Rell won’t hold back grants for education
http://www.theday.com/article/20100119/NWS12/301199935/1044
Governor’s temporary threat seen as bargaining chip in budget fight
By Ted Mann
Publication: The Day
Published 01/19/2010 06:32 AM
Turning to budgetary hardball in an effort to break an impasse with Democrats, Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s administration considered temporarily withholding a broad array of education grants to local governments in an apparent attempt to force legislators to make a deal on deeper cuts to the state budget.
Municipal leaders and representatives discovered the cut late last week, when representatives from the state Department of Education informed them that expected grant payments worth millions of dollars statewide would not be arriving after all.
Affected grants would include the Priority School District program, which helps pay for staff in troubled municipal school systems across the state, including in New London and Norwich.
“It’s a huge problem,” said Norwich Mayor Peter Nystrom. “It affects programs across our entire city district. It affects kids directly.”
Also being delayed on the orders of the governor’s budget office, according to correspondence from officials at the Department of Education, were reimbursement payments for school transportation, after-school programs, literacy programs and the Head Start program.
But it appeared late Monday that the administration had backed away from the proposal.
A Rell spokesman, Adam Liegeot, said “grants to schools will be paid on time, and there will be no delay in releasing them.”
For hours, neither Rell’s press office nor officials at the Office of Policy and Management would clarify how such denials gibe with the e-mail messages received last week by educators, which explicitly say that OPM had decided to halt payment on state grants that do not have specific payment dates enshrined in statute.
Affected school officials, lawmakers and town officials were confused and upset by the decision when word began to trickle out late last week, on the eve of the holiday weekend, and even more distressed by what some said was an effort to gain an upper hand in budget negotiations over Democrats by squeezing towns and local schools. That confusion continued through the weekend and Monday’s holiday, as area administrators remained unsure whether to expect a sudden shortfall in school funds within the coming week.
“They’re obviously trying to put pressure on the legislature to come to the table with the governor, and we’re caught in the middle here,” said Jim Finley, president of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, which advocates for municipal governments at the Capitol. “And most of those grants (being held up) are going to affect the poorest school districts the most.”
Some of that pain is imminent, said Finley, who noted that eligible Priority School Districts would normally receive a payment on Jan. 25, but that that money now could be withheld, forcing districts to fill the shortfall, at least temporarily.
One such administrator, interim Superintendent Abby I. Dolliver of Norwich, said she had notified the city’s legislative delegation and municipal officials about the impending delay in the grant payments.
But late Monday, an undersecretary at OPM, Jeffrey R. Beckham, acknowledged in a terse e-mail message that the administration had reversed its decision to withhold the funding.
“As of now it is not correct information,” Beckham wrote, without giving a reason for OPM’s change of heart. “By late last week the (Education) dept was in receipt of different instructions.”
While Rell does not have the authority to make unilateral cuts to municipal government grants, the correspondence from the education department to school officials appeared to show how the administration had found a shortcut. The grants affected by the policy, according to the department, are generally reimbursements to towns for which payment dates are not specifically identified in state statutes, meaning that actual payment could be legally delayed until June 30, the end of the fiscal year.
“Due to Governor Rell’s recent budget veto and ongoing budget negotiations, please note that the Office of Policy and Management has directed us not to process any payments other than those specified in statute,” wrote Karen Kowalski, a supervisor in the office of Brian Mahoney, the education department’s chief financial officer.
Another education official sent a similar message to concerned superintendents on Thursday, which said she had been “told that OPM had ordered the department not to pay any bills related to these grants until further notice.”
“I have also been told that the money IS still there but we are not to pay out,” the official wrote.
Democrats passed a pair of deficit mitigation bills late last year that cut only about $12.4 million in spending, but Rell called the measure insufficient and vetoed both bills. With the governor and lawmakers seemingly returned to a stalemate over how to close the deficit in the current fiscal year, legislators said they saw Rell’s move as a way to raise the stakes for legislators and drive them toward a compromise on new spending cuts.
“It’s a sort of a good news/bad news situation,” said House Minority Leader Lawrence F. Cafero Jr., R-Norwalk, who has urged Rell to take a harder line on spending cuts, but who will also feel the proposed delay in grant payments back home since Norwalk, like New London and Norwich, is a priority school district grant recipient.
But Cafero said that spreading the pain to towns could lead to more urgency among residents about addressing the state’s fiscal problems.
“No one’s felt any pain; no one’s gone without,” Cafero said. “There haven’t been closure signs on state parks or that kind of thing. I think what the governor’s thinking is, ‘Hey, I have real problems, I have obligations to maintain cash flow and these are the only accounts I have control over: I have to hold them back.’”
But municipal officials were furious with both sides, arguing that vulnerable children and school programs were being sacrificed to a seemingly endless partisan wrestling match over spending and taxes.
“Putting children in between two political parties like this,” Nystrom said, “I don’t know who to be more angry at, her or them.”
Democratic leaders were also furious.
“I plan to call her tomorrow and ask her, ‘What are you doing?’” House Speaker Christopher Donovan, D-Meriden, said Monday. “I just don’t understand it. If that’s what she’s doing, it’s truly irresponsible and unfair to cities and towns who depend on those funds and children going to after-school programs.”
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