Minita Sanghvi’s 2026 Budget-More Chaos

This blog has documented the numerous missteps in handling the city’s finances by Minita Sanghvi since she became the Saratoga Springs Commissioner of Finance.

Under the city charter, Sanghvi is responsible for preparing the city’s budget each year, which must be adopted by November 30. As this deadline approaches, Sanghvi’s years of mismanaging the city’s finances have finally brought the city to the verge of a financial crisis. How severe a crisis it is, even now, is hard to determine, though, as the financial indicators Sanghvi should be providing are missing.

One of the key documents that should have been an important tool for the Commissioner to use in understanding the city’s financial condition and planning for the 2026 budget was due September 30. As of the time of this blog’s posting, the audit has finally been placed on the agenda for the November 18, 2025, meeting; however, the link to the actual audit included in the agenda does not work.

The tardiness of this audit is not new for Sanghvi. The 2023 audit also missed the September 30, 2024, deadline and was not submitted until November 7. This was coincidentally only days after the November 2024 election in which Sanghvi was running for the State Senate. As the audit included damaging items regarding her handling of the city’s finances, it is no small wonder that she delayed releasing it beyond the required date and after the election.

In addition to tardiness, Sanghvi is criticized in the audit for failing to follow “accounting practices generally accepted in the United States.” She blamed this problem on “a personnel vacancy.”

In her response to the audit (below), Sanghvi admits that she had failed to meet the “…deadline for the submission of the Single Audit.”

You would think that, having been criticized in the 2023 audit for being late, she would be particularly diligent about ensuring the timeliness of the 2024 audit release. You would be wrong. She is late for the second consecutive year.

I am unaware of any previous Finance Commissioner failing to submit the audit on time, let alone failing to do so twice.

I contacted Commissioner Sanghvi, asking why, yet again, the audit is so late this year. In a phone conversation, she blamed the problem on the alleged failure of the Mayor’s office and the Department of Public Works.

I contacted Deputy Mayor JoAnne Kiernan and DPW Commissioner Chuck Marshall regarding Sanghvi’s allegation. Both officials told me that Sanghvi had not contacted them about any missing information.

I then sent the following email to Sanghvi, requesting any documentation that she or her staff had provided to the executive staff in either the Mayor’s office or the DPW regarding the urgent need for missing information.

The Email

John Kaufmann <	Tue, Nov 11, 7:00 PM (3 days ago)
to Minita, Tim, Dillon, John, Charles.Marshall

  Minita:

Thank you for returning my call.  As you are aware, we discussed the city’s lack of an audit.  BST, our auditor, was required to provide the city with its audit by September 30.  In turn, your office was required to submit the audit to the city council and the public by November 1.   

You blamed the failure to meet the city’s deadlines on the mayor’s office and the Department of Public Works. 

On September 25, you emailed DPW about missing information.  They informed you that the information you were looking for had been uploaded to a folder shared by DPW and Finance on August 7.  You had the information. If there was any confusion about the information, please let me know why you waited until September 25, five days before the audit was supposed to be completed, to contact DPW?

Regarding the mayor’s office, you never contacted the mayor or his deputy about this issue.  Apparently, someone from your office has contacted the planning department regarding a matter involving grants.  (In the previous audit, you were criticized for your failure to properly manage the fiscal elements of these grants.)  Notably, your office did not raise the issue until mid-October.  As the audit was required to be completed by September 30, can you explain why this was not addressed earlier?  If this was pressing and not being done, why didn’t you email the mayor or his deputy?  Please provide any documentation regarding the attempts made by your department to obtain this information.  

Audits are at the heart of accountability and of transparency. What’s most alarming is that you do not seem particularly concerned about the failure of Finance to provide this audit, which should have been available before the election.  Given the criticisms in the auditor’s 2023 report, one must wonder whether the 2024 audit will contain unflattering findings.

My key question to you is why you did not advise the council that you were unable to meet your obligation under the charter to provide them with this vital document?

Radio Silence

As usual, I received no response. I submit that there was no response because Sanghvi has no documentation. She is guilty of an inept attempt to cover up the failure in her office. I do not think it is unreasonable to consider that she has suppressed the latest 2024 audit report because it would reveal more problems in her office, particularly in a year when she was running for Supervisor.

Sanghvi’s October Surprise

As the Commissioner of Finance, Sanghvi is responsible for monitoring the city’s spending.

