New Haven Not Smiling About Malloy's Sudden Slash

After promising to shield New Haven in round one of his last-minute budget cuts, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy now proposes to send New Haven a new $5 million-plus hit—and a move to stop him has begun.

The first showdown takes place in Hartford on Thursday.

That’s when the legislature takes up Malloy’s request to give him emergency powers to cut municipal aid for the budget that takes effect Friday.

Malloy had hoped to avoid those cuts by getting $1.6 billion in concessions over two years from state unions. State union leaders agreed to that deal—but then failed to convince enough of their members to support the deal for it to take effect. (Read about that here.) As a result, Malloy has to make 11th-hour budget cuts to keep the two-year $40.11 billion budget balanced.

On Wednesday his office released his plan for the first chunk of those cuts, in municipal aid. If the legislature says he can do it.

New Haven State Rep. Roland Lemar, for one, doesn’t want to give him that permission.

“I find the governor’s power grab to be inappropriate, first and foremost, but beyond that, the cuts that he has outlined are devastating to cities and towns and to many of the most important services we provide as a state,” Lemar said.

Malloy’s chart of town-by-town cuts released Wednesday included a $2.4 million drop for New Haven. That would cover “statutory” cuts: to payment in lieu of taxes reimbursements for college and hospital and state-owned properties in town, plus about $300,000 in road construction money.

That covers less than half of the overall cuts Malloy is making as part of his post-union deal “Plan B.” A second big chunk are to include some $7 million in interdistrict cooperative school spending and $4 million for magnet schools.

New Haven Mayor John DeStefano noted that New Haven has the state’s biggest interdistrict program. (More suburbanites attend New Haven schools than any other city schools.) And it has a fleet of magnets. So New Haven will be hit hardest by those cuts, he predicted.

Malloy’s staff has yet to delineate the town-by-town impact of those cuts yet the way it has with the statutory aid. DeStefano’s staff projects that those cuts will probably mean New Haven’s new cuts will add up to $5 million to $7 million.

Just last Friday, after the stunning torpedoing of Malloy’s concession plan, the governor assured DeStefano and other mayors that cities wouldn’t feel much of the sting of new cuts until the second year of the budget.

“As it turns out, that wasn’t the case,” DeStefano said Wednesday.

Though disappointed by the numbers released Wednesday, DeStefano made sure to note that Malloy, a former Stamford mayor, has “been very supportive of municipal budgets” process overall.

He also noted that a third indirect effect of Malloy’s cuts will disproportionately hurt New Haven even more: The layoffs of correctional and mental health workers will put new strain on supportive housing developments—the alternatives to homeless shelters that New Haven been pioneering—and on efforts to work with the “reentry population.” The latter is bureaucratic lingo for the estimated 25 felons who show up on New Haven streets every week after state prisons release them.

DeStefano said he hopes a way can be found to reverse the rules by which state unions rejected the concessions deal. (A majority of workers supported the deal, but didn’t reach an 80 percent threshold required under current rules.) Meanwhile, DeStefano said he hopes legislators reject the municipal rescission request and openly debate the impacts of Malloy’s other cuts. He noted that any rollback in dealing with felons reentering society or potentially homeless people dealing with addiction, for instance, will hurt not only those individuals but the neighbors who live near them.

“It’s very important that any of these cuts face public discussion so people understand the choices,” DeStefano said.

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