OPINION: What's going on with the city budget

I'd like to provide a little perspective that might help clarify what the Manhattan City Commission is about to do.

Put simply: They're going to raise taxes so as to pay down the city debt. Exactly which taxes, and by how much, is really what they're debating, and what they'll continue debating, over the next couple of months.

Clearly, they are going to raise water rates, and fees that they can bump upward on electric, gas, phone and cable bills. They are going to ask voters to approve an increase in the sales tax. They might or might not raise property taxes, since those are politically touchier, but at minimum your property tax bill is highly likely to stay the same as this year.

This might seem strange, considering that the most recent election brought to the commission three conservatives who wanted to cut the property tax. But keep in mind that those gents - Larry Fox, Jim Morrison and Andrew Von Lintel - also campaigned on the idea of cutting city debt and fixing roads.

The thing is, the city has $330 million in debt, and the direct property-tax money dedicated to paying down that debt was slashed a couple of years back in a short-term effort to cut property taxes. Doing that caused bond-rating agencies to downgrade Manhattan's debt, meaning that the city has to pay higher interest rates when it borrows money. That's a doom loop, of course.

If you want to pay down that debt, you're going to have to come up with millions more dollars every year to start getting ahead of it rather than have it keep piling up.

Plus, if you want to fix roads, you're going to have to find millions more every year, too. Road repairs aren't cheap.

It's easy to say that this could be done simply by cutting other city spending and redirecting the money to those things that are important. It's much, much harder work to dig into the city budget and find some hidden slush fund to redirect. There's no budget line item called "waste, fraud and abuse."

Is there some of that? Almost certainly. Is there enough to make a real dent in $330 million in debt, or pay for more roads? Look, I'm no budget expert, but nobody in all my years of watching these debates has found it. Which is why we now have the discussion we're having. Which taxes to raise, and by how much?

Nobody wants to have that discussion, because it's unpleasant. But if we don't have that discussion and we let the debt pile up, we'll have to have a much more unpleasant discussion a few years down the road. It will be the same situation but the numbers will be far bigger.

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