Community Budget Participation: Educate Yourself

Part two of a multi-part series

By Ed Rast

Do you understand the actual condition of San Jose’s city facilities and service levels, where and why your tax dollars are being spent, and the City operating budget by department? It’s okay. Most people don’t. But that makes it difficult for them to participate in a community budget discussion.

Last week, I briefly discussed San Jose’s budget process and suggested that if you wanted to knowledgably participate in the coming community outreach that you should read the January 2008 report, City of San Jose: Development of Strategies to Address the City’s General Fund Structural Budget Deficit, in which many of this and next year’s deficit reduction strategies are discussed.

I also pointed you to previous blogs of mine on Protect San Jose in which I discuss public safety conditions, under-staffing, and the city budget.

If you’ve done your homework, you’re already better informed than most of your friends and neighbors. But access to this knowledge isn’t a privilege for the select few. It’s granted to all of us by law.

California’s Public Records Act, part of the state constitution, provides “access to information concerning the conduct of the people’s business is a fundamental and necessary right of every person in this state.”

As part of the budget process, the people of San Jose deserve access to more complete, understandable, and essential budget information that clearly shows:

• past actual budget spending, staffing and city service performance results;

• the current city facility, service, and performance measurement conditions, organized by responsible department;

• proposed city budget priorities, source of anticipated revenue, proposed revenue increases, and spending proposals organized by category, projects and public-private service partnerships and service grants;

• proposed actual staffing requirements and performance measurements to measure progress in meeting performance goals; and

• how each budget appropriation will or will not affect San Jose’s residents, businesses, and city government and how it will improve our community.

If everyone understood this basic budget language, City leaders and residents could engage in a proper, meaningful, and informed dialogue, which is essential to open, transparent, and accountable government

In recent years, the budget process has improved, and most residents believe that city staff who prepare the budget have good intentions, but it is not enough to be well-intentioned if most residents and even some councilmembers cannot clearly understand the City’s budget document.

San Jose’s budget looks good until you look closely look at the document itself. You find lots of confusing words and numbers that:

• summarize revenue, spending and staffing data but do not provide sufficient detail of actual vs. budgeted staffing and expenditures, common national performance measurement comparisons other cities use in their budgets;

• compare five year’s worth of budgeted staffing but do not compare that data to actual staffing by department;

• do not provide comparisons on a per-resident basis for 10 large local cities or the 12 largest California cities so city services provided for cities of differing populations can be compared to provide possible context or footnotes to explain unusual differences or variances;

• do not provide comparisons with local cites for a) development costs and b) cost of doing business, both of which affect business location, job retention, and city revenue

• lack detailed information by department and a summary listing a) tax spending for public-private partnerships that provide city services, b) non-city service spending to other governments, or c) grants or other tax subsidies, under-market rents and free services donated to non profits, developers, corporations and property owners with a stated public purpose; and

• are not organized as they are in budget documents of most other cities — where each department’s revenues and expenditures are broken down in a single section — but in four or more sections, with detailed information routinely available in other city budget documents is omitted.

If you don’t agree with the current city service and facilities conditions, city budget priorities, or cost and service comparisons, then you need to be prepared now, not next year, when many decisions will have been made — if they haven’t been made already.

As a community, we can direct the City Council and City Administration to publish more understandable budget information; improve and simplify the budget process; prioritize city spending into what should be fully funded, partially funded, and not funded; and develop or change city policies that could increase future budget deficits.

This week, your homework is to look closely at San Jose’s budget documents, particularly the 2009-2010 Operating Budget.

In coming weeks, I will continue to help by making additional budget recommendations, providing you with information to understand the budget, and notifying you of important budget meetings.

For example, at the City Council meeting on Tuesday, October 27th, there will be a staff presentation, discussion, and public comment on upcoming labor contract negotiations. I encourage all of our readers to attend and add their two cents to the discussion.