By DANIEL P. JONES And
VANESSA DE LA TORRE
Courant Staff Writers
June 19, 2008
The town council will meet Tuesday to
adopt a leaner 2008-09 annual budget now that residents have rejected the
council's original $215.9 million spending plan.
It will be up to the council to decide how much it might direct the board of
education to trim from its share of the budget, but in the meantime, Town
Manager Jim Francis prepared a list of possible reductions on the municipal
side.
Homeowners may have to say goodbye to curbside leaf pickup by the familiar
vacuum trucks. That service is one of the items on the draft list of reductions
that the council's finance and budget committee discussed Wednesday morning,
Francis said.
Increasing town fees, closing branch libraries on Friday nights and cutting
back on pothole repairs in order to reduce public works staff are other options
on the table, he said.
"There aren't any easy answers," Francis said.
Republican council minority leader Leon Davidoff, who Tuesday night lauded his
party's representatives on the council for being "in sync" with the
majority of town voters, said Wednesday that "food costs and fuel costs
are really affecting West Hartford families" and "we're going to
still try to see if we can do more with less."
Davidoff suggested the town could increase fees for building permits to raise
more revenue, but offered no concrete suggestions on how to trim costs.
"I would hope that layoffs would be the last resort," he said.
"I'm really not interested in laying people off."
Mayor Scott Slifka scoffed at the idea that town jobs
might be safe.
"Mr. Davidoff and his Republican colleagues are living in a fantasy land
where they continue to mislead the public to believe that these reductions can
be achieved without hard choices and without layoffs," Slifka
said. Last year, the town was forced to eliminate 17 positions after voters
rejected the original 2007-08 budget in a referendum, he said.
Superintendent David P. Sklarz said it was too early
to predict what kind of cuts would befall the school district, but that layoffs
are an option. Representatives from the council and board of education met
Wednesday afternoon to begin hashing out how much might need to be cut from the
$124.9 million school budget.
Until the district gets a firm figure, Sklarz said,
the hiring of teachers and any purchases for the coming academic year will be
put on hold.
"Right now, we're just trying to look at the worst-case scenario and the
best-case scenario," Sklarz said. He noted that
with personnel costs making up 85 percent of the school budget, "staff
reductions, equitably, across all of the grade levels" might be necessary.
"There's going to be some pain," Sklarz
said. Any job cuts would be focused on areas "that are furthest from the
classrooms. But as much as we've reduced the budget over the past two years,
furthest from the classroom is still pretty close."
Sklarz said cutting school programs would be
considered only as a "last resort." Special curriculum such as the
Quest program for gifted and talented students and world language at the
elementary level are what distinguish the school system, which in turn drives
up real estate values, "and consequently, what makes the taxes go up,"
Sklarz said.
Tuesday's budget defeat was decisive, despite an effort from the grass-roots
group West Hartford FIRST to drum up support for the budget, which featured a
6.9 percent spending increase. Out of 20 voting districts, only one —