Little Poland Day 4/28/2013: A Street Festival On Broad Street

Not since "Main Street USA" in years past has New Britain seen a street festival like April 28th's Little Poland Day organized by the Polonia Business Association.

More at New Britain Democrat  http://wp.me/pWyF4-11v

Rell v CCJEF: Data Shows NB One Of Hardest Hit In Funding For Schools

Rell v. CCJEF Lawsuit: New Britain One of Hardest Hit Cities In Funding For Schools

Money or the lack of it to pay for public education  was the focus of the Democratic Town Committee meeting last month.  A presentation by longtime advocate Dianne Kaplan deVries, on  a landmark court case brought by the Connecticut Coalition for Justice in Education Funding (CCJEF) contended that New Britain and other urban districts will always struggle for adequate education dollars so long as there is too much reliance on property taxes.

The Rell v. CCJEF suit, launched in November 2005,  is applying plenty of  legal pressure to shift the funding  for schools away from local property taxes and to compel equity in school funding for city and suburb alike.  The case, aided by the pro bono work of the Yale Law School Education Adequacy Clinic for the last seven years and taken up last year by New York City 's Debevoise & Plimpton firm,  seeks a decision to re-write the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula to reflect  "the real costs of adequately preparing all students for the modern workforce and productive citizenship."

New Britain -- one of the financially distressed cities that struggles with schools budgets every year -- could be considered Exhibit A in Rell v. CCJEF, according to Kaplan deVries' analysis presented to elected officials and DTC members on February 28th.  New Britain school children, in fact, have figured prominently as plaintiffs in the litigation.

New Britain needs $21,140 per pupil in inflation-adjusted dollars to provide "an adequate education" but the school district had $12,608 (2011-2012) in local and state funds, according to the Coalition. Using that number developed as part of the research for the law suit, city schools are $8,500 per pupil short or $86 million shy of delivering the "adequate" resources.

In 2013, Kaplan deVries says the gap for New Britain is even worse. The Coalition's numbers  "fail to  account for unfunded mandates, full No Child Left Behind (NCLB)  implementation, and other significant changes impacting the cost of schooling that have come along since 2004-05.  "CCJEF’s expert finance consultants found that New Britain is one of the four most severely underfunded districts in the state" according to presentation at the DTC meeting.

Dr.  Kaplan deVries,  a policy expert and CCJEF project director, said the belief that "quality education is a civil right and key to achieving social justice" underlies her organization's call to fix the school funding formula on a statewide basis and to restructure the tax system so that "geography is not destiny."

Right now attorneys in Rell v. CCJEF are in  a back-and-forth "discovery" phase of data collection, depositions and studies.  The Attorney General is in the unenviable position of defending the status quo with a trial date now set for July 2014.

The proceedings are strikingly similar to the decades-long Sheff v. O'Neill battles that eventually led to voluntary, state-funded remedies to end racial isolation and today's network of interdistrict magnet schools.  Rell v. CCJEF is just as far reaching and will impact every city and town depending on the outcome

In its challenge to the status quo CCJEF defines  "adequate" education in elementary and secondary schools with a dozen components: universal preschool and full-day kindergarten, smaller class sizes, longer school day and year, with free summer school for all, help for all students falling behind, up-to-date textbooks, materials, computer technology, more/better assistance for ELL and SPED students, opportunities for advanced students, more/earlier foreign language options, expanded arts programming, guidance counselors, social workers, psychologists, more/better professional development for teachers and all staff and improved buildings/grounds maintenance.

A decision in Rell v. CCJEF is, of course, years away. Optimistically, an improving economy and a willing state government could lead to  many of the remedies called for in the plaintiffs' case for a restructuring of school finance outside of the courts.

New Britain and other towns have no other option than to work within a structure that is unfair and overly reliant on the 17th century property tax to pay for 21st century teaching and learning.

