The new Springfield city budget has been finalized for a couple of weeks now—but don’t expect the political aftershocks it created to die down any time soon.
The municipal budget process has never exactly been smooth sailing for the Sarno administration. During Mayor Domenic Sarno’s first year in office, in 2008, it was the state-imposed Finance Control Board, not the mayor and City Council, that controlled the annual spending plan for the coming fiscal year. Still, Sarno managed to tick off councilors nonetheless, by barring them from attending budget meetings between city department heads and financial officers. The following year—which saw the Control Board, its tenure about to expire, hand the budget drafting over to local officials while maintaining final approval—Sarno loosened up on that tight control, inviting councilors to sit in on the meetings.
But any bridges that were mended by that gesture were essentially blown up during this year’s budget process, which saw Sarno and councilors engaged in a power struggle that dragged on right up to the June 30 deadline for the city to submit its fiscal 2011 budget to the state Department of Revenue.
At issue: Sarno’s request that the City Council transfer $16.6 million in free cash to a stabilization fund. City Councilor Jimmy Ferrera and others—their ears, no doubt, still ringing with the complaints of voters unhappy with recent property tax increases—objected, saying they wanted to put some of the money into a “tax relief” fund to offset future tax increases. Sarno and his financial team insisted the city, which has fought hard in recent years to get its finances in order, would risk a return to its old, unstable days without a strong stabilization fund.
Council President Jose Tosado accused Sarno of expecting councilors to “rubber stamp” his requests without providing them with necessary information. In the midst of the struggle, Councilor Tim Rooke, chairman of the Finance Committee, asked if councilors could attend a meeting between City Hall financial staff and DOR officials. In an echo of 2008, Sarno’s office informed councilors that they were not invited.
The battle between the mayor and Council came on the heels of yet another political standoff, also between Sarno and Rooke. For weeks, Rooke had refused to hold Finance Committee meetings, in an effort to force Sarno to seek competitive bids for a new School Department headquarters, rather than simply move the department to the old federal building on Main Street. Rooke has been fighting that decision since last year, insisting that the city could have found a much better deal for taxpayers had it sought bids.
In the end, Rooke—realizing that his fellow councilors could circumvent him and hold the meetings anyway—relented. The Council, too, approved the city budget at an eleventh-hour meeting, although not without also approving a resolution, sponsored by Ferrera, calling for future city surpluses to be used to offset property tax increases.
And thus a certain level of calm descended on City Hall—one that will, no doubt, give way to a tsunami as the 2011 election approaches.
That election is, of course, more than 15 months away. But Springfield’s two-year terms mean that the mayor and councilors are pretty much always in campaign mode. (Mercifully, voters last year approved an extension of the mayor’s term to four years, starting with the 2011 election.)
Right now, Tosado appears to be Sarno’s most serious potential challenger. And while the Council president has yet to make any official announcements, he’s sounding more and more like a mayoral candidate of late, with pointed criticisms of the incumbent.
In an email to the Advocate, in response to a question about the budget process, Tosado wrote, “Not too much bloodshed during the budget debate with the Mayor and his team but surely we still have a major communication problem with this administration, as well as trust issues.”
While Sarno, after the missteps of his first year in office, has let councilors attend department budget hearings, “you have to question the sincerity,” Tosado later said in an interview.
“City government is broken,” Tosado added. Does he see himself as the person who can fix it?
