Staff Blog
Nutter shows some good signs, some bad ones, concludes: “We are completely screwed.”
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Mayor Nutter held a press conference this morning to announce that the city budget deficit is, once again, worse than we thought. How much worse? Though the Fiscal Year '09 budget had been balanced by Nutter's first round of cuts, it is now back in the red, by about $47 million. And the 5-year deficit has doubled, from $1 billion to $2 billion.
Couple thoughts on this.
First, regarding the deficit itself: Damn. The first round of cuts took away some pretty core items, and it's hard to imagine things getting gentler. I guess we're all about to experience a lower standard of living vis-a-vis city services. Will garbage get picked up every two weeks now? Will the city just shut down completely if it snows? It certainly seems likely that we'll be getting a tax hike.
Second, on Nutter: The Mayor spent some time in the presser focusing on the issue of transparency. He said that he intends to include Philadelphians in the new budget-cut process on the "front end," and went so far as to say he is "very sorry" about not including citizens more the first time around and that his administration "could have and should have done better." It seemed, honestly, like a bit of a comeback for the Mayor — he seemed like someone who was coming to terms with some errors and resolving to do things better, which is the kind of thing you see rarely in politicians, but that always seemed to be within Nutter's capacity.
He diluted this a bit later on, in my opinion, when he was pressed to clarify how he could have done things better, and just kind of said, listen, we had to make decisions quickly, and hey, you can always do things better. It was very typical politician-speak. But I suppose the bottom line is that, if the upcoming process will be a more public, collaborative one than what we got this fall, that'll be a good thing.
Other notes:
-Nutter specifically called on the leaders of the four municipal unions to "share the pain." You might even say he called them out.
-The decrease in revenue from the Business Privilege Tax — about $33 million dollars — is almost as much as the entire cost of running the Fire Department.
-Vernon Odom asked Nutter how he would pay for a Super Bowl parade, should the Eagles win the Super Bowl. Nutter said he was focused on kicking the Cardinals' butts this weekend.
A tax hike will just drive away the few of us that are left in the city. It’s hard to imagine how every other municipality functions without a massive wage tax since Philadelphia sure can’t.