The Budget debate in Saratoga Springs

You would think that budgets are about money. Really?. Last Sunday the New York Times put online a new game. It asked the players to become politicians and slash the deficit, enumerating their preferred places to cut or increase budgets by filling in little squares, grouped in chunks of 100 billion dollars.This game invites us common mortals to step into the minefield of our convictions. Now we are asked to play like the big boys.

During the election campaign -now, thank God, behind us- the goading MLM (main line media) journalists liked to embarrass candidates by pressing them to state where they would cut the local, state and federal budgets to flesh out their assertions. Then they feigned surprise at hearing back generalities, platitudes and impossibilities.

A budget is an edifice of assumptions and choices; the assumptions evaluate the present state of affairs and its evolution (try to do that eschewing ideology!), and then make the choices of resources that have to be employed to achieve the overarching desired results. Which goes to show that there is no such thing as a non-political budget. We have to rewrite the slogan into “it is the politics of the economy, stupid.”

At our local level most of us will look at the one figure: what decisions have been made about the property tax rate. We call it “the bottom line”, a distillation of magnitudes into one simple, understandable number; we disregard the rest, the steps that lead to that result, as chaff and at our own peril.

Because the budget is above all a statement of intentions, a program, a blueprint of where the imagination of the people putting the figures together aims to take the community. Fleshed out, it should provide a narrative of the future.

In Saratoga Springs there is only one budget officer: the Finance Commissioner. The agents of the 2001 Charter Revision, no doubt in thrall to the continued failure of the Albany legislators to provide the State of New York with a timely budget, inserted the requirement that if the five Commissioners could not reach an agreement on the yearly budget before November 30th, the budget presented by the Finance Commissioner would become law, making him the most powerful person on the City Council. This escape clause did provide last year a spending blueprints without the approval of the full Council. The legislators refused to legislate.

So the City’s finances have been in default mode, freeing each Commissioner from the disciplined constraint of a negotiated agreement, and leading to piecemeal ad-hoc discrete decisions that will, in time, come home to haunt us.

It is also true that a very large part of the City’s expenditures are determined by State and Federal mandates, some of them unfunded, as well as by New York State procedural requirements.

Previous administrations had worked to write procedural manuals with detailed handbooks and nomenclatures with a view to create a bedrock of consensus on which to build each year’s budget; this excellent work seems to have been set aside, replaced by obfuscation and short term reaction-ary short term poultices. Deficits are announced and disappear at will, money is found in unexpected places, rainy-day funds are raided repeatedly and exhausted. The Finance Commissioner emerges as an all-conquering hero, wrestling with intractabilities like Laocoon and his serpents.

On the other hand, modest man that he is, never boasting of “the vision thing”, he has been filing all along with the State Comptroller a long term budget projection, as required by law and common sense.

Who knew?