Knocks on budget make Nutter open up

With the reputation of his young administration on the line, Mayor Nutter is shelving what critics view as a go-it-alone governing style for a more transparent approach that harks back to his promise of "a new day, a new way."

At least that is the image his administration is trying to convey after complaints in the fall about how Nutter handled Philadelphia's first $1 billion deficit, and as he tries to claw out of a second budget hole of the same magnitude.

A handful of his advisers had sat for 30 consecutive days in a 14th-floor conference room of the Municipal Services Building, making decisions, before announcing plans in November to close library branches, swimming pools, and fire companies.

The public backlash was fierce.

As they deal with the latest fiscal crisis, Nutter and his inner circle are opening up the budget process. They are taking more steps to try to shape public opinion, and paying greater attention to how their work is perceived.

Consider: Eight days ago, Nutter publicly briefed City Council on the consequences of department budget cuts of up to 30 percent. Last Tuesday, he discussed Philadelphia's financial outlook with 1,500 business leaders.

On Wednesday, the mayor traveled to Washington to lobby for President Obama's economic-stimulus package. And on Thursday, he sent a dozen or so senior aides to a public forum - the first of four - where residents ranked options for balancing the 2010 budget.

"The public embarrassment he took on the libraries was an eye-opening experience" for Nutter, local NAACP president J. Whyatt Mondesire said.

Nutter backed off a push to close 11 libraries after weeks of outcry - and a court's ruling in early January that he could not do so without Council approval.

Some residents dismissed the recent outreach as a sham.

"This is your basic dog-and-pony show for the uninformed public," Overbrook Park resident Jan Wilson, 61, said of last week's budget forum. "People walk into these things thinking they will have an opportunity to truly express themselves. Instead, they walk into a world of preordained ways."

But Mondesire and others said the effort was real.

"I don't think it's window-dressing. I don't think they are trying to fake it. . . . I think they want to avoid any other public embarrassment," Mondesire said.

To be sure, Nutter remains immensely popular. In a poll by the Pew Charitable Trusts last month, 71 percent rated the mayor favorably. (Most of the poll was conducted before Nutter announced Jan. 15 that the city faced a second $1 billion shortfall in the next five years.)

Yet 62 percent of those polled gave Nutter a grade of C or worse for the job he is doing.

Democratic media strategist Neil Oxman, hired by Nutter during his 2007 mayoral campaign, said it was clear after speaking to the mayor that a new approach was needed after the controversy over the library cuts.

Referring to Nutter's staff, Oxman said, "I think they saw what had happened in Go-round 1, and they decided, 'We have to do this differently in Go-round 2.' "

The result: "He has unleashed a public-relations machine to push his agenda," Democratic political consultant Maurice Floyd said. "He took a beating and said, 'You know what? I am going to do what my voters want me to do.' "

In an interview, Nutter explained the different approach as partially a function of time. In the fall, he said, there was enormous pressure to act quickly because those decisions would affect the current fiscal year, which was nearly half over.

But with the current budget crisis, Nutter said, he sought to leave as much time as possible for citizen input - an idea he debuted during his campaign. It is one of the reasons he delayed his budget speech from February to March 19.

Also, Nutter said: "We went over things, we knew we made mistakes, and we're better prepared. . . . Citizens have also now experienced this recession themselves, and it makes it a little bit easier to communicate it."

Zack Stalberg, president of the watchdog group Committee of Seventy, said, "He is genuinely listening better and communicating better, and at the same time he is not sugarcoating the message."

Stalberg and others said they believed that Nutter was not only thinking about the immediate challenges for fiscal 2010, but also laying groundwork to convince the public of the need for fundamental changes in how the city operates. That could include privatizing sanitation service, dramatically altering health and pension benefits for city workers, and eliminating independent row offices.

"The economic crisis is going to force him to remake government," Stalberg said.

Doing so, of course, would be difficult. In light of Friday's fatal shooting of Police Officer John Pawlowski, for example, there are questions about how the administration can consider layoffs to reduce the police budget.

Nutter, in an interview before Pawlowski's death, said, "A crisis creates an environment in which real change can happen."