Budget highlights

City Council members don't have much time to get a new budget approved in the wake of Prop Q's failure. They've begun in the past two days to wade into the tough questions about what to fund.

Here is a handy spreadsheet showing the difference between the Prop Q budget and the budget the city manager has now proposed.

Now let's look at some of the highlights from the conversation among Council members the past couple days.

Support for EMS

If there is one thing from Prop Q that the dais wants to maintain, it's the funding for EMS. One sub-quorum of Council members has proposed reallocating $4.3 million from other city programs (including the rainy day fund) to fund overtime for EMS "to backfill open vacancies and maintain staffing levels." I would be surprised if it encounters opposition.

Fuentes: How do we trust the city's numbers?

Council Member Vanessa Fuentes gently probed city budget staff on an issue that I've raised in the past: the big swings in their financial forecasts. Unlike me, she did not suggest that they were at times altered to align with certain political priorities (like getting big pay raises for cops).

The response from CFO Ed Van Eenoo and Budget Director Kerri Lang was absolutely true: sales tax revenue has fluctuated wildly in recent years, making it very hard to predict the city's bottom line.

(While most other local government entities are funded entirely by property taxes, a big chunk of the city's revenue comes from the sales tax)

Broadnax: Economic development is the way to go

City Manager T.C. Broadnax at one point said that the city needed to "be more responsible overall with level-setting with people" about what can and can't be funded. In other words, Council needs to learn to say no to more groups seeking assistance from the city.

He also pushed back on the idea of "pilot programs" –– "piloting something sounds good, but it may not be the wisest thing to do."

Finally, he said, "as the state keeps chopping away at our revenue generation capacities, I think we got to focus on economic development – it adds tax base."

It seems obvious, but it's easier said than done. Many of the same people who enthusiastically voted against Prop Q will just as enthusiastically oppose the conversion of former AISD properties into tax-generating commercial developments. They'll argue they ...