At some point, earlier this week, Finance Director Rob Dubow briefed City Council on some of the many difficulties that the administration (and Council by being involved in the process) are going to have with this year's budget. Unfortunately, unlike the start of the American Revolution, it seems that this was "the shot that was barely heard around the room."
Only The Evening Bulletin reported on it:
Mr. Dubow sounded much like his old PICA self as he led council members through a PowerPoint analysis of his budget concerns.
City spending is projected to go up this year by nearly $900 million.
Revenues for the general fund are shrinking.
Human services, police, fire, pension costs, health costs, prisons and debt siphon off 80 percent of the money that comes in leaving precious little money for fixing infrastructure, improving city services, and raising employee wages and benefits.
The good news is the city has a $300 million fund balance. The bad news is that it's not enough.
"If we only had to worry about the city's finances for one year we'd be in great shape," he told Council.
And, oh yes, it gets worse. Read the whole thing to learn how much worse. And remember, this is the guy from the Nutter administration. We're pretty used to mayors, through their surrogates or by themselves, paying a pretty rosy picture of the finances.
If anyone can find any other coverage of this event, please let me know. All I came across so far is this piece in The Evening Bulletin. So at least somebody was there for round 1 of the battle. (Sorry, I have to pull out all of the stops when talking about the budget to get some attention on it, so expect a lot of "fight" "battle" "apocalypse" vocabulary.) Admittedly, the sorry state of the city's immediate fiscal future is not "news" so much since we've been hearing about it for a couple years now. But it would seem to be news that City Council and a representative of the mayor are talking about it.