After the budget: Sanders says potato, the council says potato

From the City Council side, the theme of these mid-year budget cuts was time. They spent one-time-only revenues to keep libraries and recreation centers open, and a couple of other facilities, for another six months while they take time to gather more information, do more analysis, and consider more carefully how best to make what Mayor Jerry Sanders predicts will be $54 million in cuts in the next budget. As City Council Member Toni Atkins said after one of the recent budget hearings, “It’s our city too. We need all the information to make the best decision we can.”

From the perspective of Mayor Sanders, the package he proposed was the one best way to close the budget gap now, and get ready for next year. He spoke to the experts and made a plan. It was the best plan, and any modification of it seemed to be, in his view, a mistake, and a weak-kneed giving in to public pressure.

These two attitudes permeated the whole process.

Chief Operating Officer Jay Goldstone told CityBeat on Monday that the mayor established that there would be a $43 million mid-year budget deficit in mid-October. Within days, Goldstone said—actually he said, “nearly instantaneously”— Sanders announced to the public that falling tax revenues had led to a substantial gap between what the budget said the city could spend and what it actually had in the bank. To make matters worse, he said, revenues could be even worse in coming months, and he expects the state to close it’s deficit by taking away aid to local cities.

Then followed a pretty intense two weeks. Rachel Laing, a spokesperson for Sanders, told CityBeat that the Financial Management staff was putting in 14-16 hour days every day. Sanders met with every department head and demanded they find places to shrink their budgets so he could make a proposal to the City Council that would close the gap while preserving the economic reforms he’d made since coming to office. Then when their cuts weren’t enough, he demanded they propose options that saved even more money. Then he, Goldstone, and Chief Financial Officer Mary Lewis picked the options that balanced politics with budget realities and created a balanced budget package.

Behind the scenes, he sent his chief of staff, Kris Michell, and Goldstone to talk to City Council members early in the process. Atkins and a spokesperson for City Council President Scott Peters described these conversations as a “heads up.”

“Kris Michell stopped by my office to tell me there would be some budget problems, and asked if I had any suggestions for places to cut,” Atkins said. “I had a few ideas, but those were just off the top of my head.”

Meanwhile, Independent Budget Analyst Andrea Tevlin and her staff were trying to gather data from department staff so she could prepare a report for the City Council. She was rebuffed.

“It was very frustrating,” Tevlin said. “They were trying to wrap up everything with a bow before we could have any access to any department staff or department heads or proposals they were considering or any numbers that were affiliated with services.”

Atkins, through sources she preferred not to reveal, learned that city staff was actually forbidden from passing information on to City Council members or the IBA.

“They were under pretty heavy threats,” she said.

Indeed, Peters wrote a memo to Sanders asking that Tevlin get the information she wanted, and he too was ignored.

“[Financial Management] wanted it to go through one source,” Laing said. “The financial management team had two weeks to put together what was a budget. It’s a five-month process in real life, and they had to condense that in two weeks. We needed to keep the focus. If you start having to answer to all different people, all people who were giving directions, it really does take the focus off. We had to be efficient, it was about getting the job done.”

When asked about the communications problems between the legislative and executive branches of government, Sanders said he had met with each City Council member.

“I asked them for suggestions, I asked them which libraries,” he said.

He said he met face to face with most of the council members, though Councilmember Donna Frye would only talk to him on the phone, and Scott Peters was out of town, so they also spoke on the phone. Speaking for Peters, Maryann Pintar said they spoke generally about the difficulty of the cuts. Atkins said she met with Sanders in person, but not until 10:30 a.m. on Nov. 5. The proposal was released at 1:30 on the same day.

“He was rushing to sit down with each of us and do a heads up before he did his press conference,” Atkins said.

Atkins wished there could have been a far more collaborative process.

“At budget committee meetings in October, we asked them for information, we asked them to give us what they had so we could be a part of this,” she said. But no information was forthcoming.

After Sanders released his proposal, then, Tevlin said, city departments became very forthcoming with information. She said they did their best to provide data in the time allotted, but with the budget committee set to hold a hearing the following Wednesday, there just wasn’t enough time.

“We had Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then Tuesday was a holiday,” Tevlin said, noting how few actual working days she had to get responses from city staff before she had to write her report to City Council.

She noted that it didn’t necessarily have to run like this. There didn’t have to be a policy preventing her from getting data.

“The charter requires the opposite,” she said. “Any requested information for the budget process by the IBA, there has to be full cooperation by the mayor.”

She’s hopeful that city staff will be more open as the City council works out the new budget going forward.

“It’s worked pretty well in the first two-and-a-half years, once we got over the first bumps the first year,” she said. “I hope that we’re back to business as usual, in which we have a pretty regular dialogue on all the items coming before the council.”