Signs of Fiscal Sanity to Come?

February 12, 2009

Call it government as usual.

While Connecticut’s economy tanks in every measurable way, many city and town employees sleep easy. Their excessive pay, platinum-plated benefits, and rock-solid job security are safe.

Plymouth’s government-school teachers get an average annual salary bump of 3.45 percent in their new contract. For Cheshire’s teachers, it’s 4.4 percent. Last month, Branford’s teachers were given a contract with raises averaging 4.63 percent over the next three years. (Town employees won an average pay hike of 3.35 percent over the next five years.) Colleagues in the Lyme-Old Lyme regional school district did a bit worse, with annual increases of “only” 2.25 percent through fiscal 2012.

Waterbury’s bureaucrats hit the mother lode in January. Blue- and white-collar employees, school administrators, and firefighters all received contracts with guaranteed raises. (The Brass City’s top educrats will see their pay boosted by an average of 9.7 percent!)

Such profligacy is enough to make Connecticut’s remaining taxpayers, cursed with living in a high-tax, high-cost state that suffers from declining household incomes and vanishing private-sector jobs, join the Nutmeggers making one-way trips out of state.

But amid the avalanche of municipal-employee giveaways, some sprouts of fiscal sanity have appeared. Whether through citizen activism or the skittishness of elected officials with November on their minds, local bureaucrats’ gravy train is loosing steam.

In December, New Hartford residents Joseph Bieluch and Mark Hawley launched a scrappy effort to overturn a school-administrator agreement they thought was too generous. The contract awarded raises of 16.5 percent over the next four years. “The administrators need to make a sacrifice for the good of the town as a whole,” Bieluch told the (Waterbury) Republican-American. “Not a lot of people can afford this right now.”

A majority of citizens agreed, and in a daylong referendum January 15, crushed the contract, 293 to 62. Unfortunately, not enough folks showed up to make the vote valid. State law, in one of its countless gifts to public-sector unions, mandates that 15 percent of a town’s electorate must turn out to make a contract-rejection referendum legit -- and in New Hartford, 355 voters wasn’t enough.

Taxpayers fared better in Naugatuck. On January 6, the mayor and board of burgesses voted 8-0 to overturn the board of education’s agreement with its teacher union. The contract mandated annual raises of 3.25, 2.25, and 2.5 percent. (As is the case for every Connecticut school district, “step increases” would have meant even higher hikes for many teachers.) Not surprisingly, the school board’s bubble-headed chairwoman whined that the decision was “not … in the best interest of the citizens of Naugatuck.”

Stamford’s elected officials must hate their citizens, too. Earlier this month, the board of representatives voted 28-4 to reject a contract with school administrators. The two-year deal offered raises of 3 percent, but even that relatively mild boost went too far for most of the board. One member said “it would be …  unconscionable to support this contract.”

Another major municipality is scheduled to examine a newly negotiated contract next week. On February 17, Danbury’s common council will review the deal the Hat City’s school board reached with its teacher union. Even the city’s mayor -- Mark Boughton, a former educrat and one of the founders of the money-grubbing “Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding” -- finds the agreement problematic: “We all respect the hard work of our teachers, but the impact of the contract on the budget is profound and it’s going to be difficult to fund it.” South Windsor’s town council is looking at its new teacher-union contract, too.

In some cities and towns, layoffs -- we’re talking about government employees, remember -- are underway. In January, East Hartford fired eight workers, decided not to replace three retiring staffers, and left unfilled eight openings. On February 3rd, Greenwich told its employees it was terminating as many as 70 of them, in an attempt to close a $5 million budget gap in the current fiscal year.

For the sake of Connecticut’s economy, let’s hope these small steps toward fiscal sanity are portents of more aggressive reforms. Multi-year salary freezes -- if not pay cuts -- are needed. So is a shift to defined-contribution pension plans. Health savings accounts must be adopted much more frequently. Competitive contracting and privatization are underutilized tools.

Connecticut’s multi-decade coddling of its municipal employees won’t be halted in short order. Still, it’s encouraging to see tentative, if sometimes clumsy, attempts to restrain personnel costs that were unaffordable even when the Nutmeg State’s economy was strong.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com.

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