City Hall begins e-bickering
July 14, 2008 at 12:58 pm by Scott Henry in NewsIf you hadn’t noticed, the Atlanta budget crisis has resulted in some raw nerves and strained relations down at City Hall. The process has gone something like this: Mayor Shirley Franklin announces budget cuts. The City Council criticizes her cuts, but asks her to make some more. Franklin makes more cuts. The Council criticizes the new cuts. And so on.
On Friday, Council President Lisa Borders released a formal response to the Mayor’s announcement of $21.6 million in cuts, which include closing a fire station and laying off several dozen firefighters:
I am disappointed that additional personnel are being laid off by the Mayor as a way of achieving the City Council’s mandated 2.5 percent cut in the General Fund budget. Instead of reducing costs by eliminating jobs first, we should be more innovative in the way we do business and deliver services to residents.
A few hours later, Franklin sent this e-mail response directly to Borders:
You will have your chance as Mayor should you be successful in your election.
Snap! And minutes later, Franklin added:
The Council added costs to the budget and then gave me the authority to make the cuts after refusing to do so themselves. The Council and Chairman [Howard] Shook punted with your concurrence and instigation. I made the decisions for cuts the Council didn’t. I’m OK with that because that’s what Mayors have done all over America for years.
The ball’s in Border’s court:
I have great respect for you and the job you have done as Mayor of our beloved city. But let’s be clear: the Council is a 15-armed octopus and to suggest that I could “instigate” a unanimous vote – especially on something as complicated and critical as this monumental budget gap – is a stretch, to put it mildly. I certainly don’t have to tell someone with your experience that disagreements over policy choices are part of a healthy, natural tension between our branches of government.
Now, we should point out that we abbreviated the discourse slightly. Both Franklin and Borders acknowledged that the city is better off when the Mayor and Council work together and they expressed a desire to do so in the future.
But while it’s easy to imagine those two women settling their differences cordially and professionally, there are several members of the Council – C.T. Martin, for starters – who make collaboration between the administration and the Council all but impossible. Which means we’re probably stuck with the current back-and-forth.
Unfortunately, we’re probably not in the home stretch. Later this week, Atlanta officials expect to learn from Fulton County how much the city will be able to collect in property taxes in coming months. Because of assessment appeals, the figure could be much lower than the one the Council used when it approved the city budget last month. If so, there could be more budget cuts – and more bickering – in the city’s future.
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