Spent the day reading Interim Mayor Lee’s May 1st Budget Proposal 2011-2012 for the so-called Enterprise Departments. It’s so smart and political to throw the good news out first, but even a cursory glance reveals debt relief and employee pensions and benefits to be exposed.
Salaries are ridiculous.
Much progress with small businesses in the Mission this week. Thank you so much for your support. I love you.
I promise a full analysis of this and all of Interim Mayor Lee’s budgets. I know how it is to not have time to read the budget. I am happy to do it for you.
Tonight, I’m going to go study this highly trumpeted 5-Year-Plan, meant to show that our former Chief Administrator knows how to expand our view of governance and give us a long-view of budgeting. With a 300 million dollar deficit, a long-view helps the medicine go down.
It’s bold forward-thinking, sure, but you can’t operate on a scale like this unless you are working with some large interests. I fear that like the Treasure Island boondoggle, such plans are riddled with pocket lining. If you follow the money it seems to me to be more about cementing a Gavin Newsom II and cronies galore into positions of power. I hate saying it this way, but candidacy demands honesty.
My policy and plan are different. I think we need a short-term budget to help redesign our city economy and that 2-year budgets and 1-year budgets that take stronger action show a flexibility by City governance. With new tech, things move pretty fast – we can make decisions, try them and be more creative and fluid – not locked in to 5-year deals with special interests. My budgets will be more detailed because I propose a full and transparent Audit of departments to be set before the voters – not a .pdf of the net numbers.
We must address the waste. Vote Karthik Rajan, and the Mayor’s salary comes down with everybody else’s – we scale back, streamline, economize. We redistribute and slow growth until we have a more equitable cost of living for all our residents.
It’s unfair to comment further without a full study of Interim Mayor Lee’s Plan, so I will stop there.
I did notice that candidate Chiu, perhaps reacting to my claim that his work on the Twitter deal shows a lack of creativity in revenue generation, posted a link on his website about a creative way to generate income from technology – leasing out city infrastructure that carries data to private interests with greater need for bandwidth. Good idea, David, well done. I thought such resources must exist, I hope that with your position as Board President you can suss details and give us some concrete numbers for such a proposal.