Some Budget Facts versus what is being “said”:

What is Being Said	FACT
“There was a vote on the town budget in June of this year. Only 10,748 people voted (out of 37,000 registered voters) - 7,037 people voted NO and 3,711 people voted YES in June. Because of the “NO” vote, the Town had to submit a new budget. The new budget was generated by cutting 2.6 million dollars in taxes needed. Those cuts were achieved through cuts in the education and the town budget.”	Technically, the “cuts” were to the proposed increases in the Town and BOE budgets. With the proposed cuts, the budget increase was reduced from 7% to 6%. By contrast, the most recent Bureau of Labor statistics report found that real average weekly earnings fell by 3.1 percent over the past year.
Impact on Education: Specifically, in the new budget the Town cut 1.4 million dollars from the education budget. The largest cuts were made by increasing class size guidelines to reduce the number of teachers. The class size guidelines have been increased at elementary schools to a maximum of 24 students per class for grades K to 3 and a maximum of 28 students per class for grades 4 and 5! This means that if a grade needed 4 classes with the old guidelines, they may only have 3 classes with the new guidelines. We have already seen the impact of this change at Braeburn and Duffy where there are classes with 28 kids. In addition, the school board has cut support staff. For more details, please see the School Board’s proposed budget adjustments to accommodate the budget cut.	Actually, the $1.4 M reduction includes a number of items other than elimination of staff positions. $554, 808 or 39% of the total reduction came from reduced pupil transportation expense. $238,007 (17%) came from projected reductions in Worker’s Comp expenses. Another $218, 710 (15%) came from reduced electricity purchases. Offsetting these $1,011,525 reductions, which represent nearly 72% of the $1,411,411 total reduction and which have no impact on the quality of education, was a projected $249.084 fringe benefit increase in Health/Medical Insurance. It is precisely this sort of runaway spending on fringe benefits that has brought West Hartford to the current state of affairs.
Impact on Town Services: In addition to the 1.4 million cut from the school budget, the Town also cut 1.2 million dollars from its own budget. They reduced the library hours (closing on Sundays) and reduced the outdoor pool hours. A fire station may be closed and the fire and police training budgets were reduced. In addition to these cuts, some of the budget reductions will be achieved by reduction of town services coupled by increases in user fees to increase revenue. For more details, please see the mayor's presentation on the cuts.	Town Services wages and benefits actually went up $200,854 and $63,167 respectively due to the transfer of the Maintenance Department expense from the BOE to the Town budget. The largest expense reduction proposed by the Town was the $861,150 drop in Operating Expenses driven primarily by the elimination of leaf pick-up (which has since been restored). The Town eliminated 6 positions, all of which were either vacant, part-time or both. Hence, there was again no reduction in the fringe benefit costs that are driving the increases in the budget and property taxes.