In response to pointed questions from city council president Richard Conlin last week about the mayor’s budget priorities, Mayor Mike McGinn sent a letter to the entire city council this morning reiterating what his budget director, Beth Goldberg, told Conlin last week: Every item in the mayor’s transportation budget, which would use a five-percent increase in the commercial parking tax and higher parking meter rates to fund sidewalks, bike paths, and the South Park Bridge, is a priority.
During last week’s budget committee meeting, Conlin pressed Goldberg to tell him what the mayor’s top priorities are if (as is likely) the city council doesn’t adopt some of McGinn’s proposed new fees and taxes. If the council has to make cuts, Conlin wanted to know, what were the mayor’s top priorities? Goldberg dodged the question, saying only that “a budget is a way of articulating priorities.”
Today’s four-page letter, replete with bolds, italics, and 22 instances of the word “priority,” lays out the mayor’s budget process at great length, noting repeatedly that McGinn’s budget “preserved high priority services” but still required additional revenues—an increase to the commercial parking tax and parking-meter rates—to fund everything the mayor considered high-priority.
By asking the council to raise those revenues, the letter says, “my budget makes a clear priority statement – that additional reductions to SDOT’s budget would degrade services at a rate that is unacceptable to me, and that it is critical that we find funding to support our most important future funding obligations.”
Cute language aside, what McGinn’s telling the council is this: It isn’t his job to help them come up with cuts to his budget. If they want to make cuts, they’ll have to decide what to cut themselves. By doing so, McGinn is putting the council on the hook for whatever they end up cutting (contrary to the story McGinn and some transit proponents are pushing, the council can cut from anywhere in SDOT’s budget; they don’t have to cut the projects that would be funded by the parking tax and fee increases) and sidestepping responsibility when they fail to pass his proposed tax and fee increases.
Once the council passes its budget without McGinn’s proposals in November, watch for the mayor to issue a disappointed statement blaming the council and its “different priorities” for cutting funds for popular programs like the bike master plan, sidewalks, and the South Park Bridge.
