It’s time to quit with the patches, quit with the one-time solutions and fee hikes
EDITORIAL Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, likes to say that politicians should never let a crisis go to waste — but that’s what happened in San Francisco last summer, when the mayor and the supervisors approved a budget deal that didn’t involve any real structural reform, didn’t solve any long-term problems, and didn’t even last six months.
Now there’s a new crisis, one that, if anything, is worse. Cutting almost a half-billion dollars from the city budget last year was absolutely brutal. But cutting another half-billion, which is what the controller is now talking about, seems almost inconceivable.