City Budget Priorities

How does this all fit together?

UnaPlanner thrives on the fight against poverty. If we don't have poverty, we must create it. So we ignore our financial statements, and look only at the barren checkbooks.

Council members are project managers. They could care less about their role as trustees of good city government. Don't bother them with boring stuff like enforcing the City's nuisance codes, rental licensing codes,police staffing, or firefighter training.

Democratic politics is difficult. It requires compromise, and the internal reallocation of resources. It is much more fun to market special projects, spin special taxes, and to hand out special checkbooks.

Senior staff are locked into their political nitches. They are vested in the current system.

The result is a financial system that holds money we can't spend, even though we have important programs we can't fund. It is a system that forces the Police and Fire Chiefs, with their blue and white hats, respectively, in hand, to go begging for money for such basic priorities as police salaries and fire training facilities. Yet this system expends millions of dollars on the futile attempt to overcome the housing market, to ultra-fine-tune all land uses, and populate the streets with traffic-stopping busses.