Philadelphia City Budget
Nothing seems to come around faster than birthdays and budgets. To help make complex budget issues easier to understand, the Committee of Seventy is publishing a series of Q&As thoughout 2010 called: “In the Know.”
Battle of the Budget 2010:
Although massive layoffs and emergency health center closings aren’t predicted – as they were last year on an almost daily basis – the city’s financial struggles are far from over. City officials have already announced at least a $31 million deficit, a number that could grow higher.
On March 4, 2010, Mayor Michael Nutter will make his Annual Budget Address to the city. Between now and the July 1 start of Fiscal Year 2011, Mayor Nutter and City Council will have tough decisions to make. This In The Know is the first installment in a series that will highlight issues that will surface during the budget discussions.
We hope you will e-mail us at
budget@seventy.org
to suggest other issues or to let us know if we’ve got something all wrong.
Battle of the Budget 2009:
In the summer of 2009, the Committee of Seventy released
PHILADELPHIA’S LONG, HOT SUMMER, a comprehensive easy-to-read, easy-to-understand three-part series for non-experts on the Fiscal Year 2010 budget, labor negotiations and city workers’ pension plan.
While some of the information pertains only to what was happening in June-July 2009, the series provides a lot of background materials that remain current year after year.
If you have the time, we invite you to take a look at
PHILADELPHIA’S LONG, HOT SUMMER:
Another terrific resource for background information that we highly recommend was published by the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority (PICA), the city’s fiscal watchdog: