The Other Budget Battle

Municipal officials took time out from wrangling over their own local budgets on Wednesday to go to Hartford to launch a few preemptive salvos in the pending battle over a two-year, $38.2 billion budget unveiled by the General Assembly’s Democratic majority last week. The Democrats, who are not unanimous in their support of the package, know they probably lack the Senate votes to override the inevitable veto by Governor M. Jodi Rell, so they hope to use their plan as a basis for negotiations with the governor before the legislative session ends on June 3. While the Democrats have been specific about where and how they want to raise taxes on big incomes, cigarettes, corporations, and estates and gifts, they have been less forthcoming about where they intend to cut spending. And that is the red flag that summoned mayors and selectmen to Hartford.

 Aid to towns and cities is always a tempting target for legislators and governors looking for ways to cut the state budget. State elected officials are heavily invested in the state bureaucracy, which is the machinery of policy and the executor of many a political promise, so the Democratic budget package does not include much in the way of state employee layoffs or even the modest reorganization and consolidation of state boards and commissions included in Gov Rell’s budget. So municipal officials can see the writing on the wall. The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities estimates that Newtown will lose about $725,000 from state cuts in grants to the town.  (Enough, one would think, to inspire Newtown’s first selectman to join the gathering of concerned municipal officials in Hartford on Wednesday.  But he decided not to attend or even send a representative.)

As we have seen in Newtown this year, local budgetmakers are making very tough choices, requiring sacrifice from all quarters, including and especially the school district, which is the last place anyone wants to shortchange. Consequently, the political heat has been turned up in local board rooms and meeting halls. State legislators would just as soon keep it there, passing along their hard choices to towns and cities by applying aid to municipalities like a balm to their own bruised budget.

The challenge between now and June 3, as the negotiations unfold between the governor and the Democratic legislative majority, will be to interpose more than just a few town officials between state budgetmakers and their temptation to raid municipal aid. Bringing some of that homegrown political heat to Hartford may do as much to warm the absolute chill on local budgets as anything that can be done around town.