Last night, at the first of Oakland’s two scheduled budget readings, the City Council voted to approve a range of recommendations with the goal of balancing the FY 2010-2011 budget. Going into Thursday night’s meeting, the City faced an unresolved shortfall of $31.5million in FY 2010-11. The deficit is projected to increase to $48.3 million in FY 2011-12 and then to 60.1 million in 2012-13. Already this year,...
As those who have been following the budget process are aware, I have been extremely vocal about the fact that the longer we put off balancing the budget the larger the deficit is going to grow; unfortunately, that is exactly what has happened. The Mayor is responsible for submitting a balanced budget proposal to the council, and the council must pass a balanced budget by June 30th of each calendar year. As of...
Do you guys remember that whole issue where it turned out that the City was giving up like $400,000 a year in potential revenue by giving free parking at the garage near City Hall (PDF) to employees? And a lot of people really did not like that?
And then the Council was like, “Hmm, this seems like a lot of money. Let’s have this come back to Committee where you can explain more thoroughly the revenue...
Tomorrow, the Oakland City Council will hold yet another one of everyone’s favorite events — a special budget meeting.
You may recall the proposals for balancing the FY2010-11 budget introduced for discussion last special budget meeting, back at the beginning of the month. A number of people who went to the meeting complained to me afterwards that the Council didn’t do anything. I felt bad for them...
But not the kind of paper they use to print bus passes.
Do you guys remember a couple months ago when the City Council was talking about how they could bring in some extra revenue by limiting the amount of City employees who got free parking in City garages and renting those spaces out to the public instead? Except that the list was like, really not very limited (see the list here) and it turned out that all that...