Town Promised Access To School Financials By Month’s End

By John Voket

Newtown Finance Director Robert Tait said school officials have promised he will have unfettered access to all school financials via the computer in his office by month’s end. He told The Bee recently that the commitment was made during ongoing talks he is engaged in with First Selectman Pat Llodra, School Superintendent Janet Robinson, and school district Business Manager Ron Bienkowski.

Those talks are eventually expected to provide evidence as to whether the town and school district should merge certain business, maintenance and/or HR functions to enhance transparency, efficiency, and bring taxpayers additional cost savings.

The news about providing Mr Tait with access to school financials was hailed by Board of Finance Chair John Kortze as coming none too soon.

“During the last budget process, we were operating with two sets of numbers,” Mr Kortze said. “In these economic times the left hand needs to know what the right hand is doing.”

The finance board chairman said that Mr Tait “getting eyes on the school district’s financial information is not just a matter of courtesy, it is state mandated and should have happened a long time ago.”

“This addresses two issues,” Mr Kortze said. “Transparency — a word that is used too routinely — that really means the best management of taxpayer dollars, and enhancing the technical efficiency by which we can obtain the most up-to-the-minute information.”

Providing the town’s finance director with access to all aspects of the town’s financial systems is also the first tentative step toward the aforementioned merging of services that began two years ago with an ad hoc committee of the Legislative Council charged with determining the feasibility of these proposed system mergers.

Last December, as Mrs Llodra’s administration took office, the council, which had just received a formal report from its exploratory subcommittee, decided to hand the next part of the merger consideration process over to the Board of Selectmen. To date, Mrs Llodra said there have been about a half-dozen meetings with school officials.

On August 18, Superintendent Robinson provided a brief update to the council on the proposal, and the way she sees a potential merger process rolling out, if it is meant to be.

“We really want to do our due diligence to see if there are efficiencies,” Dr Robinson told the council. “But it may take time — there are a lot of complexities around the way we each do the work.”

Dr Robinson predicted that each facet of the proposal would require its own individual study, and she said when there is time to develop a formal report, she and other members of that point team will report back to the council.

Ahead of that meeting, Mrs Llodra said she prepared a list of “some possibilities” the team was considering. She told the council that based on the work of its ad hoc committee, which Mrs Llodra co-chaired as a council representative, “We know you’re serious about this, and you have a team of four working very hard” to develop recommendations.

Robinson: ‘Could Take Years’

During her presentation, Dr Robinson said the process will likely demand retaining an outside consultant to assist in developing research required so the team can determine the best recommendations in the end. Council Vice Chair Mary Ann Jacob asked how long the process might take.

Dr Robinson replied that there probably will not be a single time line.

“It depends on when we can get the research,” the superintendent said. She said elements of that research could come “some months down the road,” while others could take years.

Councilman Robert Merola suggested that once the consultant gets to work, the team might consider breaking the process into three parts: the aspects that might be accomplished in short order, those that might take longer, and the elements that, in fact, could take years to determine.

Council member George Ferguson added that cost savings should not be the exclusive outcome of the committee’s work, and Councilman Benjamin Spragg suggested considering bringing town IT manager Scott Sharlow into the mix.

This idea was countered by Mrs Llodra, who said an outside consultant might better serve the process.

“Someone without a stake in the game can provide a neutral view and recommendations,” she said, adding that the ideal individual should not be on the town’s payroll.

Following the council meeting, Mrs Llodra said that she was not certain that final decisions about aspects of a merger would have to necessarily take years.

“There are some pieces that can certainly be explored in a short period of time,” the first selectman said. She said making decisions about the integration of a purchasing agent or office “wouldn’t require months of study or years to execute if agreed upon.”

She also said the possible hiring of a shared communications professional who would not only be a media spokesperson, but would also be involved in the way information is presented and disseminated to the public, is another consideration that could be agreed upon or rejected quickly.

Mrs Llodra said that the next step will be to identify and contact Connecticut communities that already have partial or complete merging of town and school financial, maintenance, or human resources offices. And she agreed at this point that considering the merging of financial management between the two offices “would be the most dense in terms of the process for making that change.”

Beyond Saving Money

School board Chairman William Hart told The Bee that the big picture considerations go far beyond saving money on a financial management software system, and that changing cultures that are currently inherent in each individual finance office “can be complicated.”

Could it take years to reach a decision?

Mr Hart said that “some changes might take time.” But he acknowledged that a better route might be to “parse out changes one at a time.”

“I’d like to see this turn into a constant improvement process,” the school board chairman said. “Let’s build a process of continuous change.”

If that was the eventual outcome, it could not happen soon enough as far as the finance board chairman is concerned.

“Why would it take years?” Mr Kortze asked. “Everyone should be going into these discussions objectively with the best interests of the town in mind.”

Mr Kortze said in his opinion, with the latest student population trends dropping by a predicted 25 percent or more in the next ten years, the school district is entering “a completely different phase from the last ten years.”

“Enrollment is plummeting,” he observed. “Are we just going to languish, or address this issue head on?”