Permit Obstacle
Borrowing limitations aren’t blocking the projects, he said. The town doesn’t have the staff to oversee so much work, and a cumbersome permitting process slows improvements, he said. He also said the town is arranging private funding for Byram Park repairs and has earmarked money in a future budget.
“We get done everything we can possibly get done,” he said.
First Selectman Peter Tesei, a Republican and the city’s top elected official, didn’t immediately return a call for comment on the debate.
Greenwich is among the nation’s wealthiest towns with a top credit rating, with $719,873 of taxable property per capita, according to Standard and Poor’s. The median figure for top- graded communities is $157,536.
The municipality is home to 23 hedge funds, including AQR Capital Management, the world’s 15th-largest in a 2012 Bloomberg ranking. Banks and insurance companies employ 22 percent of residents, according to a profile on the town’s website.
“They do a fair amount of pay-as-you-go financing and they keep their debt issuances short,” said Paul Mansour, head of muni credit research at Conning. The Hartford, Connecticut-based asset manager oversees $9 billion of local debt. “It’s just a different philosophy.”
Tax Fuel
While the town would find demand for long-term debt among investors such as mutual funds, it doesn’t need those buyers because the state’s tax levels stoke individual investors’ appetite for tax-free debt, Mansour said.
Connecticut’s per-capita tax burden of $6,984 in fiscal 2010 was the highest among U.S. states, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit research group in Washington.