Bad day at Black Rock over taxes Tuesday

BRIDGEPORT — Some are calling it a “Brexit.”

But instead of the “British exit” from the European Union that has dominated headlines worldwide, in this case the “B” and “R” stand for the city’s seaside Black Rock neighborhood.

Community leaders and activists — Democrats and Republicans — living there plan to storm Tuesday’s City Council meeting to protest the spike in their tax bills wrought by the new municipal budget.

“What I find unconscionable is that the mayor and City Council somehow thought that a budget that would cause a 29 percent increase in the mill (tax) rate was appropriate or even rationale,” said Mary-Jane Foster.

Foster, a former mayoral contender, and many of her neighbors, are furious over $2,000-and-up tax hikes.

Ex-U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, a Republican, said, “People want to pursue a lot of options, including seceding from Bridgeport.” Some Black Rockers are calling for a “Brexit” on social media.

“There’s a level of anger and outrage here that in the 50-plus years I’ve been in this community I’ve never seen,” said Republican Phil Blagys, former head of the Black Rock Community Council.

Unfortunately that anger is being expressed a month too late. The budget was finalized in late May.

Broken promises?

When he ran again for mayor last year, Joe Ganim attacked incumbent and fellow Democrat Bill Finch’s record of raising taxes, except during elections.

“Stop Raising Taxes! Vote Joe Ganim,” read his lawn signs. And they worked. Ganim, who ran the city from 1991 to 2003, beat Finch and Foster in last September’s Democratic primary, then handily won November’s general election.

Ganim submitted his draft $560.3 million budget to the Council in April.

Finch would give the general public a rough estimate of how the budgets he submitted each year might impact their wallets. Ganim and his staff steadfastly refused to do that. So, using a basic calculation, Hearst Connecticut Media concluded his fiscal plan hiked the mill or tax rate from 42.1 mills to 51.4 mills.

Turned out it was even worse: The Council whittled the budget down to $552,000, but the related tax rate that the legislative body set in late May was 54.37.

Ganim all along had complained about inheriting a $20 million deficit from Finch. He at the time praised his administration for “erasing” that red ink and “reducing the tax burden on residential homeowners.”

But the latter relief was thanks to a recent state-mandated property revaluation. That process lowered the values of many Bridgeport homes, thus reducing what their owners have been paying in taxes.

Ganim Chief-of-Staff Danny Roach also calls Black Rock home and he runs a bar there.

“Black Rock property values pretty much held their own where the city on average went down 20 percent, so there’s going to be some disparities in some areas of the city,” Roach said. “Condos in particular did well with revaluation (and resultant tax cuts), whereas homeowners in Black Rock and, to a lesser extent, the North End and Brooklawn, didn’t do so well.”

Ganim is a condo-dweller. When he moved back to Bridgeport from Easton last year to run for his old job, he registered to vote out of a friend’s condominium. The mayor has since purchased a unit in that same complex and, according to the bill his office provided, has a real estate tax bill of $2,012.78.

Misled or disinterested?

There was some speculation during the budget season that the Ganim administration was intentionally playing coy over tax increases to avoid the kind of public outcry expected Tuesday night.

And though the council held public budget hearings, attendees mainly called for more education spending.

“People just didn’t really show up,” said freshman Councilman Scott Burns, a budget committee chairman who also lives in Black Rock.

Blagys said, “A lot of people don’t understand the whole process and they get the bill on July 1 and are like, all of a sudden, ‘How did this happen?’”

Roach acknowledged he has fielded complaints from neighbors about their tax bills and questions about whether the administration could have cut the budget further.

“And things could have been a lot worse if the ($20 million) deficit wasn’t shrunk,” Roach said. “Sometimes there’s only so much you can do.”

The administration already eliminated around 100 jobs since December. And on Thursday Ganim announced he will lay off an unspecified number of workers Friday because labor unions have not agreed to $4 million in concessions built into the new budget.

Tuesday’s tax protest could fuel further debate about what to do with $2.1 million the Council had originally set aside for tax relief, but that Ganim has tried to dip into to fund summer youth programs and an initiative to help ex-offenders.

“At some point we’re going to have to figure out what we’re going to do with that money,” Burns said.