Town Administrator Alerts BNAC on Budget Issues

It's a shame that WBMA-TV chose not to cover Saturday's BNAC meeting with Bloomfield's newest Town Administrator Ted Ehrenburg. Residents who attended learned much about the newest economic challenges facing our town and how Mr.Ehrenburg is planning to deal with them. Here are a few of my notes and quotes:

"You can't expect what you don't inspect. So I'm an inspection kind of guy. The minute I can unchain myself from behind my desk, I'll check on all the services that we offer and what they provide. I have this acronym called TRIM -- Total Review Ideal Method. …The only way to add to the budget is by a binding referendum. And you all know that most residents aren't going to vote for that…..When I came here I thought the general rule was you should have a surplus of 10% of your operating budget. We should have had 7.3 million in surplus. To get Bloomfield where it needs to be in terms a fiscal diet, we need to get money back into that surplus. I keep trying to tell people that if you spend every penny you have every year there's going to be nothing in that tin cup in 2014…..We're on a plane with 12 passengers and we have 10 parachutes..."