ANSONIA – A budget consultant for the city told a state advisory panel that Ansonia is trying to avoid a financial cliff after using money from the sale of its sewer system to bolster finances.
The problem – the use of “one-time revenues” to balance prior budgets.
“The reality is that the city does find itself on, if you will, the edge of a financial cliff because of those one-time revenues that were built into the budget,” the consultant, Thomas Hamilton, said at a Feb. 18 meeting of the Municipal Finance Advisory Commission (MFAC).
Hamilton said the city has been relying on money from the $41 million sale of the city’s sewer system to Aquarion. He said the city can’t rely on that money forever and needs to take steps, including raising taxes, to wean itself off.
Further complicating the situation – former Mayor David Cassetti’s administration budgeted more than $1 million in revenue from a fuel cell project that never materialized.
“The city is going to need to cut expenses and hold the expense side of the budget down as much as possible. The city is going to need to find non-tax revenues, locally generated non-tax revenues. The city is going to need to raise taxes,” Hamilton said.
Ansonia officials have been meeting with MFAC, a state advisory panel of finance experts appointed by the governor, since September. Ansonia was referred to MFAC after a state budget included language forcing the city to make appearances.
The Feb. 18 meeting was Ansonia’s first appearance under new Mayor Frank Tyszka. You can watch the full meeting here. Ansonia’s appearance is also embedded below.
Ansonia Needs New Revenue, Officials Say
In the meeting, Hamilton said the city isn’t bringing in enough money to make its budgets work.
At the same time, the city is not broke.
He said the city currently relies on drawing from two pools of money – first, the city’s $6.1 million fund balance, as well as an additional $9 million left in the Water Pollution Control Authority’s account after the sewer system was sold.
Together, those funds equal about $15 million that the city can draw from. However, Hamilton said the money won’t last forever.
He said the city needs to find new sources of revenue to create sustainable budgets. He said the city encountered problems after it predicted it would bring in about $1.58 million from a fuel cell project which hasn’t yet been built.
“The real problems that the city has faced have been on the revenue side of the equation and building in revenues that were not realistic,” Hamilton said.
Hamilton’s words echo statements made by Kurt Miller, the city’s finance director who was initially hired under former Republican Mayor David Cassetti.
Miller said in 2025, while pitching a budget which included a tax increase to the Board of Aldermen, that “the City of Ansonia has a revenue problem, and there’s not enough available economic opportunity to correct that.”
Miller, who also spoke at the Feb. 18 MFAC meeting, told the panel that the city will need to plug a budget hole created after the fuel cell project stalled.
“It looks like we’re going to be about $813,000 short on the revenue side, primarily driven by some expected revenue that we had from the fuel cell project that unfortunately is not going to happen,” Miller said.
Marcia Marien, an MFAC commissioner who is also finance director for the Town of Brookfield, repeated a request she had made in previous appearances for Miller to present the panel with a five-year budget plan. Miller said the document has to be revised based on Tyszka’s mandate that budgets no longer include one-time revenues, such as WPCA sale money.
Finance officials under both Democratic and Republican administrations in Ansonia have broadly agreed that it can’t rely on the use of its sewer sale money forever. Both Cassetti and Tyszka’s administrations have outlined plans which call for the city to raise taxes and bring in new sources of revenue.
However, Hamilton said in a recent Board of Aldermen meeting that the city needs to speed up those plans. He said the city has been going through the sewer sale money too quickly, causing the “financial cliff” he referred to in his statements to MFAC.
Ansonia’s next scheduled appearance before MFAC is May 6 at 10 a.m. Click here for the most updated information.