Opinion: Brookfield Officials Urge Residents to Vote Yes on $2.8M Capital Improvement Projects

The following letter was written by Steve Dunn, Sue Slater, John Lucas, Sean Hathorn and Mark Zerbe

Brookfield, CT — It’s cliché, but Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will the Town of Brookfield’s finances. We are making good progress and recommend the approval of the July 19 referendum on the 2016-17 $2,835,000 Capital Improvement Projects and Bonding to keep moving forward.

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The Boards of Selectmen and Finance have had to deal with some extraordinary problems this year. The realization in December 2015 that there was a $3.3 Million dollar general fund balance deficiency meant that we had to replenish that balance in order to protect the Town’s credit rating (which was ultimately downgraded just one notch by Moody’s). This put pressure on the 2016–17 operating budget to fund part of that deficiency, while adding much needed services and improvement to the Town and Education budgets.

We did that successfully with overwhelming community support at the budget referendum this past May. At the same time, the Town has hired a new Controller and the Schools are in the middle of installing an upgraded financial system. With the assistance of Blum Shapiro, both the Town and School finance offices are working to implement new and improved accounting policies and internal control procedures in an effort to clean up past accounting issues and ensure they do not occur in the future. Towards this goal, the town has installed this month the Accounts Receivable and Capital Projects modules of our accounting software. These will allow the town to track our finances with greater detail and, when used properly, prevent the types of issues we have recently been facing from happening again.

As a result of a strained operating budget, there are some items in the Capital Projects budget that we would have preferred to cover in the operating budget. To do that would have meant burdening taxpayers in the coming fiscal year with a substantially greater tax increase. We decided not to do that.

Instead, we will be working hard to create a well thought out 10-year capital and debt plan this summer. We need to gradually increase expenditures on maintenance for capital items in the operating budget and holistically plan out the use of debt to fund major projects like a new library, possible replacement or upgrade to Huckleberry Hill Elementary School, and police and fire capital needs.

There will be those who will point out flaws in the Capital Improvement Projects and Bonding plan. Failure to approve this plan will mean that needed school plant improvements will go unmet and critically needed Town equipment will not be purchased. This will cause the town to not function efficiently enough to allow the Town to achieve its mission.

We strongly support this plan and we recognize that the strategic plan is needed, but let’s not allow that to slow down on meeting our immediate needs and making excellent progress to put the Town finances back in order.

Vote “Yes” on July 19.

Steve Dunn, Sue Slater, John Lucas, Sean Hathorn and Mark Zerbe