City’s budget battle deferred, but will it explode?

First, the news: After four hours of testimony from city officials and the public, the City Council took no action on proposed budget cuts. They scheduled an official discussion, and probably a vote on a budget amendment to fix the $43 million deficit, for 1 p.m. on Monday.

Second, the reflection: Today’s hearing was the second held by the City Council to discuss Mayor Jerry Sanders’ proposal for closing the budget gap. Sanders suggested closing libraries and recreation centers, halving police and fire academy classes, firing some of his own staff, closing Customer Service Centers, and reducing by two the number of fire crews on duty any given day. All of these proposals are the sort of things that typically get politicians crucified by the voting public. Usually public safety is untouchable, right? And whatever it was that the customer service centers did, people would be peeved about losing them, right?

But after listening to public comment from both budget hearings, I don’t recall any member of the public bringing up the customer service centers. No one mentioned the lay-offs of four top officials. One non-firefighter expressed concern about the changes to fire station staffing. But libraries and recreation centers? Everyone turned out for those: older folks, small children, teenagers, parents, grandparents, non-parents, they packed City Council chambers to overflowing this afternoon, at least for the beginning. They waved signs, they applauded, they hissed. If the public cares about one issue, it’s their libraries and rec centers.

The city’s Independent Budget Analyst, Andrea Tevlin, wrote in a report this week that to keep the seven libraries and nine rec centers open for the six months left in the fiscal year, the city would need to find $2.5 million, about 6 percent of the overall gap. She proposes using savings the mayor found in adjustments made to the city’s tourism tax, along with a proposed reorganization of part of the park and recreation department, to fund it.

The mayor had set that money aside to cover the anticipated deficit in 2010, and at the start of today’s meeting, he made it clear he was not interested in using those funds to keep the facilities open for just a few months. Afterward, his spokesman, Darren Pudgil, said, “You do not use one-time monies to pay for ongoing operational expenses.”

But Tevlin’s point is not necessarily to save these branches forever, but instead to postpone the closures so that the City Council can review the criteria used to select which branches were selected for closure, and to decide if they want to save the libraries and rec centers by cutting elsewhere. In last week’s hearing, Chief Operating Officer Jay Goldstone revealed that the five-year budget projections produced by Sanders’ team assumed all the cuts remain in place for at least those five years. It includes no provision for reopening the libraries and rec centers.

“With the five-year outlook,” Tevlin told me after the meeting, “these branches are going to be closed for a long time. We want to really examine them.”

Making the whole affair even more awkward, four of the eight City Council members are in their final weeks on the job. They will be replaced on Dec. 8 by Sherri Lightner, Todd Gloria, Carl DeMaio and Marti Emerald. But they still care about these decisions.

“I still live in South Park,” said Budget Committee Chairperson Toni Atkins. “I’ll still see my former constituents in the street; they’re going to ask me about the decisions I made. I need to be able to look them in the eye and explain what I did.”

There’s a lot of tension between Sanders and the council just now. Sanders wants the City Council to agree to his proposal and quickly. He says the city is losing money every day that the council delays, and that his staff needs time to close buildings and lay people off. But at the same time, crucial memos arrived in council offices late yesterday afternoon or even this morning. The memos, from the directors of the Park and Recreation and Library departments, from Goldstone, and from Director of Financial Management Nader Tirandazi, answer crucial questions asked by the council.

“We need time to process it,” Atkins said. “We need to be able to make an informed decision.”

Pudgil didn’t seem so thrilled that the council opted to delay a decision.

“Maybe on Monday we’ll get a little action,” he said.