Mayor Lee’s budget deal

Pub date July 5, 2011
WriterMirissa Neff

The way the daily newspapers are presenting it, the budget that Mayor Ed Lee and the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee negotiated represents a new era of civility and cooperation at City Hall. The committee, after marathon negotiations, approved the $6.8 billion deal unanimously. Both sides called it a good process and a good result.

And indeed, by any standard, the way Lee worked with community groups was a huge breakthrough. After 16 years of essentially being cut out of the process under mayors Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom, the stakeholders — the people who provide the essential city services — were actually at the table. And the final blueprint isn’t as bad as it could be.

But it’s still a budget that does nothing to restore the roughly $1 billion of General Fund cuts over the past five years, that seeks no new taxes from big business or the wealthy, and that includes spending on a new Police Academy class that even the mayor doesn’t think the city needs.

And from the start, the mayor and his staff were absolutely determined to privatize security at the city’s two big public hospitals — even when it makes no political or fiscal sense.

The privatization plan was the centerpiece of what became a 13-hour shuttle diplomacy session, as staffers and supervisors sought to reach a deal they could all accept. The Mayor’s Office — particularly Steve Kawa, the chief of staff — put immense pressure on the committee members to accept a plan to replace deputy sheriffs with private security guards at San Francisco General and Laguna Honda hospitals. In the grand scheme of things, the $3 million in projected savings wasn’t a huge deal — but the politics was unnecessarily bloody. It’s as if Lee and Kawa were determined to privatize something, whatever the cost.

In the end, Sup. Jane Kim deserves considerable credit for holding firm and refusing to accept the proposal — and since Sup. David Chiu went along with her, they joined Sup. Ross Mirkarimi as a three-vote majority on the five-member panel and shot it down.

Police Chief Greg Suhr pushed for funding for a new police academy class to train 35 officers at a cost of $3.5 million (that’s $100,000 a cop). “I don’t think the department has looked hard enough at how we deploy the existing officers,” Sup. John Avalos told us.

And some key issues are still up in the air — for example, whether the mayor will adequately fund public financing of the November campaigns. With at least eight serious candidates running for mayor (not counting Lee), and most of them looking for the public financing that will help level the playing field, the city’s going to have to come up with at least several million dollars. That’s critical to the fairness of the election.

The bottom line remains: This city has been deeply damaged by years of cuts. And the next budget needs to start with a plan to repair that.