Finance And Governance Concentrates on Finance

The F&G Committee began with a financial warning and ended with one on Wednesday evening.

Councilman David Bauer, testifying as a public citizen, said that he was worried about a report he had heard from city employees that money was being wasted on a rented sanitation truck.

According to Bauer, a city truck is under repair, and the Sanitation Department rented a used vehicle at a higher price than they could have rented a new vehicle with the same specs as city trucks. In addition, a one-week repair has extended to three weeks, and the department is now requesting an additional $5000, on top of a $900o request for rental and repair costs.

Committee chair Ron Klattenberg recommended that Bauer bring his concern before the council meeting on Monday.

At meeting's end, finance director Carl Erlacher warned committee members that a request for $2.5 million dollars from the reserve fund will be made at Monday's Common Council meeting. Erlacher explained that the expenditure would cover police salaries negotiated in the last contract talks.

Erlacher stated that the expenditure would drop the reserve fund to $9 million.

"I was looking toward the day when Aetna leaves town, in building that reserve," Erlacher explained. "Now we don't have that buffer. Next year we'll have to come up with another plan."

One of the ways the city is looking to make money is through hiring a bill collector to collect on past due bills, fines and license fees. The collection company takes a percentage of the recovered funds. Fourteen thousand past-due bills were handed over to the collector.

In between the financial warnings, the committee sent a series of ordinance recommendations forward to the Common Council recommending expenditures for energy saving measures at Middletown's Public Schools. In a presentation, Kendall Jackson, director of school facilities, and Doreen Hamilton from Honeywell Business Solutions explained how the expenditures would more than payback the original outlay in savings.