Key Points:
- BOF Vice Chair Rudy Escalante proposes holding off on new hires and projects while the Town addresses financial problems.
- BOF members dispute Town Counsel’s interpretation allowing departmental transfers without their approval, questioning its effect on budget oversight.
- Incomplete financial information complicates budget planning as the BOF considers issuing guidance in November.
Why It Matters: Decisions about staffing, town projects and taxes depend on reliable financial information — and clarity about who can change spending after voters approve the budget.
Incomplete financial information and a disputed interpretation from the Town Counsel on budget authority are complicating how the Board of Finance drafts its budget guidance this year for the Board of Selectmen‘s operating budget.
“I’m very concerned about the management of the town at the moment,” BOF Vice Chair Rudy Escalante declared to his colleagues on the BOF during their Tuesday night, Sept. 29 meeting.
He added that he believed the town should be dissuaded from any new hires and projects until it “gets its act together” and addresses its financial problems.
“We really shouldn’t be expanding the town in terms of its employment, in terms of the projects we take on, given the state of disarray of the town at the moment,” Escalante said. “So I would suggest that we meet our obligations of contract raises to union employees, raises to the regular employees, but no new hires, no new projects.”
“Let’s get our act together for Fiscal ’28 and then we can move forward from there,” he said.
Dispute over Transfer Authority
One additional issue centered on exactly what authority the BOF will have to prevent the BOS — or more specifically the Town Hall administration of First Selectman Toni Boucher and Chief Financial Officer Dawn Savo — from transferring money between departments after the Town’s budget is approved.
BOF Chair Tim Birch said he finally met with lawyers from Berchem Moses, town counsel for Wilton, on Sept. 25.
Recently, Birch has strongly disagreed with Town Counsel Ira Bloom‘s interpretation of the powers of the first selectman and the BOS to move money between departments without obtaining BOF approval. He and other BOF members said Bloom’s interpretation undermines their oversight of the individual spending items in the Town-side budget presented to the Annual Town Meeting.
In the opinion of the Town Counsel, the BOF can still reduce or remove individual items from a proposed BOS budget before it goes to voters, but once it is approved by the Annual Town Meeting, the BOS can subsequently reallocate the approved funds without consent or approval from the BOF.
The BOF members felt that opinion undermines their authority.
The issue arose in July during efforts to reconcile the Town’s FY25 departmental spending and it was discovered that several spending overages in some departments had been corrected by transferring approximately $1.3 million from other departments. Furthermore, some of the individual transfers exceeded the $10,000 threshold requiring BOS approval, but that approval hadn’t been sought at the time of the transfers.
Savo and Boucher argued that, in light of the missed deadlines for filing the FY2025 financial audit report, the Town had to continue moving ahead with finishing the reconciliation, and Savo recommended that the BOS give retroactive approval to $1,300,329 in transfers at the July 27 BOS meeting. The BOS unanimously approved the transfers.
Boucher was unable to explain why the transfers were needed or who had authorized the underlying departmental overspending. She also said it was too complicated a situation to explore at that time, as it would require investigation.
Instead, she and the BOS said they would hold a joint meeting with the BOF to review the matter down the road, but that meeting has yet to take place, as of Sept. 29.
GMW uncovered that Boucher and Savo had sought an official opinion on the matter from Town Counsel almost two months earlier, getting a June 4 memo that concluded that BOF approval was not required for the department transfers without seeking BOF approval. The memo stated that neither transfers between town departments nor those within a single department necessitate BOF approval — an interpretation that addresses whether BOF consent is required, a separate question from whether required BOS approvals occurred before funds were committed.
In a memo to Boucher and the BOS on July 27, Birch disputed the interpretation, based on his reading of the Town Charter and state law. He wrote that it “essentially emasculates the power of the Board of Finance to oversee the line-item budget of the Board of Selectmen.”
“If the Board of Selectmen can move funds around a variety of line items without the consent of the Board of Finance, it renders that power meaningless,” Birch wrote. “The Board of Selectmen can approve a budget, then effectively rewrite it without any oversight.”
Consequently, on Tuesday Escalante questioned the value of discussing individual line items with the BOS if those amounts could later be changed without BOF approval.
“We have apparently lost our ability to review individual line items,” Escalante said. “So, to my mind, discussion with the Board of Selectmen about individual line items kind of might be even a waste of time … According to my understanding of their interpretation, the day after the Town Meeting where we do the budget, they can throw that budget away, create a whole new budget, and don’t have to tell anyone.”
Birch said that wasn’t completely accurate, as the BOS, Savo and Boucher would have to stay within the approved budgeted amount “in the aggregate.”
“Correct, yeah, but the individual line items can be, are completely fungible,” Escalante said.
“One of their arguments,” Birch said, “is that, ‘We’ve done it in the past,’” although he described those amounts as generally modest.
Budget Guidance Without Complete Financial Information
Some BOS members have already made it clear that they do not favor the BOF presenting them with budget guidance at all. They’ve stated that they feel it brings an artificial ceiling to the BOS’s determination of town needs.
The disagreement reflects competing approaches to developing the budget: BOF members have emphasized keeping any tax increases manageable for Wilton residents, while some selectmen have argued that the BOS should identify the Town’s needs before determining how much to spend.
As for how future interactions between the two boards may play out as budget guidance is considered, the BOF is also aware that it has not been given complete financial data that members say they need to make an informed decision. The FY25 audit still remains incomplete, FY26 figures are also not yet finalized and questions remain about how thoroughly FY27 budget-to-actual numbers have been presented.
BOF member Prasad Iyer questioned whether the FY26 financial information was reliable enough to use in developing budget guidance and whether FY25 figures would be available before the next meeting.
“Right now we don’t have good data for guidance,” he said.
“Why are we again like, ‘Oh, we have no idea what the numbers are,'” BOF member Kari Roberts said. “Like the second year in a row. I don’t understand why.”
Birch said Wilton’s auditor, Leslie Zoll of CliftonLarsonAllen LLP, said that Savo expected to provide final FY26 numbers in January so that work on that year’s audit could begin.
Meanwhile, while BOF members hope that the current FY25 audit, months overdue, will possibly be completed by mid-October, new questions have also arisen about the consultant’s work on the FY25 reconciliation.
BOF member Kim Healy shared on Tuesday that she had learned PKF O’Connor Davies accounting consultant Joseph Centofanti had apparently created at least one new fund himself that, to her knowledge, had not been created with the selectmen’s knowledge or formal approval.
“It does concern me that there are going to be other things that we identify that have been done without anyone knowing,” Healy said.
With regard to budget guidance, Birch said that the BOS should already be providing the BOF with a forecast for FY28. He identified November as a tentative deadline for the BOF to issue its budget guidance.
Whether the BOF will receive what they hope to get is still unknown.
At its Sept. 22 meeting, the BOS did discuss information to present to the BOF about prospective FY28 needs, but they did not come to a consensus on what to provide, if any.
“We are in interesting times, to say the least,” Escalante said.
