It’s no surprise that many of the items Mayor Newsom hacked out of the city budget at the last minute were important to supervisors who didn’t go along with the mayor’s original budget proposal.
Just look at the complete list (here as a pdf). Among the items axed: $130,000 for a Bernal Heights childcare center (a project Sup Tom Ammiano has been working on for two years or more), $397,000 for homeless drop-in services (which progresive board members have pushed for); $300,000 for home health nurses (a priority of SEIU Local 790) … the list goes on.
The Chron quotes Robert Haaland:
“It’s a very aggressive and obviously retaliatory move. But we’re not just going to roll over,” said Robert Haaland, a political organizer for SEIU. “Imagine you’re a working person and all of a sudden your salary gets slashed. People can lose their homes just because the mayor wants to retaliate. It remains to be seen how we’ll fight back, but we’re certainly not going to watch our members lose their homes.”
I just got off the phone with Haaland, and he went even further: “What they did is an unfair labor practice, retaliating against someone who refused to make concessions,” he said.
Which pretty much sums it up. SEIU Local 1021 wouldn’t play ball with the mayor, so now the union members get hit.
Ammiano was more than a bit pissed off. “It’s all retaliatory,” he told me. “Look at the Bernal preschool. This is a tiny amount of money, but it’s important to the community. And he didn’t even have the courtesy to call me himself and tell me about it.”
Added Ammiano: “It’s particularly ironic since he talks all the time about keeping families in San Francisco. I guess that doesn’t mean low-income families.”
The killer here is that these kind of cuts seem minor when they’re part of a $5 billion budget, but on the ground, on the streets, they really matter.
I’m still waiting to hear if the mayor will support Sup. Aaron Peskin’s revenue measures on the fall ballot, which would provide plenty of money to avoid these kinds of cuts.