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COMMUNITY

Update District Two: New Budget Faces Challenges

By Peggy Neely, Phoenix City Councilwoman, District 2

Months worth of hearings, meetings and public input have resulted in a new budget for the City of Phoenix that doesn’t solve our fiscal crisis and ultimately led me to vote “no” on the proposal last month.
Certainly the public input was helpful. I alone received more than 700 e-mails and dozens of phone calls from residents, mostly worried about proposed cuts to our police and fire departments. The concern shown by residents during this process over how we would spend our limited dollars was perhaps the one bright spot in the entire process.
One of my biggest worries over the new budget comes from the way we saved police positions by keeping officers on the payroll but taking them off the streets. The public wanted officers to stay on patrol, and the headlines after the budget passed proclaimed no cuts to police or fire services, yet the so-called solution actually does mean fewer officers on the beat and more behind desks, in assignments around City Hall, like the Water, Transit and Aviation departments.
Again, the public wants officers in patrol cars and firefighters on trucks, not people pushing paper all day long in numbers that could be out of sync with the number of badges in the field. I am grateful the new budget is directing a full Citywide audit of efficiencies and innovation and that I have been given assurances from the City Manager that Police and Fire will be two of the first departments to undergo this review. But I remain concerned that we have acted without complete review of public safety spending, which amounts to 70 percent of the budget.
Finally, I thought it was unwise to restore positions using money that we think we might raise from a sales tax fund for public safety personnel and the new food tax. Both are based on retail sales, which as we all know, are not doing well right now.
This decision alone could lead to a brand new crisis this fall, if those two funds don’t perform, or more simply put, if you don’t spend more money this year at stores and markets in Phoenix. I understand that tough times require tough if not bold decisions, but I think when it comes to public safety and the people’s money, we should be up front about the ramifications of this decision and the likelihood that we will be dealing with this problem again in a matter of months.
With all of that said, I actually agreed with most of the decisions we made in the budget, and would have voted “yes” on many of the specific recommendations in the spending plan.
Indeed, building a city budget isn’t easy in good times, let alone bad, and the process is far from perfect. It drains the spirits of our hardworking City employees, creates uncertainty about their futures and leaves taxpayers wondering what services will or won’t be around tomorrow.
I appreciate the effort and realize the difficulty of the situation for everyone, employees and taxpayers alike. But in this case, it was the overall lack of transparency regarding the recommendations for restoring police positions and my concern that people may mistakenly believe we have solved the problem that led me to vote “no” on a plan that could force us very soon to make the cuts that we all were told we have avoided.

COMMUNITY Online Extras | CITYSunTimes April 2010