Anyone interested in spending $2.9b?

I haven’t been following the City of Portland budget process much this year. For one thing, I don’t have time to study both the Budget and the Charter changes. The Budget is for a short time, the Charter should be for our lifetimes. And for another, I think the Budget is played as a shell game to citizens, and that bugs me. For instance, nowhere in the Mayor’s announcement yesterday is a simple statement, “The City of Portland’s total budget is $____”. Instead, it talks about $37m “surplus”, and how the Mayor (with input from the Office of Management and Finance) proposes to divide it up. If I were giving information to citizens to help them understand the Budget, I would start with the total. After all, that’s how we manage our family budgets. I would talk about taxes and fee levels on page 1, not page 4, and I would mention more than sewer fees. I would outline efficiencies and savings being pursued to make every dollar buy as much as possible. And I would remind citizens that taxes and fees pay for the services recommended in the Budget, and say thank you.

I spent ten minutes yesterday evening surfing PortlandOnLine, and I can’t find a figure for the proposed total 2007-8 Budget. Not in Frequently Asked Questions, even. I gave up, thinking to myself, “I bet Anna/Ryan/Nick/Scott/Amy will find out and put it in a newspaper article”, and sure enough, here it is. In the third sentence. Thanks, Ryan. Read the entire article, folks, to get a much better understanding of the overall budget (expenditures and income) than I found by clicking the main links supposedly explaining the proposal on the City’s site.

For those who would like to study it, the Mayor’s budget announcement is here, and the web page with links to more data here. The announcement is seven pages of prose, not a hundred spreadsheets, so not as daunting as it might sound. I have some thoughts on what’s worthy and questionable in the expenditures outlined, but I’ll wait to see what readers notice most, first.

Note:
1. The Mayor’s announcement states:

“It should be noted that this budget also reflects the work in the past year to align the goals of the City’s elected officials with the goals and budget of the semi-autonomous Portland Development Commission. The 2007-08 budget process marks the first time that members of the PDC Commission and the City Council joined together as a team to publicly work toward this alignment. The PDC/City Council Budget Work Group spent more than 20 hours in a positive, thorough, and informative process whose end result is a fiscally responsible budget for PDC that is aligned with both the PDC Commission’s and the City Council’s objectives. The Work Group was also fortunate to have four Urban Renewal Advisory Committee members join them for some deliberations to offer community input.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you Measure 26-92, changing the way the PDC budget is done, may not be needed, and has not received enough discussion within the community to merit approval on the May ballot.

2. The total Budget is nearly $3b. That’s Three Billion dollars, actual estimate $2,900,000,000 (ish). Bear that in mind when you hear Charter reform proponents promise to save $10m – without any analysis or fiscal study to estmate costs and savings of the proposed new form of government, even.