Council Discusses Budget Priorities

Tuesday’s City Council study session was a long, and at times tedious, look under the hood of Tacoma’s general fund services.

The session began with a review of Council’s responses to budget prioritization exercises they were assigned as homework a couple weeks ago. The responses were presented as averages, and as averages tend to do, they ran to the middle. The exercise that asked Council to rate categories of general fund services on a scale of one to four (1=eliminate funding, 2=reduce, 3=maintain, 4=increase), the averages, not surprisingly, showed a general willingness of the Council to decrease or maintain spending, but no overall will to either fully eliminate or increase funding to any category of services.

Staff also made presentations on some of the higher profile areas that currently receive general fund dollars. Tacoma Fire and Police, Human Rights and Human Services, and Community and Economic Development all presented overviews of their departments, including the services that the general fund dollars pay for, how round one of budget cuts affected their levels of service, and their challenges going forward.

There seemed to be plenty of tensions and opposing ideas inherent in the council’s responses, such as naming streets as an area for cuts while also identifying improvement of the City’s transportation infrastructure as the second on the list of 12 priorities for the city.

You can read the TNT’s summary of the session, or if you missed it live, you can catch over four hours of budget-filled fun thanks to TV-12 It was informative, if not thrilling watching, especially if you’d like to learn a little more about what the different departments do. But beyond the minutiae of the presentations, on a broader scale, some questions were raised that are worth consideration:

An all-cuts budget would mean substantial reductions in nearly every area of service the City provides, and might hamstring our recovery in the long-term in order to fix shortfalls in the near-term. Is there anywhere we’re willing to look for revenue-generating solutions?

We were frankly surprised to see one item fall as far down on the Council’s ranked list of priorities as it did: “Evaluate city services for fit with the city’s mission, vision and long-term financial sustainability,” fell at number 11 out of 12, which seems low, particularly in the current context, but as Councilmember Boe pointed out, that’s essentially what this whole process is.