As bad as the city budget mess is — and, sadly, it’s worse than most on the city council realize — there’s another dimension that makes the problem even worse. Almost 10 percent of the $2.7 billion 2008-09 budget goes to debt service. That means that when cuts are made to the 2009-10 budget to fix what could be a $200 million (or more) deficit, the council won’t be able to touch $250 million of the total.
Or, to put it in terms more easy to understand: The recession has cut your household income by 10 percent, but since you still have to pay the mortgage you took out when you were making more money, you won’t be able to afford to fix the hole in the roof of your house.
Because that, no matter how the council or Mayor Park Cities or the city staff glosses over the budget problem, is the situation we’re facing when the council debates next year’s budget in the coming weeks. There is no money to fix the roof, and our heads are going to get very wet over the next couple of years.
I don’t write this to gloat or to make jokes at the council’s expense. This is a plea for the council to pay more attention, to ask questions, and to do more than just accept whatever the city staff tells them. In fact, most of the council members I know seem like decent people. But, for whatever reason, most of them decided last year not to pay attention to the budget problem that was doing everything but slapping them up the side of the head. The council approved a 2008-09 budget that was so out of whack with reality that the surprise is not that we’re in such trouble this year, but that we’re not in more trouble.
Because things are bad enough: Sales tax receipts, which fund about one-fifth of the budget, are already down 10 percent, with no sign of improvement. Property tax receipts, which account for most of the rest of revenue, could drop as much as 7 percent without a tax increase. The city manager can talk about “revenue erosion” and furloughing employees as much as she wants, but it doesn’t change the results. We’re going to pay significant fee increases and suffer deep and painful service cuts to road repair, code enforcement, libraries and anything else that matters to people in this part of town. And we’ll almost certainly see a moratorium on hiring more cops, which was the mayor’s top budget priority, unless the council votes to raise property taxes. And what kind of politician votes to raise taxes in the middle of a recession?
The same ones, I suppose, who signed off on the budget last year that assumed that sales tax revenue would increase and that the property tax base would continue to grow — all in the shadow of the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapses, and the sub-prime mortgage implosion last summer. Hey, it’s in the budget. You can go to the city website and read the painful numbers for yourself. “That development and consumer spending confirms confidence in Dallas’ economy,” the budget says, and I’m not a good enough writer to make that stuff up.
So please, council, please: Do the right thing with this budget. Look at it carefully. Pay attention. Don’t assume all will be well just because you want it to be well. If you had been more careful last year, and planned for the revenue declines, we wouldn’t be in this mess this year. We want to be able to fix our roof before the house floods, and we won’t be able to do that if you make the same mistakes again.