In May, the city agreed to fund RISE (the provider of a homeless shelter for the city) for approximately half a million dollars. Sanghvi not only voted for the resolution, but she waxed on about the value of their service for our city.

In October, Sanghvi presented a budget that cut not only the funding for RISE, but also for all the not-for-profits the city had been supporting for years, including the Senior Center. The reason? The city was suddenly facing a $3,500,000.00 deficit for the current fiscal year, which is not yet over.

How could she not have seen this coming?

By May, when she supported spending $500,000.00 on RISE, she should have been aware of the looming budget problems.

It is a testament to her mismanagement that, up until October, when she was finally required to prepare the budget for next year, she said nothing at the Council table about the financial threat facing the city.

It is worth noting that Sanghvi was warned last fall, during the preparation of the 2025 budget, that her fiscal assumptions were overly optimistic. At the time, Public Safety Commissioner Tim Coll urged her to raise the city tax rate to 2%, as allowed by state law. Although she had raised taxes her previous two years in office, in 2024, she was running for State Senate and refused.

As has become painfully obvious, her budget for 2025 badly underestimated expenses and overestimated income. This was not her first time doing this.

As this blog has documented over the last four years, Sanghvi is far more interested in drama at the Council table than in devoting the very demanding time required to fully understand the city’s finances.

Understanding Just How Bad Sanghvi’s Budgeting Is

Under our charter, the Finance Commissioner is responsible for preparing the city’s annual budget. This budget is intended to be the result of thorough analysis and consultations with other city departments. While it is expected to be revised once it is proposed to the Council, it is intended to be a serious document that the Finance Commissioner would want to be adopted as is. This is because, unless a majority of the Council overrules the Commissioner’s proposal, it is automatically the city’s budget for the following year.

Sanghvi’s desire to defund all the not-for-profits (RISE, the senior citizens’ center, Judge Vero’s outreach/homeless court, and even school crossing guards) was supposed to reflect her determination that while these organizations were valuable, other city needs would take precedence.

Coincidentally, in an election year, these major high-profile nonprofit organizations that were cut are funded by the Mayor’s office, and these cuts were often portrayed as coming from the Mayor, not Sanghvi.

According to reports, although the public has yet to see the changes, Sanghvi has reportedly now restored these cuts.

Sanghvi Blames Other Departments For The Failure Of Her Department and Gibberish and Confusion Over What The City’s Reserves Are

As of this Friday, November 14, Sanghvi was still not taking responsibility for the late audit and continued to demonstrate a fundamental ignorance of the city’s finances.

At the pre-agenda meeting on Friday morning, Sanghvi again blamed unnamed departments for the audit delay. She informed her colleagues that her office had met with the auditors in mid-October to discuss the remaining information they needed. As the audit was supposed to be completed by the end of September, she self-documents the tardiness of her own office in completing the audit.

In a budget hearing that same day, Sanghvi was asked to provide the Council with accurate information on the city’s fund balance. The “Unassigned Fund Balance” is the technical term for the city’s reserves. In addition to raising taxes, one way to address the city’s deficit is to tap into its reserve fund. It is obviously important to know the size of the reserve in order to determine how it may be used to address the city’s deficit.

In this clip, Commissioner Coll attempts to determine from Sanghvi how much the city has in reserve to address the proposed budget shortfalls.

The Finance Commissioner serves as the chief financial officer (CFO) of the city. It’s hard to believe, as documented in the following video, Sanghvi was unable to answer Commissioner Coll’s repeated requests regarding the city’s reserves to address the budget for next year. As her frustrated response indicated, she did not know, and this is particularly glaring because, given the repeated requests for this number, she should have had the figure readily available.

Further, note how she distances herself from her staff in the video clip. When trying to explain what the city’s reserves are, she notes that the numbers she is getting are from her staff referring to her deputy and budget director as “they” as her budget director is shaking her head. So these are not numbers that she has analyzed and that constitute her financial analysis. Apparently, she is unable to read these reports on her own and adopt them as her own.

We Still Don’t Know

Sanghvi has insisted that the budget be adopted at the November 18 meeting, as she needs to travel to India. That is just two days away. The budget was supposed to be attached to the meeting agenda on the city’s website on Friday. It was not. There is a hearing on the budget before the meeting. How is the public supposed to thoughtfully speak on the budget when they do not have access to it?

I believe we will not know the actual financial condition of the city until JoAnne Kiernan, who has extensive accounting experience, takes over as the new Commissioner of Finance.