Posted on 12/09/2008 7:53:47 AM PST by SmithL
San Francisco's budget deficit for next year has grown to $575.6 million - equal to nearly half the city's discretionary spending account. It's a financial crisis Mayor Gavin Newsom called one of the worst the city has experienced since the 1930s.
Newsom will announce his plan for cutting up to $125 million from this year's $6.6 billion budget today, but gave few details about what it will include.
"This is nothing we've seen before," he told The Chronicle. "As difficult as these cuts will be, the real challenge is in the next three, four, six months."
Today's announcement is expected to include proposals to cancel police academy classes, lay off some high-paid attorneys and cut health services, including outpatient treatment programs for the mentally ill and drug addicted.
One thing that won't be part of the mayor's cuts package: slashing by 50 percent the city funds given to the Symphony, Opera and Ballet. Supervisor Aaron Peskin called for such cuts last week; if adopted, they would save the city about $1.1 million.
Peskin is also expected to present pages of cost-cutting ideas today, including the arts proposal, as a way to prevent deep cuts to the Department of Public Health and instead spread the pain around.
But Newsom said that while those three cultural institutions and the American Conservatory Theater, the Museum of Modern Art and the Exploratorium will see a 7 percent cut, the 50 percent idea is unnecessary.
"It's more symbolic than substantive," he said of Peskin's proposal. "I want to deal with the real problem, which is hundreds of millions of dollars and not hundreds of thousands."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Schadenfreude alert!!
How about cutting the $ funding for those bathhouses in the Castro?
Cut this and that, ‘enhance’ revenue, etc. Just don’t mess w/ the medical marijuana, sex change ops and x-dressing classes.
Oh, and schedule a few more gay days to drive buisnesses out of SF & CA.
Just throw another Folsom Street Fair. That should make up the deficit. Isn’t that what we’ve always heard; homosexuals have more discretionary income than heterosexuals.
Put your money where your mouth is.
*Pun not intended. It just came out that way.
VERY SIMPLE SOLUTIONs: all cities, counties, states etc....
cut unwarrented services.....stop giving yourselves pay raises each year that are in excess of the everyday working man that really deserves a decent wage for a job well done but doesn’t get it....balance your budgets and live within the means like the everyday working man has to do....stop all the nonsense programs in the schools and get back to basics and stop trying to fix what wasn’t broke to begin with....start cutting welfare and handout programs that do not encourage the people on them to go out and work for thier keep....i am sure there is more but others would like to use my soap box....
take some responsibility.......
say, where is media crucifixion — wait, that’s too good for them — where is the media smearing of municipal “ceo’s” that drove their cities into the ground financially?
Pass a gay tax...
Problem solved.
Next!
They should charge the derelicts, bums, child-molesters, and Marxists for every time they urinate on the sidewalk, assault a tourist, molest a child, steal, vandalize, or destroy property. Conservative estimates show that SF would be back in the black in 90 days.
Knock off the freebies for the homeless and start rousting their butts. Heck, they even have a “Homeless Outreach Program” that drives them around to banks, etc. If you stop giving these people goodies, they leave. Forget the stupid “free WiFi.” Maybe if you cleaned up the streets, the tourists would come back.
This a.m. (6:20) I was walking down Howard Street to work and two bums from da “Hood” were sitting on the sidewalk yelling a me for a cigarette and money. When I ignored them, the woman called me the “B” word, the “C” word and told me she needed money! I said “Go tell Obama.”
Splendid reply!
The world and mores change. My grandfather was a judge in Southwestern Oklahoma in the 30's. I remember one case where a local resident was fined for saying "Son of a Bitch" in public.
“San Francisco’s budget deficit for next year has grown to $575.6 million”, most of which was spent on flavored lubes and loafer lightener!
This is akin to, having blown all your money on high living, deciding to keep paying the cable bill instead of buying food.
These are the standard opening move “Washington Monument” cuts.
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