More ECS money as proposed by Governor Malloy this year can help,  but will not solve the underlying problem.  It also helps that the eight years of willful neglect of education by the Stewart administration ended last year. Mayor O'Brien, the current Council and New Britain legislators have shown a firm commitment to give the schools their fair share, however limited revenues in cash-strapped New Britain are for education.

Regardless of the court proceedings and the outcomes, Rell v CCJEF continues to apply the needed pressure to move the state toward "adequate" funding and equity so that children in New Britain have the same opportunities as children in Greenwich.

Options On The Table For The "Move To Neighborhood Schools"

New Britain's "Move to Neighborhood Schools" will be the focus of  a Monday, February 25th Board of Education meeting when board members will review a plan by Supt, Kelt Cooper that calls for all students attending classes in schools and programs outside of their neighborhood district in 2012-2013 to attend a neighborhood school in 2013-2014.

The Monday 2/25 public meeting begins at 6 p.m. at New Britain High School's Tercyak Lecture Hall on Mill Street with a presentation on the neighborhood plan and two hours set aside for public comment. According to BOE President Sharon Beloin-Saavedra a final plan for a neighborhood schools' strategy will be voted on by the board in March.

The BOE faces a lengthy agenda because of storm cancellations earlier in the month. It will also take up inclusion of the DiLoreto School in the State Commissioner of Education's "network" schools -- a decision expected to bring additional funds into Slater Road school to improve the school district's low achievement scores.

Over the last decade or so the school district established specialized programs or magnets with learning communities and supports as choices for families (available via lottery) across the city with the intent of developing models for higher student achievement. The neighborhood school proposal notes that "while most students attending these select programs attained high levels of academic achievement, the strategy did not increase overall school district performance."  The administration said the citywide academies "created another  unintended issue: that of filling schools with non-neighborhood children. This necessitated the busing of neighborhood students to other buildings to accommodate any incoming population."

Cooper is proposing that 2013-2014 be a year of transition with four steps: 1)Students newly registered to the district are placed in his/her neighborhood school based on classroom space; 2) the elimination of Out of District (OOD) or "non-neighborhood school" requests by parents or guardians; 3) the re-zoning of school district lines based on population; 4) adoption of neighborhood schools for all students in the 2013-2014 school year identified as "Plan A." by the school administration.

BOE members are reviewing Cooper's proposal that also identifies two alternate plans for moving to a neighborhood school strategy.

"Plan B" allows students located in a school outside of their district to be "grandfathered" into the school outside of the neighborhood district with certain conditions. The student would first be placed in a neighborhood school in September 2013 for the first three weeks and then, -- if space is available -- the student could  return to the OOD school of choice for the remainder of the year.  Parent or guardians, however, would be required to provide transportation since busing to non-neighborhood schools will be eliminated. "Plan C" allows for "grandfathering" of students in the non-neighborhood schools of choice in 2013-2014 in grades 5 and 8 only.

Supt. Cooper prefers Plan A stating that it "would be the most efficient means to return to neighborhood schools. It is one which would probably be the most cost effective regarding the budget."

For implementation to neighborhood only schools (special education is exempt from the plan) the school administration will need to re-draw the city's education map with new district lines. "The ground work has begun in the mapping identification of students at schools for the current year. This process clearly shows that students in each school are scattered throughout the city, which requires busing to all schools," Cooper stated in a February 7th proposal. "The second process involves the mapping of former neighborhood school district lines from the mid 1990s with the overlay of our current student population to identify the numbers of students at each school based on the former neighborhood lines. In some cases the population has shifted away from a few neighborhoods and significantly increased in other neighborhoods."

The neighborhood schools' plan seeks to "establish the framework for equitable distribution of district resources based on the needs of the neighborhood school."   School administrators acknowledge  "the movement of district lines is a significant event in our community but it is essential to regain a sense of school community in neighborhoods."

