchases. Under previous first selectman Herb Rosenthal, a $2 million annual capital allocation was reserved for open space purchases.

The initiative was designed to position the town to strategically block residential sprawl by having ready cash to purchase or grant easements on properties under consideration for development, to obtain parcels that would help connect noncontiguous tracts of public land, or to protect key natural resources like waterways and aquifers.

Newtown’s Conservation Officer Rob Sibley, in a previous presentation to the council, supported the program’s full funding, saying that every million dollars spent today to permanently block residential development translated in to tens of millions in taxpayer savings in the subsequent 50–100-year cycle.

Parks & Rec Give & Take

After much discussion, and a motion from Ms Murray to reduce bonding for the first construction phase of the new town recreation and senior center at Fairfield Hills from $5 million to $2 million in the 2010 fiscal cycle, the subcommittee instead settled on cutting that proposal to $3.8 million and reducing funding a 2009 Dickinson Park infrastructure upgrade from $620,000 to $200,000.

At the same time, the subcommittee honored a plea from Parks & Recreation Commission Chair Ed Marks and Director Amy Mangold to reinstate $350,000 in the 2009 CIP to fund critical improvements to the department’s maintenance facility on Trades Lane.

Mr Marks previously told the council that $350,000 was urgently needed to bring the facility up to code. He said department employees, who are forced to eat and take breaks in the same room where equipment and vehicles are left running, deserve to have an appropriately ventilated space separate from the work area.

The parks chairman also noted that the existing single bathroom facility in the building’s basement is only accessible via a single, narrow, and steep set of stairs, and that appropriate bath and shower facilities must be created for both the men and women on the department’s workforce.

After learning about the proposed cuts, Mr Marks told The Bee he would return to the next council meeting to fight for the entire Dickinson proposal, which is presumably the greater of the two priorities sanctioned for reductions.

Regarding the cut to the proposed rec and senior facility, which is currently in design phase, Ms Murray suggested the scope and proposed uses for the new building were not clear enough.

“They should be more specific when requesting money,” Ms Murray said.

Fellow IPN Councilman Davis, who is not on the finance committee, asserted that instead of building a new facility that would contain classroom space for programs, the Parks & Recreation Department should work more closely with the Board of Education to utilize existing classroom space in town school buildings for rec activities.

Ultimately, Mr DiCandido said he expected each department affected by the proposed cuts would aggressively seek to have those funds reinstated by the full council before the 2009-2010 budget is finalized in late March.

“Let them come [to the council] and do the Kabuki dance,” Mr DiCandido said.