The 2011-2012 Town Budget leaves a lot to be desired for East Haven

I attended the Mayor’s Presentation on the Town Budget and I must say I was impressed by the delivery of the address. If you listened to what she was saying it all made sense and the Power Point presentation was just as good the only problem was she forgot that it was only last year that she socked the Town of East Haven with a 17% tax increase.

The facts are that the Capone Administration continues to blame the Maturo Administration for the over estimation of projected revenues from 2007 that put this Town at a 5.3 million dollar deficit and that is simply not true. When the Maturo Administration left office it left a 4 million dollar fund balance which by 2010 was in the negative. How does that happen? Fiscal mismanagement is how it occurs and a lack of accountability.

What Mayor Capone wants you the taxpayer to forget is she owned a part of the 2007-2008 budget from the Maturo Administration. Every budget runs from July 1^st to June 30^th. She was elected in November 2007. From December 2007 to current her administration she has had full control of the Town’s expenses and her administration has taken no accountability for anything and continues to blame the Maturo Administration.

I have said it from the 2007 campaign that Mayor Capone’s lack of experience has been part of the problem. Her lack of managerial skills allowed her to leave Maturo’s finance director Paul Rizza in the position when clearly anyone in such a key role should have been replaced and a forensic audit should have been done on the Maturo Administration. However, since that was not done we the taxpayers will probably never know if there was a short fall left behind and Capone’s administration continues to use that as an excuse for the deficit.

As for the 1.5 million dollars received in the Tweed New Haven Airport agreement, it is not a good accounting practice to use non budgetary items as sources of revenue to balance a budget and for the Mayor to claim that she has reduced your taxes by half a mill is also disingenuous. The fact remains that this administration hit the taxpayers with the largest tax increase in recent memory last year and shaving off an average of $20 this year to the $800 we were hit with last year is no bargain in our households.

The truth is in the numbers and even though this Administration claims to have reduced spending and now has lowered your taxes it’s all a shell game and frankly in speaking with many people in Town we’ve had enough. It’s time that we have truth in government and elected officials that will stop being disingenuous with our tax dollars. The only question one should be asking is how much was my property tax bill in 2009-10 and how much was my property tax bill in 2010-11?