City responds to Street's proposed budget cuts

The city of Philadelphia is going on a financial diet. Doctor's orders. Not cutting back the city's budget would result in a gargantuan deficit of $834 million by 2008, and in his Jan. 28 address, Mayor John Street proposed to tackle the problem. His primary solution is scaling down both city jobs and funding for selected city facilities, while maintaining his ambitious quality of life initiatives in full operation and even proposing new ones. Apart from the city employees who will lose their jobs, 2,500 of them by 2008 to be exact, and the neighborhoods that will lose their pools and recreation centers, many say Street's proposal arguably isn't a bad deal -- but can he pull it off? "We're in a 'wait and see' mode," said City Controller Jonathan Saidel, who also expressed that Street's proposed cuts could theoretically do the job despite the enormous expenditure on quality of life programming. Like other officials who have expressed relative approval of Street's proposal on paper, Saidel remained wary of the plan's actual execution. "The devil is going to be in the details," he said. • For a city that's trying to shed pounds in terms of its deficit, Philadelphia sure has a lot of ambitious, expensive programs on its plate -- programs like Operation Safe Streets, the plan to curb crime with more policing hours, and the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, the campaign against blight. The mayor has declared his steadfast intentions to stick by these programs, regardless of the financial burden. He is determined to keep these efforts going at full speed. "The mayor's initiatives are sorely overdue," Saidel affirmed. "It's certainly laudable, but in order to pay for those laudable actions, he's going to have to cut his budget somewhere else." And he's starting with his own people. Street pledged to cut 50 jobs from top City Hall offices by the end of the month, trimming $17.5 million from the payroll over the next five years. Other city personnel who will be let go in the coming years are largely in upper and intermediate managerial positions. "If you do it right, not only will you have a restructured government that runs more efficiently -- you'll save money," Saidel said. Joyce Wilkerson, the mayor's chief of staff, announced that "this administration looked at ways to fundamentally change the way government operates." This will include condensing departments, cutting out not only unnecessary personnel, but also certain superfluous elements of bureaucratic paper work. Saidel praised Street's administration for "reorganizing the government to do what it can do and [telling] people honestly what it can't do." "He's the first mayor to do something like this in a long time," Saidel said, noting that the mayor's job cuts are gutsy considering the upcoming election. • The financial nitty-gritty will come clean in upcoming months as the City Council holds departmental budget hearings, investigating allocations that are unclear. Yesterday morning, the Council heard general testimony regarding Street's proposed Five-Year Plan. Wilkerson reviewed the cuts in keeping with input from Director of Finance Janice Davis and Budget Director and 1981 College graduate Rob Dubow. Council members interrogated the panel regarding allocations they deemed questionable.