For the past few weeks, the back and forth over coming to some agreement over the Wilmington budget for the next fiscal year has been a source of a great deal of cynicism, exasperation and a fair amount of entertainment. While there is not alot to be proud of here — at bottom we have a new administration who seems to think that they can get things done by fiat. For all of the yelling and screaming about what the Wilmington City Charter says — it still gives the Administration the power to spend the money that City Council allocates to it. That is pretty basic everywhere. Even though the Council spent much of its time rubber-stamping much of the Baker Administration’s work, I wish I could be more hopeful in a more energized Council who will actually do what the Charter expects of them.
Andrew Staub of the NJ has done a pretty good job of documenting the atrocities. Here are the links:
Overview of the final Council budget and veto threat
Williams vetos the budget (6 days later)
Williams and Gregory can’t reach an agreement
Williams calls for a Special Meeting, Gregory says No
Mayor Baker advises Williams to relent
Details on the Council Special Project that is supposed to be at issue
Chancery Court won’t order the Special Meeting
Now the thing to recognize here is that while this Council started off on the right budget direction (defunding positions, defunding Executive Office raises, adding to the Water & Sewer fund, reducing the amount of money taken from reserves), at the end of the day, the Mayor got pretty much everything he asked for. Early in this process, the Mayor claimed he was vetoing the budget because it wasn’t balanced as required by law. This was a ham-handed play to get more positions in the Finance Department funded. Once it was pointed out that everyone could see through the unusual accounting done to make that claim, the only thing left was the $250K that Council appropriated to itself for Special Projects.
For all of the sturm and drang, it is pretty clear that Council has the sole authority to appropriate funds and they can appropriate funds to themselves. Which they’ve pretty routinely done. Special Projects aren’t new to the City Council. And members get an allocation of funds to spend in the community as they see fit. Are any of these a good use of taxpayer funds? Probably not. But I do know that there are neighborhood groups (including mine) and youth groups that have had projects funded via these funds.
About half of the $250K is supposed to fund an educational advocacy group. The contracts have already been let for this (and, interestingly, approved by the City Solicitor) some months back and it isn’t clear to me whether the entire Council knew of or approved of this. Still, the goals of this advocacy group are great ones and one of the individuals involved here has a great reputation as a student advocate. This is a badly needed service for students. I just don’t think that City taxpayers should be paying the freight for this work. This is the kind of thing that the school districts (and the DDOE) should be funding — and since they’ve been especially neglectful of City students, Wilmington ought to have some leverage to get them on board for this. But this also points out the extremely small ball approach by the City to educational issues. I would much rather see a serious and focused working group that would sort through the options the City might have to force better attention to its schools — keeping all options on the table, including lawsuits. Because the thing that ought to concern City leaders is how to entice people to live in the city when the choices for educating their kids are less than optimal.
So, the bottom line — the Council got more engaged with forming the budget, but largely gave back all they took away. Both the Council and the Mayor have “discretionary funds” that aren’t subject to review or accountability. The Mayor and his partisans seem to think that just because the Mayor wants it, the Council should just roll over. And that the Mayor, should force his way with the Council, which completely upends all of their BS about abiding by the City Charter. (I listened to Rick Jensen on this yesterday after El Som was off and Jensen was positively giddy over the prospect of police rounding up City Council members.) Which bypasses the entire idea of professionally working together. I’m very fond of the idea of an independently elected City Auditor watching over the process, since I’m REALLY clear that neither party is up to it. But the net here seems to be that the Mayor and his people don’t quite know how to work with people as equals and the City Council is prepared to go to the mat for its prerogatives (rather than better budgets).
That’s my take. I know that there are folks commenting on Facebook and the NJ who are pushing bad information and generally bullying people who disagree with them. But I don’t think that the legality of the actions is the problem here — leadership and accountability for taxpayer funds is.