Ruocco's "State of the Town"

The following is a guest post from Tom Ruocco. It's something that he initially sent to a few constituents in the 2nd District, but I asked him to share it with all of you. So here it is... unedited, except for deleting a few meeting dates that have already passed:

I hope that your holidays were enjoyable and that your New Year's resolutions are in order. I'm sending along this update to remind you of some critical dates, proposals and decisions.

Board of Education Budget
The requested budget is $59,788,292. That's a 7.29% increase from current year; an increase of $4,063,049.

Based on revenue projections for the proposed retail/residential development on the table before the P&Z, it would take 2-3 of these developments just to cover the proposed increase in the BOE budget for this year. That should give you an idea of how little new revenue can help when you have to accommodate spending of this magnitude. Residents are encouraged to attend the BOE meetings and speak up, if possible, about the proposed budget increases.

Fund Balance/Surplus policy
Recently, at the January 11th meeting, the Town Council adopted a new policy that requires the Town to maintain an un-designated fund balance equal to 8 - 9% of the previous year's expenditures. Ultimately, that means that for every dollar in spending, we will have to allocate an additional 8 cents to maintain the fund balance. Looking at the BOE budget alone, we would have to ensure that an additional $325,034 is set aside for undesignated reserves to meet the requirement of the adopted policy. And that's just for the BOE budget. Factor in other departments, and you can see how much we have to hit up the taxpayer to meet the 8% fund balance minimum.

This policy passed 5-4 along party lines. The Democrats voting in favor, the Republicans against. My objection was that the 8% minimum was too high. I proposed an amendment that defined the fund balance as 5-9% instead of the minimum of 8%. I felt it gave us more flexibility and would have actually accommodated the democrats desire for an 8% balance. I thought it was a good compromise, but it failed 5-4, again along party lines (democrats voting against).

The policy also described options for distributing funds which exceed the 8% minimum. Currently, we have about 1.4 million dollars in excess funds, which translates into a current fund balance of about 9.4%. I hope we can dedicate those funds to providing tax relief, but as of now there are no stated plans to do so. We will debate that during the budget deliberations.

Statement to Legislators to improve repeat offender laws
I'm happy to report that my amendment to the annual legislative package was adopted unanimously by the Council. The amendment calls for strengthening our repeat offender laws and defining home invasion as a violent crime. The full adopted text is as follows:

"In light of the deadly home invasion that claimed three Cheshire lives on July 23, 2007, and in the interest of preventing this kind of crime from ever happening again, the Cheshire Town Council urges our state delegation to work toward meaningful criminal justice reform including reforming Connecticut's persistent offender statute, reclassification of home invasion (burglary) as a violent crime, and revamping our current parole system. We urge the legislature to schedule a special session to deal with these important matters as soon as possible and to focus on changes which would have had a major impact on the felons who were responsible for the horrific crime they committed in Cheshire ."

Thank you once again for your attention. Please stay in touch. Be sure to watch the various board meetings on channel 14, and try to attend meetings. There are critical decisions on the table, and they will all affect your daily life in Cheshire

I hope this was of interest to you. My thought is that this is another small step in the right direction... open government. Hopefully over the coming months and years, more elected officials, such as Tom Ruocco, Tim Slocum and Diane Visconti (all guest posters), will take advantage of new media to interact with voters.

Tim White