Some budget-cutting tips

I HAD a sense of deja vu when Mayor Nutter announced his budget cuts.

Several were similar to those proposed by Mayor Street in 2004, when I was managing director - and I still have the scars to prove it. I would've preferred being caned in Singapore to having to appear before City Council to defend closing swimming pools, cutting library hours and reconfiguring fire companies.

There are some differences.

The cuts now are broader and deeper. And for good reason - today's financial crisis is much worse. A mayor whose honeymoon had long vanished proposed the 2004 cuts. Today's are being proposed by a mayor who still has a full tank of goodwill.

In 2004, the animosity toward Street was so thick it was difficult to get a fair hearing on the cuts. Today, it's hard to even get a hearing - Council appears more willing to appease than to provide legislative oversight.

Both approaches are wrong. Debate on issues that affect the city's future shouldn't depend on a mayor's popularity. If we don't have a serious discussion about these issues, rather than the token gestures Council has offered so far, then that august body might just as well fold up shop and save us some real money.

LET'S NOT FORGET that Council's own staff has grown from 108 in 1980 to 191 for this fiscal year.

That's a 77 percent increase, though the number of councilmembers is the same, and the city itself is smaller. Compare that to the decline in street department workers, cut from 2,800 to 1,800 during the same time, or 36 percent.

Make no mistake, we have to right-size our city. Our infrastructure was built for a population of 2 million people - today, one of every four of those folks has left our city.

The Nutter administration has a great opportunity to reshape and reform city government. When it comes to managing change, nothing is better than having a popular mayor and a serious fiscal crisis.

But there is a difference between forcing change and forging change. Forced change will be temporary and create resentment. Forging change can be lasting and create a sense of partnership. But to forge change, people, particularly those most affected, have to know that decisions have been made fairly.

Now is the time for the Nutter administration to demonstrate its competence and openness by explaining in detail how its decisions were made. His plan for public meetings, announced yesterday, is a fine start. Citizens may actually have some good suggestions.

I have some of my own:

* In 2004, we recommended pairing rather than closing libraries. Some libraries would have normal hours and others may have more limited hours depending on location and usage. It wasn't popular at the time, but faced with closing 11 libraries, maybe it deserves a new look.

* We need a good independent study of the police department. To paraphrase Willie Sutton, it's where the money is. The department's district structure has remained basically the same for more than four decades, designed at at time when there were no cell phones, computers and the demographics of the city were strikingly different. Restructuring doesn't mean fewer police - it can mean more police used more strategically.

* The city is going after tax delinquents, but let's not forget that the city's biggest debtor is the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

It's time to ask the State Supreme Court to mandate that the state pay for local courts as it was ordered to do more than a decade ago. That in itself could close the city's budget gap by more than $100 million each year.

The conventional wisdom is that we won't succeed. But before we rip the heart out of our of neighborhoods, let's give it the old college try.

* Speaking of colleges - and hospitals - let's remember that they don't pay real-estate taxes because of their non-profit status though they are our largest employers and operate more like IBM than the Sisters of Charity.

Why don't we ask them to make a contribution in lieu of taxes? Let them contribute directly to keeping some of our libraries and swimming pools open.

_ And I would say the same for some of the law firms and businesses that live in tax heaven.

For example, we have lawyers and financial advisers located at the Cira Center, created as a tax-free zone, who pay no wage tax or business taxes. In one law firm, the lawyers' average salary is more than $1 million a year, but they pay nothing.

Justice, if not compassion, demands that they do their part.

* And let's remember that taxes is a five-, not a four-letter, word.

Why don't we raise the local portion of the wage tax by a tenth of a percent? Given the state-mandated reduction, we will still be in better shape than before.

Remember, each tenth of a percent would raise more than $25 million a year but cost a $50,000-a-year wage-earner about a dollar a week - less than one cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee.

I appreciate the hard work the Nutter administration has been doing in trying to right-size the ship during these difficult times. The issues are complex, the work is hard.

But what we are doing to our city, particularly the fabric of our neighborhoods, is severe. It deserves more discussion and debate. But let's keep the debate civil. Those lashes I received in 2004 still smart. *

Phil Goldsmith was formerly the city's managing director. Read his blog at philgoldsmith.blogspot.com. E-mail pgold4110@aol.com.