By May of 2025, $39 million or nearly 96% of the proceeds had already been spent by the city leaving only $1.8 million in the city treasury.Mayor Cassetti’s finance director, a fellow Republican from a neighboring town working part-time to manage a $60+ million annual budget provided a list to the Valley Independent Sentinel detailing the administration’s practice of selling municipal assets to pay for current budget deficits.At the time of the budget passages by the GOP-controlled Board of Aldermen, the taxpayers were not informed that the budgets were seriously out of balance.Kurt Miller told the Valley Independent: “We’ve been using one-time revenue sources to pay for recurring expenses. So essentially what we’ve been doing is we’ve been paying our mortgage with our savings account.”The Valley Independent Sentinel noted in the June 30 article: The city’s use of WPCA money to bolster its operating budgets is not without critics.It was cited as one of the reasons S&P Global Ratings downgraded Ansonia’s credit outlook from stable to negative in 2024.S&P Global Ratings issue bond ratings for municipalities. Bond ratings are essentially credit ratings and affect how much a community can borrow and at what interest rate.S&P Global Ratings didn’t lower Ansonia’s bond rating but expressed concern about budgets relying too heavily on the WPCA money.“The negative outlook is driven by Ansonia’s plans to use one-time proceeds from the sale of $41 million of wastewater assets to fund recurring budgetary expenditures through fiscal 2030,” the report stated.Despite Miller’s admission and the warnings from S&P Global Ratings against using one-time revenues for current operating expenses, Cassetti and Miller repeated the dangerous practice in Ansonia’s current budget for Fiscal Year 25/26 which went into effect just months after the sale and the ratings agency warnings.