Mayor John Street delivered his final budget address to the city last week, praising his and his predecessor's work in delivering 15 years of balanced budgets.
But Pennsylvania regulators and several mayoral candidates aren't so quick to congratulate Street's work.
The five-year financial plan he laid out in front of City Council presents an austere spending plan over the next five years, thanks to a rapidly shrinking surplus.
Highlights of the proposal include a plan to spend $15 million annually from 2010 for the Convention Center, which is set to undergo an expansion. Street also plans to increase the number of police officers by 200 in the first year of the budget plan.
However, the plan also calls on the city to begin shrinking its police force in 2009 by 63 police officers, despite the fact that the city has suffered a wave of murders over the past year.
His budget also fails to tackle the ever-rising of health care and pensions costs for city workers, which is projected to rise to $1 billion a year by 2012 - a quarter of the city's budget.
Street, who inherited a $300 million surplus thanks to then-Mayor Ed Rendell, will bequeath upon his successor a plan that reduces that surplus to $47 million by 2012.
And some of the people who hope to take over the mayor's job weren't too happy about those figures.
In a statement, former Councilman Michael Nutter criticized Street for not following the advice of a 2005 Penn study that gave ways the city could increase its revenue through state and federal money.
"These are funding opportunities for over 30 city departments and agencies that would bring non-local revenues to city spending priorities," Nutter said.
State Rep. Dwight Evans (D-Phila.), who is also chairman of the state assembly's appropriations committee, lambasted the Street administration, saying in a statement that "the city's direction has quite clearly gone off on the wrong track. The most important thing in government is our fiscal health, and it appears as though we may be heading for the emergency room."
The state authority in charge of the city's budget also took issue with the mayor.
Rob Dubow, executive director of the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, said he saw a problem in the amount of money the administration was expecting to receive from Harrisburg and Washington to finance the city's Department of Human Services.
In his proposal, Street proposed a $90 million increase in the DHS budget over the next five years. However, he expects all that money to come from state and federal funding, which Dubow says is clearly at odds with the latest budget out of Harrisburg.
"The number was completely inconsistent with the state budget," he said, adding that "once you took that money out, the plan wouldn't be balanced."
Street officials did not return requests for comment.
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