Correcting

Some Misinformation

To the Editor:

Recently Po Murray issued a lengthy email to a large number of people with information about the 2009-2010 Annual Town Budget, to urge that the council add $1 million to the Board of Education budget. Although it contains a significant amount of information, some of it is very misleading and some is outright false. For example:

1) She falsely claims that the public never approved the use of the $1.5 million proceeds from the sale of five homes on Mile Hill South Road for Fairfield Hills. A town meeting on March 10, 2005. authorized the sale of the homes and also authorized that the proceeds would be used to help cover environmental cleanup costs at Fairfield Hills. In fact, that is why the state gave us the homes. When we learned that the environmental cost of remediation of subsurface pollution would be over $3.5 million, I went to Rich Nuculo at the State Office of Policy and Management to see if the state would help us, because the cost had escalated so much from their and our original 2001 estimates. He said that they could not give us money, but that they could give us the five houses to sell.

2) She misleadingly claims that our Fund Balance increased from $8.1 million to $12.78 million. She apparently does not understand our financial reports and the 2007 Charter change and resulting council-approved Fund Balance Policy and actions that took place in the last year, while she has been a council member. The increase in the General Fund fund balance resulted from moving funds from the Capital Reserve Fund. The combined totals of the two fund balances actually declined slightly from $15.52 million on 6/30/2007 to $15.48 million on 6/30/2008. However, of that amount, only $7.8 million is the true “rainy day fund” that she describes. The Board of Finance is proposing to use $2 million to add to revenue to reduce taxes in the coming year. Due to the tightness of the proposed budget on the expenditure side (almost $2 million below the current year) and the uncertainty of our revenue estimates, we will likely need to use the $2 million and will therefore have reduced our “rainy day fund” to $5.8 million by 6/30/2010.

 Ms Murray puts out so much misinformation that is very damaging to the public discourse, but there is not enough space or time to respond. I hope that I have clarified at least these two issues.

Sincerely,

Herb Rosenthal

70 Main Street, Newtown                                             March 25, 2009