First Selectman Talks Budget, Yale-New Haven Hospital, and Bin Laden in North Haven Way Q&A

The North Haven Way has published its latest interview with First Selectman Michael Freda, this time digging into the state of the town's finances and its plans for economic development.

Explaining why the town will not, as some residents have suggested, separate capital requests from the budget on tomorrow's referendum, Freda says he has already taken excess money out of North Haven's recommended 8% fund balance to mitigate taxes and pay off debts.

We are not separating capital from the budget because we have already moved 1.6M from the fund balance into this budget as part of my commitment to our town to use any excess over 8 percent fund balance to mitigate taxes and to help defray the revenue loss from CRRA.

I would need to take another 1.3M from the fund balance to do what you are asking. That would put us below the 8 percent and I am not willing to do that.

Keep this in mind, next year if the capital needs are less than 1.3M that would represent a savings versus this year so the argument works both ways. What I mean by this is that one year the capital could increase the total budget, but the next year capital could be less and that could help decrease the budget when you look at capital as an expense that could go up or down from one year to the next.

According to Freda, neither the dump truck nor the tow truck making up North Haven's $1.3 million budgetary capital request have yet been purchased.

Read the full article here.