How Nutter Plans to Spend Your Money (The Next Mayor)

Hello readers of the Next Mayor! As Dan alluded to yesterday, WHYY and the Philadelphia Daily News will be continuing the partnership that created this blog. In the coming weeks, we will unveil “It’s Your Money”, a multimedia project about the city budget process.

The city budget has typically been mysterious and inaccessible to the general public. We hope that our project can held shed some light on how things work and encourage broader participation in this discussion about the future of Philadelphia. We are counting on our readers to help make this project a success.

Please let us know what kind of content you want. We plan have a regularly updated blog with news and analysis about the budget. There will also be other multimedia such as video and audio. We’d love to hear suggestions by e-mail or in the comments for useful tools that could be part of this project.

Now, onto the analysis......

Yesterday, Michael Nutter presented his budget to City Council and the public. You can see Nutter’s speech and Dan’s analysis by reading this post. Nutter’s total budget proposal was $3.975 billion. His plan calls for a continued decrease in business taxes, moderate increases in spending, and a somewhat controversial proposal to fund the city’s pension obligation through floating a large municipal bond.

Nutter proposed increasing funding in a variety of areas. He already announced his intention to hire more police officers and spend more money on emergency medical services. Nutter’s plan also included significant investments in environmental initiatives and several other areas. We will be examining many of them in detail in the coming months.

The proposals to cut taxes shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Michael Nutter championed cuts in both the Business Privilege Tax and Wage Tax before he was even a candidate for mayor. The only surprise was his call to increase the parking tax from 15% to 20%. A group of business fiercely fought this proposal during the Street Administration. It will be interesting to see what happens on this one.

The most controversial portion of Nutter’s budget is likely to be his plan to float a $4.5 billion bond to fully fund the city’s pension obligations. Nutter believes this will lock payments into a regular schedule and improve the fiscal health of the city. It remains to be seen if a bond with such favorable terms would be possible in this market.

Any immediate thoughts?