It’s Our Money’s Ben Waxman put together a helpful chart outlining exactly how Mayor Nutter’s many goals have been affected by the current budget shortfall.  Unfortunately, it looks like depending on changes to the pension fund to “improve fiscal health” seems to have been pretty short sighted and in desperate need of a plan B.  Combine failure to address “fiscal health” with all of the current problems on the revenue side brought about the economic slow down and you get a recipe for disaster.

Not only has Nutter had to curtail many of the strategies that he laid out to meet his goals (change tax structure, reduce homicide rate, improve the environment, etc.), he’s actually had to walk back on some of the strategies that were in place from the previous administration - suspend all tax cuts immediately springs to mind.

The Daily News editorial board also takes Nutter to task, not so much for his proposals, but for the method by which he arrived at these proposals:

His administration’s response - closing libraries, closing pools, some fire stations and rec centers, as well as a 1 percent cut in the city work force - are painful cuts, to be sure. But they’re also, well . . . not very revolutionary.

In fact, they feel like a small response to a big challenge.

Don’t get us wrong: We’re willing to be convinced that we have too many libraries for our size, and the pools’ costs may outweigh their benefits, but Nutter hasn’t shown anyone that. Why are those libraries closing and not others? Why those pools? Why only 1 percent of the workforce and not more? We just don’t understand how he got to the decisions he did. What’s the rationale? Where’s the data? Without it, these cuts don’t make sense.

In essence, if the administration had just been more transparent, if they had just been more forthcoming with the information they used to arrive at these cuts, IF they could just give us some assurance that there was some information used to arrive at these cuts, then maybe the city could be more supportive.  It seems, though, that the mayor whom a lot of Philadelphians thought they were getting, is turning out to be something different, something… familiar:

Nutter promised that there’s nothing that government does that can’t be done in the light of day. So how much has the public been consulted since the crisis was announced Sept. 11? Where were the public meetings to help people understand what we were up against? And maybe get input into some solutions?

It’s unclear whether anyone outside the administration got to offer any ideas in this current plan. In fact, some smart and reasonable ideas offered by City Council members are nowhere to be found in the budget plan. Why? Doesn’t every little bit count? Aren’t we all in this together?

Hmmm… a mayor who doesn’t adopt any ideas that he or his administration didn’t come up with, who acts in secret.  Where I have seen this before?

This blog isn’t the first one to notice this change, although we haven’t called him Bizarro Nutter.