Over Minita Sanghvi’s two two-year terms as Saratoga Springs Commissioner of Finance, I cataloged her extreme failure to manage the city’s finances. Calling it “management” is a misnomer. Sanghvi had little interest in the arcane, demanding numbers of public finance. Readers may recall that her automatic email response told anyone trying to contact her that the job was only part-time and that they should contact her deputy with questions.
Emblematic of her profound carelessness and disinterest in the legal and fiscal implications of her actions was her vote to approve a contract requiring the city to increase the number of firefighters per shift to seventeen. This added millions of dollars to the city’s payroll and included no sunset clause. This meant the city had to carry this burden indefinitely.
At the time, she suggested delaying the vote until the incoming Public Safety Commissioner could determine how the city would fund the additional overtime. Consistent with her careless and unconsidered approach to the city’s finances, she ignored her own warning and voted to approve the agreement. Even more stunning was her recent Facebook post where she admitted:
“I should have asked the Mayor to wait on that agreement and should have provided the city a financial impact statement as they do at the county (But this is something I have learned from my time as County Supervisor).”
It’s hard to believe that in four years as Finance Commissioner, it never occurred to her that a financial impact study might be a good idea before the city committed itself to hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional recurring costs.
This one vote that she was a part of is a major factor in the fiscal crisis the city now faces.
Sound Bites Are No Replacement For Knowledge and Analysis
After reading remarks about the budget made on Facebook by Sanghvi, where, among other pieces of misinformation, Sanghvi falsely claimed that “one of the biggest items [in the budget] is a new police station”, current Finance Commissioner JoAnne Kiernan replied to correct the record. Kiernan cc’d an extensive list of Saratogians including City Democratic Chair Ron Kim, the Council, and the press. Her email graphically documents Sanghvi’s role in eroding the city’s fiscal condition. The gap between Sanghvi’s commentary and the reality of the city’s finances is so extreme that I have taken the liberty of looking at Sanghvi’s psychology. The full text of their exchanges is at the bottom of this blog. Kiernan’s clarity is striking. It’s not very long and well worth the time to read it.
At the risk of oversimplifying Kiernan’s writings, they boil down to two simple facts.
First, the city’s “unassigned fund balance” is basically its financial reserves. Don’t confuse these with ongoing profit, like a business might use freely. Some years the city produces no excess of income over expenses. The money is for emergencies or special purchases.
Most centrally, the city cannot chronically run a deficit, where expenses exceed income, and it draws on the fund balance to fill the gap. With sharp inflation and other factors, including municipalities’ requirements to pay retirement premiums and health insurance costs over the last two years, the chickens have come home to roost for many of the cities and towns around us that, like Sanghvi, ignored the laws of spiraling deficits.
During her four years, even during the relatively fat years, Sanghvi ran deficits every year, always pointing to the strong fund balances (built up by her predecessors) to paper over her unsustainable budgets.
So what was Sanghvi’s response to Kiernan’s carefully crafted analysis?
From: Supervisor Minita Sanghvi <sanghviminita@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 8, 2026 5:28 PM
To: JoAnne Kiernan <Joanne.Kiernan@saratogaspringsny.gov>
Are you seriously telling me with a straight face that the police station WILL NOT increase our debt service load in future years? It will seriously impact our finances in the future and YOU KNOW THAT!
THE 2025 AUD [JK:SIC} VERY CLEARLY STATES THAT THE CITY HAD 11.88 MILLION IN UNASSIGNED FUND BALANCE. THAT’S 18.7% OF THE BUDGET. Well within the city finance policy of 10% to 25%. That you then decided to continue using that fund balance all through 2026 and are NOW blaming me for your decisions you made this year is regrettable.
Finally, raising taxes by 18% when you were left with an 18.7% fund balance requires some accountability to our public.
I’m not getting into a cat-fight with your smear campaigns. So I am not going to continue this conversation beyond this email.
Bless all your hearts!
Minita
There are several things worth noting about what Sanghvi has written here, aside from its extreme brevity compared with Kiernan’s lengthy, thoughtful email.
First, the fund balance amount is irrelevant. It is not a boundless piggy bank out of the Aladdin myth. The central question is: how do we craft a budget that can bring expenses in line with revenues? The concept could not be simpler or more critical. You don’t need an accounting degree or to be a CPA to understand this fundamental issue. Sanghvi also conveniently ignores that the 2026 budget JoAnne had to work with this year was created by Sanghvi.
