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Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Want To Review The Budget Briefing Data Yourself?

Here's a copy of the briefing the department heads did for City Council members yesterday about their 10, 20 and 30 budget cut scenarios.

Happy reading.

Posted by Catherine Lucey @ 2:45 PM Permalink | 6 comments

Comments

0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 2:51 PM, 02/11/2009

Thanks, and bravo for posting it.

— CleanupPhilly

0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 3:46 PM, 02/11/2009

Looking at what other cities are doing, we can see that Chicago is privatizing the airport. they also privatized garages. Philly has a lot of public property that could be privatized, from Rec Center that are crumbling (Marian Anderson), pools that could be sold to nearby swim clubs (O'Connor to Lombard Swim Club, for example) to selling high value properties owned by the city, such as the Avenue of the Arts STD clinic and Health Dept. offices. Fines were increased in almost every city facing deficits, and enforcement of this has to proceed in Philly, where fines are a joke. Philly needs to garnishee wages of city employees who incur fines or have overdue property taxes. In LA, there was a recall of take home vehicles. Completely sensible. It's just not utterly fair that life and limb services take a hit of the same rate as something that we can completely live without. We can completely live without free city health centers. We really can. The city can have people use private facilities that get reimbursed for serving the indigent. We really can put AVI in place, and increase property taxes to regional levels over the five year plan. We can furlough city employees and contract out those functions, and probably get better performance. NYC gets more Medicaid reimbursements, and why is that not possible in Philly? They reformed their pension, they increased city employee health care contributions. NYC employees work longer and retire later. There is no DROP program in any other city. But Nutter has had a WHOLE YEAR to address even one of these things, and he just let it ride.

— CleanupPhilly

0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 3:52 PM, 02/11/2009

Nutter is trying to be like Phoenix which cut libraries, police, fire, and after school programs. But Philly is really more like NYC and Chicago, with huge, highly political public assets like the airport, like the RDA, like the property held out of the tax base for eventual chimerical redevelopment from long promised funds. This property can be sold for hard cash AND will start paying into the property tax base. There are literally tens of thousands of city held or government agency held properties that are no longer viable for the planned projects for them. The city has to simply sell this off. Cities do it all the time. Using the RDA mechanism is too slow. The RDA lets fake builders simply rewrite redevelopment contracts they are in violation of, when it could simply sell the property to a buyer and require them to build in a year or the property revert to back to the RDA after that time. Whatever your politics, ask yourself is it working that the RDA is the top property tax delinquent in the city? That the city is #2? http://www.hallwatch.org/proptax/about/redelinq/stats/topdelinquents/mailingaddress

— CleanupPhilly

0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 3:58 PM, 02/11/2009

Nutter's already violated the "guiding principles" in his budget presentation above: fiscal integrity, safety, education, and jobs. He could have implemented AVI to improve fiscal integrity, he started asking for police and fire cuts before everything, he cut libraries outright until sued, and he's frozen wage tax cuts which every analyst shows with hard data decreases jobs at a time when jobs are projected by the economy.com to go from 660,000 in 20007 for Philly to 637,000 in Philly by 2011. He's already made the decision to further decrease jobs more than that projection. But the political cash cows he's not even discussed.

— CleanupPhilly

0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 4:05 PM, 02/11/2009

Nutter can't cut DHS, but he can cut city funds for Public Health and Supportive Housing, which are more properly funded by state and federal funds. That would be enough to cover the deficit this year. He can keep libraries and Fairmount Park funding, but Recreation is not critical to the city, and private providers exist who are well-regarded, like the YMCA. If you keep police, fire, prison, and street funding, but cut recreation, public health, supportive housing, then you've gotten already to $335 million of the $1 billion needed. Then collect the $522 million in overdue property taxes by sheriff sale and putting city held/government held property back into the tax paying base. Then AVI so that everyone has current real time property values. That's tough, but that will do it. The city doesn't need to run a nursing home, health centers, give job physicals, and be the low income health system and providers. We can't keep having city funded low rent housing and city funded health care. These are most properly the roles of state and federal programs. They are redundant parts of the city budget.

— CleanupPhilly

0 like this / 0 don't • Posted 4:12 PM, 02/11/2009

If the city keeps trying to have such a costly local government, we'll end up like Detroit, when we could be NYC. Detroit was devalued to non-investment grade status. Analysts recommend that if Detroit issue bonds, that you can't count on them. It's like junk bond status. Detroit tried to be the low income warehouse of the region. Now it's collapsing under its own weight after driving out the people who pay for the base. It's a black hole. We are near black hole status if we don't make big changes today. Privatize the airport, PGW, PWD, and even functions like property tax assessment and collection. Cut pensions, cut benefits, increase time to retire, cut health benefits after the retiree is eligible for Medicare. Nutter is trying to Donovan McNabb his way through this, just phoning it in, and deflecting suggestions, riding it out without making any real changes too often. See what that got him, though? Left behind.

— CleanupPhilly

6 comments

About The Philly Clout Team

Chris Brennan, a native Philadelphian and graduate of Temple University, joined the Daily News in 1999. He has written about SEPTA, the Philadelphia School District, the legalization of casino gambling, state government, the mayor, the governor, City Council and political campaigns.

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David Gambacorta spent a small eternity writing about cops, drug dealers and serial killers. Now he’s writing about power and politics – which sometimes reminds him of the old crime beat. He joined the Daily News in 2005. And yes, he knows you’re not quite sure how to pronounce his last name. E-mail tips to gambacd@phillynews.com

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Catherine Lucey joined the Daily News in 2002 and has written about murderous drug gangs, political protesters and Harry Potter. After covering the 2007 mayoral election, she moved over to the City Hall bureau where she has been reporting on the Nutter administration.

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Jan Ransom, a native New Yorker, joined the Daily News in 2010 after graduating from Howard University. She has since written about the difficulty of filing police complaints, tax deadbeats and life after violent home invasions. She joined the Daily News City Hall Bureau in 2011 and has plunged headfirst into reporting on administration budget battles and City Council shenanigans.

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