Report Inappropriate Comments

Councilman Ladouceur states "We owe this to the educators, the parents, the students and the taxpayers who are footing the bill for the 260 million dollar school department budget.”

How are we supposed to take the Councilman's action and the rest of the City Council serious when

1) He is not willing to tackle all the problems identify on the city side of the budget?

2) He don't know that the total school department budget including Federal, state and local tax dollars is $161 million not $260 million?

2) He doesn't realize that the percentage of local tax dollars used to fund the city budget is growing each year and that 77% of the budget is paid for by local taxpayers while 74% of the school budget is paid for by local taxpayers?

3) He either doesn't know or doesn't care that in the last ten years local tax dollars allocated to the city budget have increased from $67.1 million to $107.1 million for a grand total of a $40 MILLION INCREASE, while over the same period of time the local tax dollars allocated to the school budget has increased from $118.1 million to $119.5 million or a grand total increase of only $1.4 million.

4) He doesn't think an investigation should be undertaken to determine why out of every new property tax dollar collected in the city over the last ten years 97 CENTS of every dollar went to the city budget and only 3 CENTS went to the school budget?

5) He doesn't want to investigate why unfunded liabilities in the city as reported in the most recent city annual financial report increased over $300 million and what effect this is having on the city and school services?

6) He doesn't want to investigate why the Fire Department OVERTIME budget has been exceeded by amounts ranging from $1 million to $2 million over the past years?

7) He doesn't want to investigate why sick pay bonuses paid out in the city budget over the past years have exceeded the budgeted amount by almost 300 PERCENT costing $600,000 more last year?

8) He doesn't want to investigate why the city in direct conflict with the advice of city healthcare expert recommendation, switched from a Self-Insured Program to a fully insured program and if that change has anything to do with why healthcare costs in the city budget have increased at a greater rate than the school budget?

9) He doesn't want to investigate how much the $600 cap on family plan prescription drug cost is costing taxpayers?

10) He doesn't want to investigate why the cash flow is most of the city pension plans are negative, meaning more cash is going out of the funds then going in and what effect this is having on more tax payer dollars being needed in the pay each year.

11) He doesn't want to investigate eliminating Cost of Living Adjustment (Municipal has not seen a A COLA in almost 10 years) in the pension plans until all plans are at sufficient funding levels? Or putting caps of the max amount anyone can receive from a plan each year?

12) He doesn’t want to investigate if the new Health Saving account benefit enacted several years ago providing each police office $4,000 each year and costing taxpayers over $600,000 more each year, has saved on healthcare spending and if the benefit should be reduced or eliminated or provided to other city employees?

13) He doesn’t want to investigate the potential cost saving from the consolidation of city services such as police and fire dispatch services while massive consolidation efforts have occurred in the school budget related to special education bus services, maintenance services and closure of schools saving tens of millions of tax dollars?

14) He doesn’t want to investigate after massive thief of materials and tools was discovered within the Department of Public Works, implementing new inventory tracking software and vehicle GPS tracking on all vehicles to save taxpayer dollars?

15) He doesn’t want to investigate how the Warwick Sewer Authority can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for engineering plans and material to increase the size of the berm around the facility after it flooded out, only to realize that the material could not be used and the money spent wasted?

16) He doesn’t want to investigate how to city council members violated state Open Meeting laws twice in the last few years and what can be done so this does not happen again and more transparency can be provided to taxpayers?

17) He doesn't want to investigate once the school contract is settled, where is all the money going to come from to pay for increased teacher salary and benefits?

However when city spending continues to increase to new record l;evels each year and taxpayers in neighborhoods such as mine receive a property tax increase of over 10% while roads continue to be in terrible condition, recreation facilities are falling apart and overall city services are being cut, and he and all the other council members are content to do little to nothing to investigate what is causing this and what can they do to make needed fiscal changes in the city, I will call them out for what this action is, nothing more than GRANDSTANDING and undermining the School Committee and the Superintendent.

When Councilman Ladoceur and the rest of the City Council decide to get their own house in order and solve all these above issues, I will be the first one to stand in line and applaud them when they need to stick their noise in the school departments business.