LET US STIPULATE: filling San Francisco's $97 million budget gap will not be easy. As we noted last week, the failure of the two tax measures on the November ballot have left Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board of Supervisors in a tough situation: there's no immediate new source of revenue (even raising Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s franchise fee will take some legal wrangling that may drag on for months), and the current budget was balanced on the assumption that the city would have new tax money to spend. So there will have to be cuts, and no matter what they are, they won't be pleasant.

But as Rachel Brahinsky reports on page 16, some of the top items on the chopping block are services for the most vulnerable and neediest people in San Francisco.

At the end of this year, Newsom plans to shut down the Central City Hospitality House Self-Help Center, a place that for 19 years has allowed homeless people to take showers, get something to eat, use a phone, and connect with social services – no questions asked. It's a place that doesn't require you to get fingerprinted or show an ID, to speak fluent English, or to be mentally stable enough to negotiate the city's social-services bureaucracy. You show up, they help you.

Not surprisingly, the 6,000 clients who come through every year are the people who most need that help. They're the ones who slip through the holes in the safety net, the ones who can't or won't go through the hassle of entering Care Not Cash, the ones who are most likely to get sick, get hurt, get strung out, or die on the streets without some sort of intervention.

Newsom is also proposing to shutter the Tom Waddell Health Center's Urgent Care Clinic, a public health facility that serves a largely homeless client base and treats some 8,000 people a year. Most of the people who visit the clinic have no primary-care doctor; if they weren't treated at Waddell, they'd most likely get sicker and sicker until they wound up in San Francisco General Hospital's emergency room, clogging an already overcrowded facility and greatly increasing the cost of care.

This, apparently, is what Newsom's concept of Care Not Cash amounts to: just as the weather is getting cold and wet, just as people are seeing their already meager welfare checks cut to almost nothing, the few remaining services for the very poor are going to be eliminated. It's unconscionable, and the supervisors shouldn't stand for it.

The total cost of saving Hospitality House and the Waddell clinic is about $2.3 million. That's just a fraction of the $50 million in waste that progressive budget advocates have identified in the San Francisco Fire Department (see "Where There's Smoke, There's Fire," 7/6/04). We don't like closing neighborhood fire stations, and neither does anyone else. But when you have a station that's staffed 24 hours, 365 days a year, and answering only a couple of calls a day, and another station a few blocks away that could handle those calls just as quickly, and you have desperately sick and hungry homeless people who need a small amount of help ... well, that's a pretty clear choice.

Of course, the firefighters union, which has plenty of money, is already on the attack, running big ads and lobbying supervisors against making even modest cuts to one of the most wasteful, overfunded departments in the city. And the homeless and the sick poor have no union, no powerful lobbyists, and thus less clout at City Hall.

As Bill Barnes, a former aide to Sup. Chris Daly, warned in an op-ed piece Nov. 23, the budget cuts seem to be falling hardest on the backs of those who need the money most – and who, voting patterns suggest, most strongly supported the tax measures. Should the voters in wealthier neighborhoods on the west side of town, who opposed the new taxes, be exempt from any budget pain (for example, fire station closures), while the east side programs that serve the homeless are eliminated – sending more sick, hungry, broke, and, in some cases, mentally ill people out onto the sidewalks in the rain?

A few of the supervisors are starting to fight back – Sup. Gerardo Sandoval wants to cut funding for the Visitor and Conventions Bureau, Sup. Aaron Peskin wants to raise the hotel room tax, and Sup. Chris Daly is loudly denouncing the cuts to frontline services for the needy. But there's still a general feeling at City Hall that Newsom will get most of what he wants. That's wrong.

The supervisors need to look at every new scrap of money that can be found to fund these services (Barnes, for example, notes that raising health inspection fees for restaurants to the full-service cost would raise $1 million a year). They need to scrutinize and audit every city contract (the half million in taxpayer money that went to Julie Lee's San Francisco Neighbors Resource Center for a community center that was never built could have covered almost the entire cost of keeping Hospitality House open for a year). And they need to look at the budget's sacred cows, including the police and fire departments, and squeeze out every drop of inefficiency and waste before they start hacking away at programs for the homeless.