Dear Westfield City Councilors:
First, I want to call out and thank Councilor Flaherty for his Wednesday letter to the editor. I got a pretty good chuckle out of it. It was amazing to watch him take an innocuous analogy I used to explain the CIP shift and spin it into a work “containing smoothly embedded socioeconomic profiling and uses Early Socialistic analogies.” It’s quite amusing to see the tortured lengths Councilor Flaherty is willing to take, including red baiting, to distort an honest policy discussion into an ugly contest of personalities.
But I refuse to go there. The debate has been poisoned enough with this kind of nonsense to the point where it has become almost impossible to have a debate. So I suggest a more productive route. I propose we get back to facts to determine what the CIP shift should be and what the best use of the free cash is without wasting time on groundless accusations and conspiracy theories. I think that’s what the public probably prefers and it’sdefinitely what they deserve.
So please allow me to put forth a few facts I think are of primary importance to the debates at hand:
The proposed levy increase by the mayor, 1.25 percent, is the lowest proposed levy increase since 2003.
The 1.25 percent figure was determined by using the standard practice for calculating it: using last year’s levy limit, and not the levy, as the basis. All city councilors, especially Councilor Keefe, should know that the mayor’s method is the proper way to calculate this number. This is the way it’s been done long before Mayor Knapik was mayor and it’s the way the Department of Revenue expects it to be calculated and reported.
A levy increase of 1.25 percent, coupled with the mayor’s proposed 1.66 CIP shift, would raise the property tax on the average home owner by $4/month assuming the value of the property remains the same compared to last year. You can calculate what the levy would be for your residential property on my website at http://www.dondleyfocitycouncil.com/fy15_calculator. Cindy Harris, who made the only concrete proposal at the last city council meeting, suggested moving the CIP to 1.70. If implemented, this would result in about a $1/month tax increase for the average homeowner (again, this assumes the property value remains constant). And if you lived in a more modest house worth less than $225K like many residents on fixed incomes do, your property tax bill would be even lower.
The CIP shift is much lower than it’s been in years. In 2005, the CIP shift was 2.0. In 2006, it was 1.78. Since then, the city council has slowly but surely moved it lower to 1.63. If the CIP shift were bumped up a few hundredths of a point to 1.66 or even 1.7, still well below its recent historical averages, it’s unlikely that businesses would start fleeing town.
The mayor’s original budget in June proposed a 2.5 percent levy increase. He then reduced that figure to to 1.5 percent. After some push back from the city council, he further reduced it to 1.25 percent. Despite claims to the contrary, the mayor has been negotiating with the city council and is listening to them.
The $12 million surplus some city councilors want to claim we have is not actually a $12 million surplus. After we pay our immediate obligations, we are lucky if we have an $8 million surplus when all is said and done.
As the mayor has pointed out in his recent letter to Council President Bean, we have many future obligations and expenditures that we must be mindful of. The mayor provided concrete reasons for why he thinks it would be unwise to go lower than 1.25 percent. When placed in the light of these coming expenses, a very strong argument can be made that it’s a bad time to spend down the $8 million surplus. Amazingly, none of these future expenses were even mentioned at the last city council meeting despite the fact that they most definitely need be considered before an informed decision can be made about the surplus.
Finally, this year’s budget won’t have the likely benefit of a bond sale windfall that last year’s budget had. We will probably need to tap the surplus just to make up for future budget shortfalls.
So these are facts about the CIP shift and some of the factors that I think definitely need to be taken into consideration before deciding what to do with the money in the free cash account. Instead of fruitless foot stomping and leveraging the CIP shift debate into an opportunity to score political points, I strongly encourage the city council to discuss all of these matters at next week’s meeting and establish ground rules for thoughtful, productive discussion on these issues so that informed votes can be cast.
Sincerely,
Steve Dondley
