The Numbers Don’t Lie: Sanghvi Drove The City’s Finances Over The Cliff

I feel for the last four years I have been like Cassandra, warning that former Saratoga Springs Finance Commissioner Minita Sanghvi’s budgets were thrown together with little understanding of the city’s spending, let alone planning for the future. I warned in this blog that this would lead to a budget deficit that would challenge this community. Well, the numbers are out, and they are even worse than I anticipated, leaving the city in a major financial hole that will require a lot of pain to fill.

The following graph, prepared by the Finance Department in order to educate the public on the seriousness we face, is from a city release. Each tan column represents the actual spending each year. The blue line represents how much income the city took in each year. The red and green columns represent how much the city overspent/underspent each year. It is important to note that in the first column for the year 2022, the budget was prepared not by Commissioner Sanghvi but by her predecessor, Michele Madigan. Not coincidentally, that (the green column in the lower left) was the only year that the city actually operated within its budget, leaving a fund balance (reserve) for Commissioner Sanghvi of a whopping seventeen million dollars which Sanghvi has recklessly squandered.

There is still a significant amount of time before this fiscal year is over, so it is an inexact art to project what it will cost the city to operate for the balance of the year and how deep in the red we will be. Regrettably, there is little doubt much of our fund balance will have been exhausted to fill Sanghvi’s budget holes. The city’s policies and procedures require that the city fund balance represent at least 10% and no more than 25% of the city budget; the city will have little in the way of resources to fill what will be a widening gap next year.

The Chart

The Full Press Release