To counteract parent concerns about the loss of learning communities (LCs) that have improved student performance in the academies, school officials are pledging that "the best practices we have learned to be effective through out smaller learning communities will be implemented district-wide for all students in all schools."

The neighborhood school proposal identifies a potential saving of $78,200 for each bus taken out of service in 2013-2014.  Those funds presumably could be applied to school budgets on a neighborhood basis,  but the total amount of savings from transportation for the district was not estimated.

Digging Out Slowed By Storm Intensity, Accumulation

The storm that moved into the city at mid day on Friday dumped upwards of 27 inches of drifting snow. It will likely take two to three days to get streets back to normal in cities such as New Britain and Hartford.

By 9 p.m. Saturday many residential side streets remained unplowed as crews labored to get major thoroughfares cleared for emergencies and public safety responses.

The intensity of the storm and Friday night blizzard conditions forced crews off the roads disrupting a normal schedule of snow clearance that occurs with less severe storms.  Public and private crews have been working all day Saturday and will continue through the night to make all streets passable by some time Sunday, officials said.

"You can't even quantify how bad it is out here," said one private plow operator about the situation in New Britain. "Take the 2011 storms and triple it. I've been stuck in the truck 10 times. There are places I can't even do with the truck. There is just too much to plow."

In an update Mayor O'Brien said that all streets should be clear by Sunday:

"In New Britain, city crews have been working around the clock, under difficult conditions, since during the storm, to clear the snow. As of right now, it looks like city streets will be opened by snowplows sometime tomorrow (Sunday).
With the massive amount of snow, the clearing has been tough and slow-going. To get the city up and running, the city has been clearing the major roads first and working to the neighborhood streets.
The job is so large because of the historic snowfall that the city workers actually have to use pay loaders in addition to plows to clear the large amount of snow. And because there is so much snow to be removed, it is going to take time to completely clear the streets. It is a tough job, given how severe this storm was, and other cities and towns are experiencing similar challenges."

A pristine Brighton Street near CCSU in the Belvedere neighborhood was among many secondary roads that were still waiting for street plows late Saturday night.  Friday's blizzard forced crews off the roads for a time during the storm. 

Lower Values Will Mean Fewer Assessment Appeals, Lower Taxes (But Not For the Right Reasons)

The Board of Assessment Appeal will be hearing from hundreds of property owners in a couple of months who disagree with the just completed, state mandated revaluation on residential and commercial real estate in the city.  

But for City Assessor Mike Konik and his three-member board the number of appeals should be dramatically less than other reassessment years. The caseload load may be at an all-time low.


The Herald's Scott Whipple reports: "The city’s Grand List for Oct. 1, 2012, decreased $498,847,668, or 16.92 percent, from the 2011 list to $2,450,232,418. Revaluation, mandated by state law at least every five years, was the reason for the drop-off as housing values have been adjusted downward reflecting the bottoming out of the market that had reached a peak in 2007 when the city last reassessed property."


Homeowners and apartment house owners will be getting a break as the mill rate is set for another year. Tax rates are going down not because governments are ending the over reliance on property levies. They are declining because of the  economic collapse of five years ago.   Long term, the fiscal squeeze on cash-strapped cities such as New Britain is getting worse..


It used to be a given that your home would  always go up in value in good economic times and bad. Home equity was that economic ace in the hole for American households. It could leverage loans to pay for college or help reduce debt. The seller, with rare exceptions, could always count on a return on investment, getting  significantly more than the original sales price.  The only downside was that whenever revaluation occurred homeowners would always get whacked with a bigger tax bill. And in Connecticut ,with some of the highest property taxes in the country, that meant lots of appeals and more pressure to shrink municipal budgets.
"The banks had issued so many mortgages, so rapidly, that they had given short shrift to basic procedural safeguards," says Economist Joseph Stiglitz in his book, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. "And as the banks and other lenders rushed to lend more and more money, not surprisingly, fraudulent practices became endemic. FBI investigations spiked. The combination of frequent fraudulent practices and a disregard of procedural safeguards was lethal."
 
