Municipalities call for relief from financial crisis

HARTFORD » Lobbyists for Connecticut towns and cities on Friday asked the governor to help make it easier for them to cope with the state’s financial crisis by reducing expensive administrative burdens and letting them apply local cost-control reforms.

The Council of Small Towns and the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities also would like to change the municipal retirement system, and make it easier to arbitrate collective bargaining issues that could foster better intertown cooperation on such things as animal control, solid waste transfer stations and emergency responses.

They also want to keep a higher percentage of land-transfer fees.

Malloy, appearing with the heads of COST and CCM, said the budget stalemate, now six weeks into the new fiscal year, is creating a statewide uncertainty.

“Every day we don’t have a budget our work gets harder, not easier,” Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said in the state Capitol.

Malloy called the meeting with Joe DeLong, executive director of the CCM, and Betsy Gara, executive director of COST, a “productive” session with much agreement.

Malloy said some of the relief lawmakers can offer towns and cities includes an easing of regulations.

“In the current economic reality everyone is — and has been for a number of years — expected to deliver more with less,” he said.

DeLong said that CCM member communities are facing the possibility of reduced state aid and have

not been asking to be “held harmless” with continued levels of state aid in a year when lawmakers faced a $5-billion budget deficit.

But a short while later, Senate President Pro Tempore Martin M. Looney, DNew Haven, said DeLong’s statement was inaccurate.

“For the chief lobbyists of CCM and COST to stand up publicly and declare that they have not and are not asking for towns to be held harmless when it comes to municipal aid is misleading and does not accurately represent the positions of the mayors and first selectmen from whom we have heard,”

Looney said.

He stressed that municipal aid has divided state lawmakers as they deal with what is now — following the $1.5-billion in union concessions — an estimated $3.5 billion deficit in the budget that started July 1.

For almost six weeks, Malloy has run the state with minimal executive orders, and without a twoyear budget produced from the General Assembly.

Gara said that small towns need “tools” to help them reduce local expenses, including relief from costly state mandates, such as binding arbitration.

“Our city and town leaders are partners in governing the state,” DeLong said. “We all want the same things for Connecticut. I hope this is a step in this budget process where we have more time to have meetings with legislative leaders on both sides of the aisle as well.”

He said that during the recent negotiations that led to the givebacks from about 45,000 state employees — including a new retirement program for the next generation of workers that has been described as a hybrid 401(k) — town and city pension plans have been overlooked.

Barriers to service sharing are also needed, DeLong said.

“One of COST’s priorities has been to adjust the prevailing wage threshold,” Gara said, adding that they have not been adjusted since 1991. “Things like salt sheds, town garages, pavilions, all that becoming more expensive because of the prevailing wage requirements,” she added. The prevailing wage is the amount that workers much be paid for municipal and state projects, reflecting the region’s pay scale.

In the Municipal Employee Retirement System, employee contributions of about 2.25 percent of annual salaries for many workers, have not been adjusted since 1947, when the program began, Gara said, adding that COST and CCM would like the employee contribution to be removed from state law and become subject to collective bargaining.

“It makes consolidation very politically unpopular, because there is no savings and it’s very difficult to show other benefits,” Gara said.

“In the current economic reality everyone is — and has been for a number of years — expected to deliver more with less.” — Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy