City of New Haven Proposed 2011-12 Budget
City of New Haven, Board of Ed Budget
Management Partners Gap Analysis for the Financial Review And Audit Commission
McGladrey Gap Analysis for the Mayor’s Ability to Pay Presentation
Check this out: CNN Report on Cash Strapped Cities. Pay attention to Corey Booker’s thoughts on not only budget shortfalls but the unfunded pension and healthcare liabilities. This is HIGHLY relevant to New Haven.
Read the article here in the New Haven Independent.
Can we decrease spending and increase revenue to cover $100 Million? This is what we need to do in five years to cover a $82 Million shortfall and raise the emergency fund to 5% of our budget (another $22 million). This is not counting any drastic measures by the State to cut our PILOT or ECS (Education) funding.
Other interesting findings such as spending $1.5 Billion Dollars on Schools without checking to see if we need to build so many schools — is this why the census is so low at schools? If our census at schools do not match what we told the state, the State is going to send us a bill for the difference. I believe we have already had to pay back about $65 million in money for things which the State never approved. Where does it end???
Check out this article in CT News Junkie on Unfunded Pension Obligations
An important piece this article does not mention is the “discount rate” or “Return on Investment” assumptions. When you assume, as New Haven does, a high and unrealistic 8-9% return every year, year after year, you only need to put in a small amount of money AND you can claim that we are “funding the pensions at 100% actuarial required amount”. The problem, is that if you assume 5% then the amount we need to put away in our CERF and P&F funds would skyrocket each year. Our funded ratio is very low AND we assume a high rate of return. I would recommend you request from our actuaries SEVERAL scenarios with the rate of return, pessimistic/ best guess/ optimistic ROI. Our current ROI is hopelessly optimistic and concealing the true problem in our city’s pension funds.
See the New York Times Discussion.
Can New Haven fix its pension problem?
Thank You
We had a very successful turn out last evening and even won over the people turned out by the Mayor. Lets keep up the pressure to have the Board of Aldermen send the budget back to the Mayor.