Budget Committee Chair John Avalos
The most painful and divisive city budget season in many years was just getting under way as this issue went to press, with dueling City Hall rallies preceding the June 16 Board of Supervisors vote on an interim budget and the board's Budget and Finance Committee slated to finally delve into the 2009-10 general fund budgets on June 17.
Both sides have adopted the rhetoric of a life-or-death struggle, with firefighters warning at a rally and in an advertising campaign that any cuts to their budget is akin to playing Russian Roulette, while city service providers say the deep public health cuts proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom will also cost lives and carry dire long-term costs and consequences.
Despite Newsom's pledges in January and again on June 1 to work closely with the Board of Supervisors on budget issues, that hasn't happened. Instead, Newsom's proposed budget would decimate the social services supported by board progressives, who responded by proposing an interim budget that would share that pain with police, fire, and sheriff's budgets — which Newsom proposed to increase.
Rather than simply adopting the mayor's proposed budget as the interim spending plan for the month of July, as the board traditionally has done, progressive supporters proposed an interim budget that would make up to $82 million in cuts to the three public safety agencies and use that money to prevent the more draconian cuts to social services.
"It's the start of a discussion to figure out what that number should be. I don't know where we're going to end up," Sup. David Campos, who sits on the budget committee, told us.
Board President David Chiu said Newsom did finally meet with him and Budget Committee chair John Avalos on June 15 to try to resolve the impasse. But he said, "We didn't hear anything from the mayor that would change where we were last week." They planned to meet again on June 19.
"What we proposed represents the magnitude of the challenge we face this year," Chiu said of the interim budget proposal, seeming to indicate that supervisors are open to negotiation.
The real work begins the morning of June 17 when the Budget and Finance Committee dissects the budgets of 15 city departments, including the Mayor's Office, of which Avalos told us, "I don't think the mayor has made the same concessions as he's had other departments make."
The next day, another 13 city departments go under the committee's microscope, including the public safety departments that were spared the mayor's budget ax and even given small increases, and the budget of the Public Defenders Office, where Newsom proposes cutting 16 positions.
"This creates a severe imbalance in the criminal justice system," Public Defender Jeff Adachi told us. "Why is he cutting public defender services while fully funding police, fully funding the sheriff's department, and essentially creating a situation where poor people are going to get second-rate representation?"
That theme of rich vs. poor has pervaded the budget season debate, both overtly and in budget priorities that each side is supporting.
BUDGET ...
What we are seeing now is beautiful, as progressives are finally framing the debate in terms which resonate with San Francisco's values because it takes six votes to rule the day.
So many progressives internalize the position of opposition, of powerlessness that they allow that fear to diminish the amount of political risk they're willing to take.
This happened most notably last fall, when the "progressive" housing and land use nonprofit mafiosi who have not won an election in more than 10 years folded in the Eastern Neighborhood plan because they feared that Avalos and Mar would lose in D11 and D1 respectively.
But it turns out that those 20 years older than me were wrong, that those 20 years younger than me are clearly up to the task of running and winning competitive supervisorial campaigns.
The disconnect between these generations is one structural weakness facing a sustainable progressive movement, but fortunately, the next generation is not saddled with the impediments which have crippled the previous generation.
I guess in a world where progressives incubate in a nonprofit or union world where there are no incentives for success, where there are no penalties for failure, one's perspective as to what is good and desirable and what is bad and to be avoided get skewed until at one point one cannot tell the difference.
To quote Abe Simpson: "I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me."
But now is the time for progressives to "walk in power" as a means of exercising the political advantage we've worked so hard to win at the ballot box over the past 10 years, not to cower as if we don't "deserve" or can't possibly "win" a political contest where advancement is clearly within our grasp.
-marc
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