First Selectman urges voters to turn down latest version of Middlefield budget
Posted on:
Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - 2:06pm
Based on legal advice and state statutes, Middlefield First Selectman Jon Brayshaw is urging voters to attend the public hearing and town meeting slated for Thursday, June 25, at 7 p.m. at the Memorial School auditorium and vote down the proposed budget.
According to Brayshaw, the applicable statute on municipal employees is crystal clear. “Our contracts were negotiated in good faith,” he says, “and we are legally bound to honor them.”
The statute language is as follows: “Where the legislative body is the town meeting (as in Middlefield), approval of the agreement (labor contract) by a majority of the selectmen shall make the agreement valid and binding upon the town and the board of finance shall appropriate or provide whatever funds are necessary to comply with such collective bargaining agreement.” (emphasis added)
Since the Board of Finance’s current budget proposal includes cuts to three union positions (the assessor, one of the constables and the building/land use secretary), as well as adjustments to the public works crew’s terms of employment (no overtime), Brayshaw casts the budget as both terribly unwise and illegal.
He is not alone. A heated meeting of the Lake Beseck Association on June 22 produced an irate letter penned by president Dick Boynton detailing five places where the Board of Finance’s judgment was questioned, including elimination of public works overtime, cutting the assessor’s hours to part-time, reducing the constable’s hours, eliminating lifeguards at the beach and eliminating funding for Youth and Family Services. Boynton argued that cutting the assessor’s hours in half and benefits totally would result in the town losing the services of this person, involve the town in expensive lawsuits and create the impression in the job market that working in Middlefield is not a stable option for well-qualified people.
A letter received at Town Times from Corrin Hultgren of Rockfall argues with the BOF for their elimination of funds for Youth Services, as well as overtime for the town crew. He defends the work and usefulness of both groups and ridicules the board’s comments that the road crew should take time off before pending snowstorms in order not to accrue overtime. “Has anyone really thought this through? OK, say it snows overnight on a Monday, plows can’t start plowing until shift time (no overtime, remember?). So, no school. Buses can’t travel on snow covered roads. Therefore, parents can’t go to work. Even if they could navigate their cars on the unplowed roads, there is no longer a DMYFS program for their child to attend – because you closed it – so they have to stay home. I bet if that happens a few times over the winter, someone’s boss might just get fed up and find a more reliable person to take their job. But I guess you see that as OK because you saved them a few dollars on their tax bill, right?” Hultgren’s letter reads in part.
A local firefighter has written to Brayshaw and asked why the BOF didn’t consider eliminating money for a party for the firefighters before some of the essential services to which they took an axe, specifically Youth and Family Services.
Brayshaw noted that morale among town employees is shot and “that’s a moral issue. We shouldn’t be treating the people who work for us, who we depend on, in this cavalier way.” He adds, “We run a tight ship here. We have about 20 town employees; some of those are part-time. We’re not overstaffed.”
Brayshaw explained that the budget he delivered to the Board of Finance in early March had a bottom line equal to the current year’s budget, along with several innovative attempts to save money and more efficiently utilize personnel.
In the three months since, the BOF has replicated that achievement in an entirely different – and some would say illegal – way. “This is a budget that should be defeated,” Brayshaw concluded.
What would happen then is that the BOF would have to develop next year’s budget, which would be automatically adopted as the town’s budget. Brayshaw’s hope is that the public hearing and town meeting would give BOF members enough of a sense of what people want and their outrage over what the BOF has taken away so that the final budget would be more palatable than the one that will be voted on June 25 at 7 p.m.
