Kennedy: “… hard, tough
choices …”
Ciaravino: “Let’s lay it out …”
NEWBURGH – Mayor Judy Kennedy and City Manager Michael Ciaravino said Newburgh government has had to make some tough fiscal decisions for 2016 in the continued financial balancing act.
During the State of the City address Thursday evening, they presented this year’s capital plan, as well as other city efforts, to maintain fiscal stability.
For 2016, the city has bonded $8 million, $3 million of which will be dedicated to maintenance of the city’s fresh water supplies of Washington Lake and Brown’s Pond. The rest of the bonded monies have been allocated to the city’s general fund and public safety. However, city officials have assessed their comprehensive capital needs at $102.2 million.
That has left the city with some hard choices, but ones that had to be made in order to keep it from losing more money due to fines, said Kennedy.
“It’s the thing we had to do in order to avoid getting fines and so forth,” the mayor said. “I would have loved to see more revenue generating things in our capital plan, absolutely and in this case it’s kind of like I would love to see a new couch but, my car’s broken down; I’ve got to do something about the car. It’s making really hard, tough choices I think.”
Ciaravino said projects like the Newburgh Landing that cannot be funded
at the moment should not be written off as there are other ways to finance
them.
“Rather than limit our thinking to our bonding capacity, let’s just identify all of it,” said Ciaravino. “Let’s lay it out; let’s prioritize it and let’s, at the end of the day, with those things that we are not able to finance with our Capital Plan, we will at least have on our awareness radar that speaks to, ‘Now what do we do with this? Do we go after these grants? Do we do something differently so that we can at least tell the community, yes, we know about this other project; we know that we need to do this?’ This is us balancing our priorities to the very best of our ability.”
Although the city is in a precarious financial position, officials said they have made progress. Ciaravino noted the city’s bond rating has been gradually increasing. Community policing has helped bring the community and police together resulting in a drop in violent crime and a six percent increase in community initiated police calls. The city has completed shoring efforts of City Hall and the police station, as well as a number of paving projects, in-house using their own DPW resulting in significant savings. Also, following a leak detection audit in the beginning of the year, the city water department has identified 96 leaks in parts of the city’s water supply, fixing 69 of them and expecting to have them all fixed by May, he said.
