WANTED: A MORE PERFECT UNION

OUR REACTION when we heard the city's white-collar municipal union is dissing public involvement in the budget

process?

Oh, no you didn't!

For one thing, as a newspaper, we take public involvement pretty seriously; without the public, there is no democracy. Especially important: public involvement in the budget process, the recent level of which has surprised (and delighted) us. Who'd have thought that hundreds of citizens would show up at budget town-hall meetings?

District Council 47 held a news conference earlier this week to declaim the public budget workshops starting tonight, calling them "fatally flawed" and a "public-relations ploy to give the appearance of openess, transparency and honesty." The workshops are being run by the Penn Project for Civic Engagement; registration for tonight's, at St. Dominic's School, 8510 Frankford Ave., Holmesburg, starts at 6 p.m.

As far as we can tell, the union's beef is that Mayor Nutter talks only about "cutting services" instead of other ways the city should be filling its budget hole, like raising taxes or collecting money from nonprofts. Perhaps to a labor member, "cutting services" is code for "cutting union jobs."

We don't blame them for going into default mode - protecting jobs and benefits. But it would be nice if the union acknowledged that those benefits are one of the biggest parts of the city budget: 25 percent, expected to rise to 28 percent by 2012, according a Pew study last year. That study worried that rising pension and health-care costs threaten the city's ability to provide services.

Philadelphia paid more in health-care costs per employee than any of the 10 cities surveyed but one, and asks its workers to contribute less to their pension plans than any other city save one.

Monday's conference seemed like old-school

pre-contract-negotiation theater. Except as the general public in the city and around the country lose not only their benefits but their jobs and homes, it's unclear whether there remains much of an audience for this kind of theater.

We suggest union members look up the thick document on the budget that Nutter presented to Council on Monday (www.phila.gov.) And they should consider this: If you want to show the way to public involvement and transparency, open up the union negotiations to the public. Let taxpayers make recommendations and ask questions. Until you do that, you shouldn't diss any attempt at public involvement. *