Hartford Budget discussion

[The Voice of Reason]

I am not sure anyone cares but I thought maybe we could open some budget discussion up here since it affects sme of us directly and most of us indirectly.

Access to the budget info for '09-'10 can be found on the cities page

http://www.hartford.gov/budget/RecommendedBudget09-10/

Some things that are interesting. and mind you I am looking at the broadest strokes right now.

The total budget passed a 535,000,000 budget

The Sundry section of the budget is likely the scariest part.

Sundry makes up 137,009,937 of the total budget

Out of that figure

62,792,159 goes to cover Benefits and Insurance

33,147,000 goes to debt service

so, doing some simple math, these two line items cover

11.74% and 6.20% of the total budget.

Education accounts for 271,631,688 or 50.77% of the total budget.

So with just the school system, Employee benefits, Insurance, and debt service, the city is spending $367,570,847

now, looking a little deeper

The library gets 7790000. a pretty decent sized cut from the 8345148 spent in 07, and the 8241580 spent in 08 I suspect there will be some branch closures or programs cut.

I think it would be wise if government could figure out a way to say. OK liberary, you get 8 mill a year untill 2012. shake on it, and make the lib budget for it.

then each year the govt would have to hold to its word on budget items like this.

it just seems messed up whrn the city projects for an increase in giving to the Lib because they are building a huge renovation, then they cut them off at the knees and lower the budget by 10% over 2 years.

The general fund is pretty scary. I think I will nose around a bit and see where we obviously wasting money (in my opinion)