Hello Hamden Residents,

Before we can talk about what should be cut from the Town of Hamden’s budget, we need to confront a more foundational issue: we don’t actually know how much money we truly have to spend. This isn’t a minor oversight. Right now, Hamden’s budget is, at best, an educated guess. And part of me wonders if that’s simply how things have always been done.

The Hidden Story in the Budget

When I requested access to the back-end budget data through ClearGov, Mayor Lauren Garrett graciously provided it. However, as I began analyzing expenditures, I noticed something odd: only one fund was listed—the General Fund.

That’s a problem. Without separate fund breakdowns, it’s impossible to distinguish between what’s tax-funded and what’s grant- or state-funded. While this distinction is more apparent in the “Capital Projects” section, it becomes far more problematic in other areas of the budget, where the funding sources are less clearly defined.

For example, ARPA isn’t listed as a revenue source in the proposed 2025–2026 budget, even though ARPA-funded salary stipends are included in the expenditures. This discrepancy likely arises from the reallocation of remaining unused or unallocated ARPA funds in December 2024 to cover municipal expenses, effectively moving them into the General Fund, as required by the allocation deadline. The concern, however, lies in the fact that these funds are not taxpayer dollars, and there is no clear distinction between which expenses are being funded by tax revenue and which are being covered by grant money. This is not a household checkbook; funds like these should not be mixed together, as we have multiple funding sources. This lack of clarity underscores the need for financial statements that are broken out by fund, enabling a transparent view of how each type of funding is being allocated...

Read the full article on our Substack here.

Join our group on Facebook, Hamden Residents Unite.

Be well,

Grace