And so bad things happened to many working and middle income people when the unregulated "too big to fail" banks and investment houses consorted to bring down the economy.  The bailed out bankers foreclosed quickly on the little guys, including those duped into homeownership via lenders who stretched and broke the rules..


Locally,  lower assessments will further  reduce municipal income as communities seek revenue to keep school funding and essential services afloat.   Few thought the ever expanding housing market would go bust until the "bubble" burst and the economy tanked in 2008. 


As reported in the New York Times in a story on the plight of municipal budgets in 2011:

And because it often takes several years for property tax assessments to catch up with the state of the housing market, the real impact of the housing implosion is only now being felt in many cities. For the first time since the Great Recession began, property tax collections fell during the last three months of 2010, according to an analysis of data by the Rockefeller Institute, and many mayors expect the declines to continue.

A July 2012 report from the Rockefeller Institute, State University of New York, "The Impact of the Great Recession On Local Property Taxes,"  puts the new property assessments and the financial struggles of cities  into perspective:

• The property tax is, by far, the most significant revenue source used to finance critical local services such as K-12 education, police and fire protection, and other front-line public services.
• Although the property tax is generally a stable revenue source, the Great Recession, the housing bubble, and tax limits have combined to weaken tax collections significantly.
• Local property tax revenues declined by 0.9 percent in nominal terms in the first quarter of 2012, after two consecutive quarters of growth. However, after adjusting for inflation, local property taxes actually declined by 2.8 percent in the first quarter of 2012, marking the sixth consecutive quarterly decline in real collections.
• Prolonged weakness in the property tax, combined with continued budget stress at the state level and the prospect of deep spending cuts in Washington, raise the prospect of serious budget problems and service cutbacks in local governments in many parts of the country.

Everyone on all sides of New Britain's budget and tax debate needs to consider the big picture before pointing fingers and blaming the Mayor, the Council and their neighbors.

Tribute To Bart Fisher, the Herald's Historian-In-Residence

Herald sportswriter Bart Fisher, who died last week at age 68, touched many, many people with his coverage of sports, "encyclopedic" knowledge of athletics and community and informative pieces about the city's history.  Invariably a Bart Fisher column would reveal little known but important aspects of New Britain's past that gave us a deeper understanding and appreciation of where we live.

Dennis Buden, a former Herald writer, gave one of the tributes to his mentor:

Bart’s Hardware City History column in The Herald offered a weekly chance for nostalgic readers like me to fondly recall the New Britain of a kinder, gentler time. His Around Town column highlighted the special people and places in our community, and always brought a smile. His reporting and countless columns as Herald sports editor, chronicling the exploits of New Britain’s athletes over the last 40 years, preserve a permanent and poetic record of New Britain lore as only Bart could tell it.

Link to tribute:

The New Britain Herald : New Britain, Conn., and surrounding areas (newbritainherald.com)

Community Journalism Gone Bad

The New Britain City Journal, once a promising venture in community journalism, has plunged into a tabloid gutter of innuendo, rumor and personal attack over the issue of regulating non-owner occupied housing and paying for code enforcement in the city.  

The City Journal, violating basic rules of journalism with all kinds of unsubstantiated accusations, has taken sides and cast its lot with out-of-town landlords, particularly their loudest voice,  New Yorker Sam Zherka, the owner of Farmington Hills apartments (formerly Ledgecrest Village) and publisher of The Westchester Guardian. 

Yellow Journalism In New Britain

Every week now scurrilous stories and anonymous advertising of questionable legality are hammering the O'Brien administration and members of the Common Council. 

The latest "news story" in the January 25th edition, offers readers a $25,000 reward for information leading to "the arrest and conviction" of Mayor O'Brien and Aide Phil Sherwood to "clean up city (sic) of a corrupt and dirty administration."  The Journal, at Zherka's behest, is relying on readers to come up with the "dirt and corruption" to bring down Mayor O'Brien. 

