Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin has long been a proponent of more regionalization of city and town services, removing political boundaries in an effort to save money for taxpayers.
He backed off a specific approach to instilling a regional sales tax Tuesday.
"I don’t have any preconception about how it gets done," Bronin said of revenue and service sharing. "What I do know is that this system we currently have where we are so dependent on the property tax and we're a city where so much of the property tax and so much of the wealth has left the city, it just doesn’t work."
Hartford had to close a roughly $20 million budget hole for the 2017 fiscal year and that deficit will only grow for the 2018 fiscal year as a result of increased costs and a shrinking property tax base. That property tax base, more than half of which consists of hospitals, universities, and other tax-exempt institutions, is something that works to hurt the city more than help.
"You have a city where the taxable property base is not much bigger than the surrounding towns and yet we have real city challenges and real city responsibilities and the region and state need us to be successful if we’re going to grow as a state."