The other glaring fact is that as Kiernan points out, “there is absolutely no money allocated for a new police station in either the 2027 capital budget or the 2027 general fund budget. None. To suggest otherwise is simply false.”
And finally, there is Sanghvi’s dismissive remark that, in her mind, engaging in a dialogue about city finances is nothing more than a “cat fight”!
Understanding Minita Sanghvi
I expect the following will offend some readers, but Ms. Sanghvi’s behavior is so extreme that it deserves attention.
Sanghvi has missed more City Council meetings than any of her colleagues, and she has done so chronically. As noted earlier, she knows little about the finances of the city she was responsible for and she does not welcome comments from the public while frequently making rude and disrespectful comments to her colleagues at the Council table and attacking them through her reliable scribe at the Times Union, Wendy Liberatore.
Her closing remark in her email to Commissioner Kiernan captures the quintessence of a certain kind of personality.
“I’m not getting into a cat-fight with your smear campaigns. So I am not going to continue this conversation beyond this email.“
When one, as in Ms. Sanghvi, is privileged, they have no need to defend themselves and reply to critics, especially when there is a lurking fear that the person they are dealing with is far more informed than they are. Their defense is simply to announce that they are done with this, whatever “this” may be.
There is a certain irony, as pointed out by Mike Brandi, that Sanghvi, who views herself as a champion of political correctness, slips into sexism by referring to the exchange as a “cat fight.”
The Exchange
Re: 2027 comp budget information
| Supervisor Minita Sanghvi <sanghviminita@gmail.com> | Thu, Oct 8, 5:28 PM (4 days ago) | ||
to JoAnne, msanghvi@saratogacountyny.gov, sburger@saratogacountyny.gov, John, BK, Jessica, Tim, Riley, Lisa, Tad, Daniel, Jacob, wliberatore@timesunion.com, me, mbrandi2389@gmail.com, ronkimesq@gmail.com, cbeatty@saratogapublishing.com, eralls@saratogian.com, alavine@wamc.org, , msnyder@dailygazette.net | |||
Are you seriously telling me with a straight face that the police station WILL NOT increase our debt service load in future years? It will seriously impact our finances in the future and YOU KNOW THAT!
THE 2025 AUD VERY CLEARLY STATES THAT THE CITY HAD 11.88 MILLION IN UNASSIGNED FUND BALANCE. THAT’S 18.7% OF THE BUDGET. Well within the city finance policy of 10% to 25%. That you then decided to continue using that fund balance all through 2026 and are NOW blaming me for your decisions you made this year is regrettable.
Finally, raising taxes by 18% when you were left with an 18.7% fund balance requires some accountability to our public.
I’m not getting into a cat-fight with your smear campaigns. So I am not going to continue this conversation beyond this email.
Bless all your hearts!
Minita
On Thu, Oct 8, 2026 at 5:10 PM JoAnne Kiernan <Joanne.Kiernan@saratogaspringsny.gov> wrote:
Hi Minita –
I read your October 8 post regarding the proposed 18% tax increase with disbelief. You state that you “come with receipts,” yet what you presented to the public was a selective version of the City’s finances that conveniently leaves out the decisions and financial consequences that occurred during your four years as Finance Commissioner.
If you are going to put numbers in front of the public, then you owe taxpayers the entire story, not just the portions that support your narrative.
Let me begin by correcting the most obvious misrepresentation: there is absolutely no money allocated for a new police station in either the 2027 capital budget or the 2027 general fund budget. None. To suggest otherwise is simply false.
The financial problems facing the City today did not begin when I took office. I inherited them.
For four consecutive years, the City spent more than it took in and relied on fund balance to cover the difference. There was no meaningful plan to reverse that course. Fund balance is not a recurring source of revenue. It is a financial cushion that is supposed to protect the City from emergencies and unexpected circumstances, not an account that can be repeatedly drained to make an unsustainable budget appear balanced.
The consequences of that approach are now catching up with us.
The 2026 budget appropriated approximately $1.3 million of fund balance, yet the City’s projected year-end deficit is now expected to be more than $4 million. That is more than $3 million greater than the deficit that was projected in the 2026 adopted budget. After 2026, the City will be dangerously close to the minimum fund balance level we should maintain.
That is not a small budgeting error. It is the result of a structural problem that was allowed to continue for four years.
While the 2026 budget may have reasonably reflected certain revenues, the operating expenses were grossly underfunded. The budget did not accurately reflect what it actually costs to operate the City.
