Budget Forum Consensus: Find Revenue, Don't Cut Services

I went to the budget forum in south philly last night as a ringer of sorts. I was there as a resident but also to advocate for the positions of the Coalition for Essential Services.

The break out session I attended had about 25 people in it as well as some folks from the City. The rest of the group were not activists nor did they seem to be highly politically active. They were concerned residents.

I entered my breakout session with my 'alternative points' in hand. However in terms of my agenda I might as well have stayed at home. Before the breakout even started a South Philly resident objected that the process was skewed toward making cuts. He pointed out that all of the increase revenue options were listed after the service cuts. And that the increase revenue points and numbers seemed very low.

The session started out with the group identifying the 'low hanging fruit'. Every person picked a revenue increase over budget cut (except one person picked libraries and another picked recreation).

When we broke into smaller groups I started advocate for rolling back taxes for large businesses (over $500,000 in revenue) back to the 2004 level. The rest of the group wouldn't let me get to the details, they were like 'of course we'd support that over cutting public health or housing'.

The points we had ascribed to business tax increase were significantly higher (18 points) than the City/Center for Civic Engagement.

I was also not the first to mention the lack of repealing the tax abatement as a revenue stream option.

This is not to say that everyone there agreed completely with everything I had to say. It was a difficult discussion to say the least. But folks were definitely more interested in talking about the revenue options and the process seemed slanted toward making cuts. As a mother of two said, 'you pay a little more but you get a lot more.'

The community forum last night reminded me a lot of the Great Expectations project. The discussions and outcomes in both were orchestrated toward certain outcomes. I think it is an agenda that promotes the welfare of upper middle class and wealthier Philadelphians. It is a perspective that sees cutting taxes and services as a boon. The authors of this agenda aren't the ones who will use the public health centers or the shelters and won't send their kids to neighborhood public schools.

I don't want to diminish the effort that the City and Civic Engagement folks put into organizing these forums. It is no small effort. And it is certainly heartening that the public is being engaged in this kind of effort. In many ways it is a major step forward. And will hopefully become a standard. However I am concerned that this public engagement piece will be used to legitimize policies that prioritize cutting city services at a time that they are needed most.