Sanghvi and Moran End Their Tenure On The Council With Just More Disinformation

Saratoga Springs is finally coming to the end of the ordeal of having to listen to disinformation from Finance Commissioner Minita Sanghvi and Accounts Commissioner Dillon Moran. Still, even for them, the chaos and dishonesty they have engaged in discussing the mess Sanghvi created with the 2026 budget takes a lot of nerve.

In the November 20, 2025, edition of the Saratogian, its readers were subjected to the magical thinking of Sanghvi and Moran, in which events are twisted beyond recognition.

Sanghvi’s Twisted Self-Congratulations

According to the city’s charter, the Finance Commissioner is supposed to spend months working with each department’s executive staff to craft the next year’s budget. The budget is supposed to reflect the Commissioner’s best thinking on balancing the city’s resources with its anticipated income.

In October, with less than two months until the budget’s required adoption date, Sanghvi suddenly announced that the city was in a deep financial hole. Her response was classic partisan abuse. To close this hole, Sanghvi’s (a Democrat) proposed budget eliminated funding for the Mayor’s (a Republican running for office) department for non-profits, most of which were devoted to homelessness, as well as other key services like school crossing guards.

This is what Sanghvi told the Saratogian on October 9, 2025,

“I could not take money from our police or public works department and then give that money to nonprofits. This is not an easy decision. This is not something we did lightly, but we had no other way of doing this.”

In this same article, she dismissed the idea of raising the property tax rate to address the shortfall:

Another option Sanghvi pointed out, though she added that she did not (sic) believe “city residents should not be facing the burden of rising property taxes every year” and that “2% is more than enough.”(Emphasis added)

Saratogian Newspaper

Sanghvi doesn’t explain where the money will come from to put the $900,000.00 back in the budget. Magic!

According to the November 25, 2025 Times Union, Sanghvi transferred $1,810,000.00 from the city’s fund balance (reserves) and $500,000.00 from the city’s retirement reserve. So we will run a deficit of at least $2,310,000.00 next year. I have no idea whether it is prudent to take $500,000.00 away from the city’s retirement reserve. It is troubling that Sanghvi supposedly overestimated by $500,000.00 what would be needed next year to meet our obligation regarding the retirement system.

Sanghvi’s Magical Thinking

As it turned out, the final budget was very different from her original proposal. In addition to raiding the city’s reserves and its retirement funding, Sanghvi reversed her position on raising taxes. Her new budget will now benefit by raising taxes by 4.53%. This, of course, comes after the election, during which she was campaigning for a Count Supervisor position.

It is important to note that based on Sanghvi’s budget, the city ran a deficit of $3,500,000.00 during the current (2025) year. It is rather stunning that Sanghvi only revealed this fiscal hole after her successful campaign for County Supervisor.

I’m sorry that, for many, the Saratogian articles are behind a paywall, as it is impossible to summarize the rambling, contradictory remarks Sanghvi made to the Saratogian in defense of what she did. Sanghvi effusively congratulated herself and her work with the community for reinstating her own cuts.

Take this statement from Sanghvi:

They [JK: The community?] said very clearly that they wanted to fund the RISE shelter, the homeless, Franklin Community Center and all these other organizations, which are doing incredible work in our community and that they were fine with the 4.5% tax increase. I think it was important for the public to come to that conclusion themselves and say, ‘yes, we want this tax increase to pay for this. And I think that’s sort of the goal that we achieved here.”

This may be the way Sanghvi wants this debacle remembered, but it is not what actually happened.

In fact, Sanghvi faced significant pushback from Mayor Safford, Public Works Commissioner Chuck Marshall, and Commissioner Coll on her budget from the start.

This is Coll’s recollection:

As soon as I saw the Comprehensive Budget unilaterally presented by Commissioner Sanghvi, I knew we were in trouble. The proposal included no funding for school crossing guards, contractual obligations, or our vital nonprofits such as the homeless shelter and the Senior Center. I strongly advocated for a tax increase to our legal limit (4.5%) and for using fund balance to support our nonprofits. Fortunately, Mayor Safford, Commissioner Marshall, and I reached a consensus to address the needs of our most vulnerable residents, as Commissioner Moran was absent from this particular budget workshop. The video of this meeting, dated 11/14/2025, will corroborate and set forth the truth of this matter, including that Commissioner Sanghvi’s budget did not provide funding for these nonprofits from the outset.

Commissioner Tim Coll

Dillon Moran’s Memory Hole

Moran was the sole vote against adopting the budget. He attributed his vote to the budget’s failure to include funds to address the city’s alleged water issues, issues he claimed he raised when he ran for DPW Commissioner seven years ago.

According to the Saratogian article, Moran said:

“The budget does nothing to put forward money to invest in the most important thing we provide to our citizens, which is clean, potable, consistent drinking water. I, in good conscience, cannot vote for that budget. The biggest issue facing this community. Period.”

Moran to the Saratogian

So if Moran was alarmed about the lack of money in the budget regarding water, why didn’t he offer an amendment to address his allegation?

Instead, he offered the following shrill warning to the Saratogian:

“The budget does not include money to address the issues in any sort of meaningful way. We are facing a $40 million investment that I called for seven years ago, when it was $24 million and it’s $40 now. If we don’t do something about it today, it’s going to be 50 (million), and then 60 (million), and then we’re going to have a major failure and then big sections of our community could be without drinking water.

“And if they’re without drinking water for a certain period of time, and those pipes sit dry, that’s it.”

Dillon Moran

Apparently, Moran does not remember that his campaign for Commissioner of Public Works at the time was deep-sixed when it was revealed that a campaign mailer he had sent included a forged letter purportedly from the New York State Department of Health supporting his wildly false accusations about the state of the city’s water supply.

Here is a post documenting Moran’s folly in which he falsified the NYSHD letter.

This is the mailer containing the forged letter from the New York State Department of Health that Moran sent out in his attack on the late Public Works Commissioner Skip Scirocco.