Overtime is a perfect example. The 2026 budgeted overtime was not even at the level of 2022, when the City had approximately 30 fewer employees and was not yet obligated to maintain the 17-person minimum staffing requirement on Fire Department trucks.
Since taking office, I have required quarterly overtime and comp time presentations from departments so we can determine what overtime is contractual, what is emergency, and what is discretionary. Approximately 90% of the overtime is contractual or emergency, and more than $1 million is directly related to staffing shortages in the Fire Department.
These are not numbers being manufactured to justify a tax increase. They are the actual costs the City is obligated to pay.
Which brings me to the December 19, 2023 agreement requiring minimum staffing of 17 firefighters.
Under Mayor Ron Kim, the City Council unanimously approved that agreement with the Fire unions. There was no adequate financial impact analysis demonstrating how the City would absorb the additional recurring costs.
What makes this particularly troubling is that you recognized the financial implications at the time.
You were quoted at that meeting as saying that the City budgeted approximately $400,000 for overtime and $375,000 in Fire Department compensatory time, and that the agreement would add another $502,000. You suggested delaying the vote until the incoming Public Safety Commissioner could determine how the additional overtime would be funded.
And yet you voted for the agreement.
You were also recently quoted as saying:
“I should have asked for the mayor to wait on the agreement and should have provided the city a financial impact statement as they do at the county. But this is something I have learned from my time as County Supervisor.”
That statement is difficult to reconcile with your role as the City’s Chief Financial Officer.
You should not have needed to learn after the fact that the City needed a financial impact analysis before committing itself to hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional recurring costs. That should have been part of the job before the vote, not something acknowledged afterward.
And to be absolutely clear, I do not blame the firefighters or the union for this agreement. They negotiated for their members. The elected officials were responsible for determining whether the City could afford what was being negotiated and whether the agreement was financially sustainable.
The responsibility belongs to those who voted for it without adequately addressing how it would be funded.
Your comments regarding the debt service fund are also misleading.
The increase in debt service has nothing to do with a proposed police station. Again, there is no funding for a police station in either the 2027 capital budget or the 2027 general fund budget.
The increase is related to a Bond Anticipation Note issued in 2026. Based on the advice of our fiscal advisors, because the City’s 2026 capital requests were relatively low compared with prior years, the fiscally responsible approach was to issue a BAN in 2026 and combine the 2026 and 2027 capital projects when the City goes to bond in 2027. The proceeds of that bond will then be used to repay the BAN.
That is a financing strategy based on the City’s capital program and advice from fiscal professionals. It is not a hidden police station.
What concerns me most about your post is the attempt to portray the City’s current financial challenges as though they were created by the people who are now being forced to address them.
They were not.
For four years, the City relied on fund balance to support its operations. Recurring expenses continued to grow faster than recurring revenues, which you have had pointed out many times during your tenure of Finance Commissioner. Necessary expenses were underbudgeted. And there was no credible plan to correct the structural imbalance.
Cutting repairs and maintenance or reducing training does not solve that problem. It simply ties the hands of City employees and pushes necessary costs into the future. That is not fiscal reform. It is another form of kicking the can down the road.
I did not create the deficit. I did not create the contractual obligations. I did not create the depleted fund balance.
I inherited them and I inherited the responsibility to finally deal with them.
That means looking honestly at every recurring expense, reviewing contracts and purchasing, examining overtime and staffing, evaluating capital projects and debt, identifying savings, and making difficult decisions about the City’s future.
It also means being honest with taxpayers about what happens if we do nothing. The status quo is continued deficit spending, continued depletion of fund balance, continued underbudgeting of recurring expenses, and eventually having even fewer options available to the City.
I will not continue that cycle.
I will not use fund balance to make an unsustainable budget look balanced. I will not underbudget known expenses and hope the bills somehow disappear. And I will not leave the next administration with an even larger financial hole because making difficult decisions today is politically uncomfortable.
You had four years as Finance Commissioner to address these issues. You now have the opportunity to explain to taxpayers why those decisions were made and why the City was left in the financial position it is in today.
But what you cannot do is rewrite that history and blame the people who are now trying to fix it.
You say you have the receipts.
So do I.
And the full set of receipts tells a very different story.
Regards,
JoAnne Kiernan
Commissioner of Finance
City of Saratoga Springs
474 Broadway – Suite 11
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866
Phone (518) 587-3550 ext 2514
—
Minita Sanghvi, PhD
County Supervisor representing Saratoga Springs, NY
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