Wrote City Journal Editor and Publisher Robin Vinci: "Anyone who has any information is asked to send it to: The New Britain City Journal....and it will be forwarded to 'Taxpayers and Associates affiliated with Farmington Hills."  

The situation at the New Britain City Journal is akin to what occurred at Zherka's Westchester paper in 2010.   In his column, "The 'Zherkus' is back in town," Phil Reisman of  The Gannett-owned Journal News wrote a story on the resignation of the Guardian's editor in chief, Sam Abady: 

"The falling-out was caused by the Sept. 16 issue, which featured a cover story about Yonkers Mayor Phil Amicone titled,'Rumours (sic) Of Impending Indictment?' The piece by Hezi Aris, who succeeded Abady as editor, is all over the map in its criticism of the Mayor, but it never says exactly why Amicone is supposedly in hot water. It is overwrought, rife with tortured metaphorical references to the battle of Gallipoli, Shakespeare and 'Waiting for Godot' -- and thick with innuendo and winking, read-between the lines suggestions of criminality. Nothing is substantiated. But the most damning piece is that Aris all but admits he didn't have the only metaphor that matters -- the smoking gun. The self incriminating sentence is as follows: 'The rumor mill has been spewing out tidbits of information accepted as 'facts' by some, yet is unsubstantiated to date." 

In that 2010 column Reisman reported that Zherka, the organizer of a Tea Party demonstration in White Plains (confirming his right-wing, extremist views),  had won a 1st amendment lawsuit when the Yonkers Mayor overstepped his bounds during a longstanding feud and ordered removal of newspaper dispensing boxes.  

"Besides owning a topless bar in New York City and publishing a vanity newspaper filled with political conspiracy theories, Zherka is known for being a self-styled 'player' with a flare for attracting attention," wrote Reisman, "Zherka is also notorious for filing lawsuits against public officials he believes have crossed him. There are many who fall into this category --- and many have also been the subject of sensational attack stories in The Guardian since it was started in 2006."

When the City Journal began in October 2009 it was the subject of a laudatory post by NB Politicus. Then known as the Hardware City Journal, the grassroots, free-circulation paper was praised on this blog:

New Britain's "October surprise" has nothing to do with the upcoming municipal election and everything to do with what may be a revival of community journalism in town.
The first edition of Hardware City Journal (HCJ), a 16-page free circulation paper, began circulating Friday (Oct. 16th) packed full of local news and information. The paper, with only a handful of ads upon which free circulation newspapers usually depend, is similar in content and appearance to the Berlin Citizen weekly next door. The upstart HCJ appears to be the brainchild of Robin Vinci, a former Herald reporter who covered Berlin and a native of New Britain. Vinci's love for her native city comes through in an opening letter on the editorial page. She is a journalist who knows the town she is writing about past and present, a factor which can count for a lot in delivering news you may not find elsewhere.

Robin Vinci denies that anything has changed at the City Journal or that it has become Sam Zherka's "vanity newspaper" in New Britain.   She maintains the out-of-town landlord's money and influence are not a part of her publication. It's hard to believe, however, that print and online ads  in a 16 page tabloid alone are paying for mailings of the paper into 23,000 households and for the addition of  "writers" and ad reps who may be imported by Zherka himself.  

Whatever the Vinci-Zherka relationship,  the tone and content of Ms. Vinci's stories over the past few months calls into question her credibility as a reporter.  Her tirades without facts about the O'Brien administration sound more like a propagandist  beholden to special interests, the Republican Party or both.  

The City Journal has  abandoned the mission that you can still find on its online masthead: "We will not publish accusations or hurtful comments. We feel New Britain is a great city and want to focus on the brighter, positive aspects of it."

This is not the same City Journal that won praise here three and a half years ago.  The promise of "honest, straight-forward reporting" has given way to the strident and sensational and an agenda that is not in the public interest.

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