New Haven Mayor: Hour Of Denial Has Passed

In his annual “State of the City Address,” Mayor John DeStefano warned New Haven to prepare for tough budget decisions, including a first round of government layoffs by the end of the month.

DeStefano devoted a significant chunk of his address Monday night to the need to approach a $5.5 million current-year deficit and $42 million upcoming-year budget gap with “open eyes.”

“What we need to do now is to make the hard, but right choices,” DeStefano said.

“And I will tell you certain as I am standing here tonight, that there will be a group somewhere that will oppose every one of these things. But we would be deceiving ourselves, and defrauding our children, were we to pretend that this is a temporary economic situation.”

“Not seeing this reality and doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is not a choice,” the mayor declared. “Rather it is the classic definition of insanity.”

Among the “hard choices” he called for: dramatic pension and health care reform for government employees and new ways of doing government business, from creating an authority that can chargenot-for-profits for handling stormwater to outsourcing school custodial work and privatizing now-public parking garages and lots in town.

Read the full prepared text of the speech here.  You can read more of the New Haven Independent story.