Submitted by Joe Pellegrino
Talk about eye popping headlines! The latest Democratic E-blast caught my attention: $1.6 BILLION backlog! Wow! That is quite a number.
Having been a former Chair of the Budget Committee for the BET, I had to ask myself: how could that be? Where does that number come from and what does it contain?
I looked at the LWV Greenwich’s study and the closest I could come to that number was a reference to the 15-YEAR capital budget which is, in reality, just a wish list put together by Town departments and the Board of Education.
Referring to the actual Town Budget for 2023-2024, that number is $1.145 billion…so where does the other $455 MILLION come from? Hard to find that, but hey, what is four hundred and fifty-five million dollars when you need to capture your reader’s attention with misleading information.
Could it be that we actually appropriate money for capital projects, but that it takes more than a year to get them completed and thus we have a carryover of funding? But even that does not get you anywhere close to the $455 million gap.
Finally, it dawned on me: this number is fiction because if you take the $1.6 Billion and divide it by 15, you come up with approximately $106 million a year in capital spending.
And as hard as we try, there is no way we can spend $106 million a year on capital improvements: you can’t physically undertake enough improvements in a year to equal that dollar amount. You don’t have
enough Town employees to be engaged in that number of capital projects and think that you have a clue as to what the contractors are doing. You simply cannot spend that much money a year without
significantly raising taxes. Or significantly increasing the number of town employees responsible for capital improvements.
It will be interesting to see, this coming November, if the voters are as gullible as the Democrats think they are. I am optimistic to believe that the majority of Greenwich residents will see through these misleading headlines and vote on the basis that the Town has been well managed under Republican leadership.