Budget Battle Book

If you were forced against your will to City Council chambers today*, you will have heard the mayor's annual budget address.  As always, the Mayor promised to invest more capital dollars into the various Pittsburgh neighborhoods, which has become sort of an annual right of fall to be forgotten about by the Spring... sort of like NBC's primetime lineup.

If I recall correctly, there was a significant amount of money set aside in the previous year's budget for capital improvements, all of which eventually failed to materialize.  The Mayor's Office said they really needed that money for some really important stuff, while Council sat around in stunned silence like it was left with the bill at a fancy restaurant.  In any case, the Mayor totally promises this time to divvy out the money to the neighborhoods and pinky swears that he has no current plants to yank the money at the last minute again.

And you wonder why the last three Mayors have campaigned on a platform to "invest more in the neighborhoods."

Anyway, there's a couple of more line items in the budget that people are glossing over, but are important to note:

* Removing the Doug Shields smell from Council Chambers - $5,000
* Lottery tickets - $10,000
* Inflatable bouncy castle - $4,000
* Three threatening looking guys with bats to stand outside of the PWSA offices - $15,000
* Hair gel - $7,500
* 311 Staff Person - $0
* Zober Wrangler - $55,000
* Three even more threatening looking guys with bats to stand outside of the Parking Authority offices - $40,000
* Ick-Ray Itzgerald-Fay Estruction-Day Und-Fay - $100,000
* Walrus Repair (Northside) - $33,000
* Pothole Repair - $7.34
* Mt. Washington Based Space Laser - $200,000,000
* Levitating Tables - $5,000
* New old funk smell for Department of Finance's Office - $15,000
* Cello - $300

Once again, the West End gets totally stiffed for much needed Walrus repair.  Typical.

No word on when the Council President will issue her shadow budget for the Northside.

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*Don't laugh.  It's happened to me before.

The Devil in the Budgeting Details

OK so there's this odd little kerfluffle going on in Council which piqued my interest:

Pittsburgh City Council president calls URA allocation attempt 'sleazy'

That headline buries this piece of information:

Council President Darlene Harris said the measure to transfer money out of projects in East Allegheny, Observatory Hill, Brighton Heights, Troy Hill and Squirrel Hill neighborhoods...

So it sounds like the URA is asking Council to reallocate money to other (as they said about the stimulus) "ready-to-go" projects.

So what are these mystery projects? I can't make heads nor tails of it, but it's on page 281 of the .pdf, and it's labeled as a "new" project, whatever that's worth. That makes it sound like a special allocation by the Council to the URA for specific actions in specific neighborhood.

Could it be that someone on Council has tried to squirrel away money for her or his district's pet projects and is not willing to let it go to other districts? Any idea whose Council District contains East Allegheny, Observatory Hill, Brighton Heights, and Troy Hill?

(Hint: I already mentioned her name.)

Senate leaders boycott Senate leaders' budget proposal

(AP) Harrisburg - State Senate leaders today boycotted a conference committee meeting organized by state Senate leaders to discuss a state budget proposal and to introduce their own budget plan.

Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, said today that Senate Republicans are fashioning a revised budget bill to compete with another revised budget bill that they released yesterday. The measure could be down voted in the Senate in favor of their other measure.

If the House were to agree with the disagreement, their bill or their other bill could be on the governor's desk by late this week, or not.

Details of the bill were unavailable at the time, but the other revised budget bill is believed to be $100 million smaller than the other budget bill that was previously agreed to the day before.

House Democrats are proposing an alternative-alternative plan which is $1 billion less than the amendment to the previous amendment that substituted an alternative amendment to a section which was previously amended.

Earlier, an aide to Representative Dwight Evans, D-Philadelphia, threw up his hands and said "I dunno, you tell me what's going on."

The budget should have been adopted by the start of the new fiscal year July 1st, although the start of the new fiscal year had been previously amended to start December 1st.

Budgets

Today a doctor with a flashlight shows us where budget projections come from.

Because of the recent budget problems in THE CITY, all the departments in THE BUREAUCRACY have begun to forecast a list of priority projects based on which projects have money committed to them, which have had some precommitments, and which are in "the pipeline". Now we can predict how much money we're going to need for the next eight years for all of these projects.

Next we're going to predict the weather in Central Park on October 15, 2011 at 2:34 PM [partly cloudy, 54 degrees, wind from the southwest], the winner of World Series in 2007 [Yankees], and the date the aliens will finally land [trick question: already here!]

According to chaos theory, no projection, however well reasoned, is any better than a shot in the dark. Minor fluctuations in tax rates, employment, national debt may cause vast differences in the amount of resources we will have and therefore number of projects we'll be able to do.

But I spent today doing this futile exercise anyway. Turns out that we have 80 priority projects costing $650,000,000... and about $13,000,000 to do it with. Of course, they're still working on the list of "must-do" projects.

I'm looking at this as an excuse, nay, an "opportunity" to cut out the crappy projects. ['Course, that would leave me with nothing to do.]

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Update October 28, 2007: Boy was I ever wrong on the Yankees!