DeStefano: Don't Gut New Haven's City Budget

Other cities have laid off over 100 cops. Or stopped paying pensions. Or stopped shoveling snow. Or filed for bankruptcy. New Haven’s mayor declared that New Haven can avoid those fates in 2011 by avoiding a simple two-letter word.

That word is “no.” Former First Lady Nancy Reagan called on the nation to utter that word when offered drugs. Mayor John DeStefano Monday called on the city to resist the temptation to use the same word as New Haven considers painful budget cuts and benefits changes in order to avoid “massive” layoffs.

While the campaigns are different, DeStefano, like Nancy Reagan, is calling for breaking an addiction of sorts, to what he calls a generation’s worth of costly or outdated ways of doing government business, which are now taking a deadly toll on municipal and state budgets across the country.

New Haven needs to plug an $8 million hole in its current year budget—and a $57 million projected gap in its 2011-12 budget.

It can’t do so, DeStefano said Monday, without changing the rules governing when public employees retire, how much they get, how much they pay for health insurance while employed; when citizens go to the library; or what the state allows the city to levy fines or fees for.

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