There was an earthquake last week at City Hall, but not the kind that registers on the Richter scale. This was a political earthquake.
It occurred unexpectedly during budget negotiation at the City Council meeting. Staff had prepared a 353-page budget proposal, and the gist of it was that the city is bankrupt. Not bankrupt in the sense that there’s no money in the coffers, but bankrupt in the sense that there’s not enough money to keep the city running—without using $60 million of the city’s reserves.
After spending hours studying the details of the depressing document, I approached Tuesday’s budget session with dread. With so little wiggle room, I expected to see Councilmembers horse trading police officer salaries for streetlight repairs as they whistled past the metaphoric graveyard.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead of signing off on the budget with minor tweaks and hoping for the best, Councilmember Jesse Zwick jolted the Council by rejecting the premise of their negotiation. “I don’t believe that spending an additional $60 million of our extremely scarce reserves to balance our budget is at all prudent,” he said.
He proceeded to break with tradition by presenting to the Council an alternative budget proposal, which combined a commitment to public safety with tough love. His plan freezes most hiring, other than for the police department, fire department and revenue-generating initiatives, and it increases parking permit fees. This is in addition to the many fee hikes that were already recommended, including cemetery fees, cat license fees, and community garden fees, while the staff reduction he’s mandating will implicitly also reduce municipal amenities. “All I want to do is fulfill every departmental and community need as we were able to in the past,” Zwick said, “but we can’t.”
It’s rare these days for any politician to acknowledge unpleasant realities, let alone face them head on. Elected leaders frequently want credit for being bold when they’re actually being timid, so it was startling—and undeniably bold—to address the depth of our fiscal problems and the discomfort that will be required to mitigate them.
Zwick didn’t act alone, having vetted his plan with Councilmembers Dan Hall and Caroline Torosis, who collaborated with him on the proposal. California’s Brown Act regulations for transparent governance precluded Zwick from conferring with additional Councilmembers (and also protected him from having to negotiate with them).
This meant that the majority of the Councilmembers were left sputtering as they tried to latch onto the details of the surprise plan, in an effort to add something substantive to the discussion. For the most part, they failed. If they had been clever, they could have used parliamentary procedures to block the plan, but that would have left them with a $60 million hole in the budget and a jeopardized city credit rating.
Although Zwick told me after the meeting that he had consulted with a “kitchen cabinet” of civic leaders, I’m not convinced democracy was best served by having unelected people—and previously elected people—usurping power from the Councilmembers selected by the voters and lobbying for their own priorities. So call me conflicted. I admire the audaciousness but not the politics. The devil’s in the details, and there are many still up in the air. Much depends on what the staff brings back to Council in June for final approval and whether the Councilmembers grant that approval.
Meanwhile, the city’s not out of the economic woods. The proposed budget mitigates the damage to the financial reserves, but it doesn’t eliminate the need to continue dipping into them. And we have a President unleashing what Zwick described as “voodoo economic theories,” impacting the international tourism that we rely on as Washington pulls federal funding for our capital projects and targets our local vulnerable populations.
The existential threat of not-so-friendly fire from our own government is what helped motivate Zwick to take a hard line on fiscal responsibility, though he doesn’t expect it to be “easy or popular,” he said. “One of the best things I can do as a local progressive leader is get our house in order, demonstrating that you can lead with liberal and progressive values and achieve great results.”
I called what happened an earthquake, and admittedly it was a small one. But if you’ve been waiting for leaders to rise to the challenge of our current moment, maybe this was the initial temblor.
Devan Sipher can be reached at Unmuted.SMDP@gmail.com