The city's and school district's budgets are getting a lot of play in the news today. The former for its newfound behind-closed-doors status and the latter for a range of issues that should be discussed on Food Network. And by the way, if you're depending on Wireless Philadelphia to access this blog, let me know and I'll start printing it out and mailing it to you.
To start off, while Mayor Nutter may not be seeking to contract out any city services like former Mayor Rendell, there is one thing he wants to "privatize" - budget negotiations with City Council.
After last week's well-publicized flap over the discouragingly misnamed "Sunshine Act", the Mayor and Council have decided to meet in small groups to avoid the suspicious minds of the media, making those minds even more... well... suspicious.
The Inquirer, Daily News and KYW 1060's Mike Dunn all have pieces about these meetings this morning. My morning routine of listening to Newsradio in the shower (it's the only thing that comes in on my shower radio) greeted me with the kind of titillating story that includes phrases like "sources tell" and "sources say" which tip me off to the fact that I'm being let in on a secret that the mayor doesn't want me to know.
That secret:
Sources tell KYW Newsradio that the Nutter administration is considering an increase in Philadelphia's hotel tax, as it struggles to revise its budget for the coming year.
So wait. If I want to stay in one of those big, fancy Center City hotels that are about 7 blocks from my house, I'm going to have to pay 1% more? Noooooooo!
Apparently, the real problem is with the 5-year plan which seems to be a little out of whack now that it's clear that the economy is slowing and fewer people are paying the same real estate transfer tax that the folks who are selling me my house will pay. The Inky gets a quote from Councilwoman Quinones-Sanchez who sums it up pretty succinctly:
"[Mayor Nutter] is going to have to figure out what he is willing to give up. . . . He can't get the tax cuts the way they are scheduled and still keep all this money on the table for all the priorities that he outlined."
That oughta set tax reform advocates a buzzing. From Brett Mandel at Philadelphia Forward:
One idea that should be rejected immediately is any notion of stopping the city’s tax-reduction program. The city's modest tax reductions have slowly and steadily improved the city's competitiveness and the gap between national job growth and city job growth has been almost cut in half since the city began its tax reductions. Without continued improvement in our tax competitiveness, there is no reason to believe that Philadelphia will do anything but continue to lose jobs and lag economically.
So following the post-inauguration honeymoon period, the sides are starting become clear. Councilwoman Quinones-Sanchez - who is probably not alone - is providing the loyal opposition and asking the necessary questions about the tax cutting priorities while the Mayor and other council members have shown their support for a position not unlike the one outlined above by Mandel - though probably not as fiesty!
Over on the school district budget, WHYY's Bill Hangley spoke to some folks who understand that while serving healthy, locally-grown fruits and vegetables in the schools may cost a little more, it should be seen as an investment.
After all, as reported in the Daily News, they've already made an investment of sorts in forgoing a bunch of revenue that they used to get by selling soda and unhealthy snacks to school kids. Unfortunately, it seems that - like gambling revenue going to New Jersey and Delaware - that money is going to your local corner bodega:
[District Chief Operating Office Fred] Farlino said many students skip the federally funded breakfast program because they come to school too late or they fill up on corner-store snacks on the way to school.
The comments section of that story makes the usual under-informed if passionate case to blame the parents for not making breakfast. Show of hands: how many people had time to cook themselves a complete and healthy breakfast this morning?
As if that weren't enough, the District also had to answer to Council for possibly replacing those unhealthy snacks and sodas with tainted beef. Mmm Mmm good.
Ok. So they weren't necessarily replacing the snacks and sodas with the bad meat but even so, not even being able to tell whether they got any of that downer cow goodness got into their cafeterias should be enough to turn any kid into a vegetarian.
As for Wireless Philadelphia, looks like it will be dealing with its own tainting - having the plug pulled. Metro has more.
The award for reporting some actual good news also goes to the Metro for letting us know that despite what's going on with every other government and municipal agency in the country, SEPTA, for once, is going to be ok:
Instead of the annual begging for state money, the transit agency is now preparing to build on an $80 million surplus in funding it received last year, SEPTA officials said last week.
Comments (1)
$80 billion??? Isn't that, like, enough to build the proposed Roosevelt Blvd subway or something?
On schools. I always had a complete breakfast every morning, but that was because my mother was a remnant of the stay-at-home-mom era despite her having a graduate degree.
On the city budget, I'll just quote what I posted on a story farther down, apparently while you were writing this one. Also, please print council's opinion, with full name attribution, whenever possible. Philadelphia voters deserve to be informed of their council representative's opinion on the issues, and I don't think that's happening as much as it should (blogs like this one help a lot).
Anyway, here's my opinion on the closed meetings (although I suppose being afraid that the public might find out that spending is being cut might be another reason for trying to close the meetings):
"I agree that the meeting doesn't look good for the Nutter administration. However, one thing that jumped out at me the next day was the mention of union negotiations. I wonder if the secrecy was in order to not tip the administration's hand too early on what they were going to say during those negotiations. If that's the case, I'm kind of torn between the public's right to know and the strategic advantage the secrecy would offer those who presumably are trying to keep our best interests in mind in negotiation labor contracts -- which brings us back to whether or not our elected officials really have our best interests in mind.
As Councilman Goode said, a lot comes down to trust which, unfortunately, many of us don't have in our government (and with good reason)."
Posted by Goofy | May 7, 2008 1:37 PM