Until the Budget Freezes Over?
The voters have selected a new Council and the political power has shifted mightily in Stratford. Through the will of its voters and the very hard work and expense of a few dozen citizens, Stratford no longer has a single political committee running everything.
The question now is what to do with that power. Let us keep things in perspective as well. Stratford contains 50,000 residents and is 98+% developed. No matter many hundreds of thousands of dollars we invest in an Economic Development Director we are not going to see any significant new development in Stratford. We would have to hire an army and conquer say, Shelton, for that to happen. Nonetheless, Stratford municipal government operates on a $200+ million/year budget. That, as every resident knows, is far too much to pay for what we get. There are far too many overpaid and under-worked administrators and staff in both the Town and BOE. There are far too many unjustified capital items in the budget. There are far too many legal expenses. There are far too many unnecessary perks given away in contracts and deals. Where to start?
We congratulate Councilman Dumas for making a start with a proposed hiring freeze. As we had mentioned, that effort would be mostly symbolic. We would suggest lopping off the low hanging fruit first. Convert the Town Attorney to a salaried position and pass around the bucket and collect the keys to all the Town owned cars.
A much more difficult effort that will cause a great deal of teeth gnashing and garment renting by Town/BOE employees would be to convert the Town Budget to a zero based budget. For the non-accountant readers among us, that simply means starting your budget with zero dollars and justifying the need and expense for every item instead of taking last year’s budget and seeing how much you can add. And that also means actually submitting and publishing a readable, understandable budget to the taxpayers (are you listening, BOE?).
