Street, Council tangle one last time over budget

In an initial committee vote yesterday, City Council unanimously recommended a 2008 budget that differs from Mayor Street's original proposal by just $16 million.

While Street wanted to cut the budgets of the district attorney, Community College of Philadelphia, the Free Library and a number of city departments including Health and Licenses and Inspections, Council wants to restore most of their money.

With the proposed budget now topping $3.8 billion, you might think this lame-duck mayor would simply agree to the minor changes and move toward a quiet summer.

But that was far from clear yesterday. While Council has carefully balanced its additions with spending cuts elsewhere, some of those cuts are to programs near and dear to the mayor.

For example, Council wants to kill the $5 million that would be split equally between the effort to market the city for the hospitality industry and for Innovation Philadelphia, the non-profit entity trying to develop the technology and knowledge industries in the city. Council tried and failed to whack that money last year.

There's also $4 million in the Commerce Department's economic-stimulus program that helps the city offer packages to companies thinking of departing the city limits.

Joyce Wilkerson, Street's chief of staff, raised concerns about those cuts, but she expressed even more concern with Council's attempt to restore the 2.5 percent spending cuts that Street proposed for a number of city departments.

Wilkerson is concerned that Council is taking a one-time source of money like the stimulus money and proposing to fund jobs in various city departments. In effect, there is no funding for these jobs in 2009 and beyond.

"The reason we made these cuts is because we didn't have room in the five-year plan to support all these operations," Wilkerson said.

Council also added $3.5 million to its own budget to cover an estimated $1 million in attorneys fees, $1 million for a summer-jobs program and $1 million for a heating-assistance program. Among the losers was the city Law Department, which was cut almost $1 million.

After the Council vote, Council President Anna Verna said, "We passed what we thought we wanted, and the mayor will do what he wants to do." *