Many, many thanks to our special guest contributors who did such fantastic jobs in summarizing, analyzing, questioning and photographing the four citizen budget workshops.  I was only able to make it to two of them and for the first one I spent the entire evening in the overflow group observing as Chris and Harris tried to get to 100 points with 100+ people using much the same format that was designed for groups of 15-20.

On Monday night, however, I made it a point to float from group to group.  Primarily I was looking to get pictures of some of the more high profile city officials as they sat in on the groups and listen in as they interacted with the folks who were taking the budget challenge.  Over the course of the evening, however, I observed on at least three occasions what I’ve been calling “instant credibility.”

Let me explain.

Did anyone believe what these folks were saying?

First let’s talk about “instant skepticism.”  All night long people were questioning the very assumptions upon which the budget balancing exercise was based.  They questioned every piece of data the city offered.  And yes, while there were a few errors on the worksheet - some typographical, some due to oversight - for the most part, it seems that the data that the citizens were working with were a pretty healthy and robust sample of the pieces of the budget that are at the discretion of the mayor for the next fiscal year.  From the beginning of the crisis people have been questioning whether the city is in any kind of fiscal trouble at all.

Some citizens made sure that their fellow Philadelphians were prepared to ask tough questions.

And question they should.  No citizen should ever just take on faith everything their city passes along.  In fact, that’s what makes the struggles of our colleagues over at Broad and Callowhill so troubling - as expertly captured by the inimitable Signe Wilkinson.  The skepticism is healthy and it’s necessary.  And as those questions come in, Chris, Tom, Alan and I have been trying to use them and get answers from city officials.  I’ve even tried to answer those questions on other blogs.  In other words, just like the Mayor has repeatedly said that everything is on the table when it comes to balancing the budget, so everything has been on the table when it comes to asking the city about balancing the budget.

In fact, I put myself into the instant skeptic category.  I understand why the city’s choices are so limited right now but I can’t give city leadership a pass for ignoring the looming problems with the city’s debt load, health care costs, and prison costs as well as the unsustainable pension arrangement.  There have also been repeated calls for a “rainy day” fund that would be looking pretty good right now in this storm.  So while I’m not skeptical about the fact that there will have to be cuts and even tax increases this year and next, I’ll continue to question why it’s so difficult to come up with a way to equitably cover the health care and retirement of the city’s workers and deal with long term problems.  Rob Dubow is right when he says the city can’t go into debt or print money but they can squirrel away extra money during times of plenty so we can “borrow” from it during times of famine.

So I get the skepticism.  But what I don’t get is how these same people, who are so willing to question or disbelieve data and information that come from people who have spent their entire careers immersed in this stuff can turn around and suspend that doubt when the random guy sitting next to them in a small group makes a declaration of “fact.”  Instant credibility.

Man stands up in the middle of the small group and declares with an air of authority that “if you take all of the salaries for all of the city and state workers and freeze them for 3 years, you’d get all this money you need.”  Woman sitting next to him, a city worker, says “really?  Hey, I’m for it as long as you don’t lay me off or decrease my salary.”  Before long the whole group has decided that this is the solution and asks the moderator whether they can use it to get to their 100 points.  Instant credibility.

There's Chief of Staff Clay Armbrister in a small group. Did you know he's the first ever chief of staff? (Read below)

Woman, sitting towards the back of the group, offers a self-evident truth of her own that “this is the first mayor who has a chief of staff!  Why do we need a chief of staff?  He’s making a ton of money we should just get rid of him.”  Most folks who read this blog know the names David L. Cohen and Janice Wilkerson, chiefs of staff for the immediate two past mayors.  They might also know that Clay Armbrister took a pretty healthy pay cut to leave his former position at Temple.   No one in the group had those facts at their disposal to challenge this woman’s declaration.  Instant credibility.

In fact, if someone had stood up and said, “did you know that Michael Nutter has a secret vault behind his desk in the mayor’s office with $50 million in gold bars that’s supposed to be used in an emergency and he doesn’t want to touch it” or “I read somewhere that the largest oil deposit in North America is buried under the Blue Cross River Rink, Drill, Baby Drill!” I have little doubt that at least half the room would have accepted it without a challenge.  And that would have been enough to get it into the “Shared Pain” bucket.

I won’t go into the Essential Services Coalition handout.  Others have discussed that at length and I actually think it served its purpose to get people thinking about longer term issues like the property tax abatements and uncollected taxes.  I should also give that handout credit for spurring me on to learn about PILOTs, which I thought were only in the news when they rescued hundreds of people from crashing into the Hudson.  (Though I am doubtful that the city could ever get $38 million without a change in state law for reasons I explained here.)

Anyway, lest this become an elitist screed against the unwashed masses, the “instant credibility” behavior is easy enough to understand.  These are scary times.  People want to be comforted and they want to know that other people like them are feeling the same way.  They want to hear something, anything, that sounds like a way to keep their health or rec centers open.  I’m sure psychological studies have been done that measure and explain the “skepticism of authority/belief in neighbors” dichotomy.  We tend to trust the people closest to us in age (never trust anyone over 30!), socio-economic status, our neighborhood, education level or our family.  It’s human nature.  In fact, I had a moment of it as well when a gentleman in the last group I observed started a statement with, “I just moved here a couple months ago but….”  He had instant credibility with me and I’ve lived here pretty much my whole life.

I also don’t want to question why the city representative in each group didn’t feel the need to challenge these assertions.  They were there to observe and answer specific questions that were put to them and by all accounts, they did that well.  If any of them had challenged an uninformed group member, it would surely have led to an uprising against them.  So they watched.  And they listened.  And now they know what they will be facing when they make those inevitable difficult choices that will bring the budget back into balance.

So the skepticism is healthy and the instant credibility is a reasonable and understandable reaction.  Where do we go from here?

The government:

Continue this process.  Let folks cool off for a bit after this but get ready to start a whole new round of workshops.  Contract negotiations with the unions are coming up and everyone knows that the structural costs of health benefits and pensions will be on the table.  Perhaps workshops that mix city workers with taxpayers can run in parallel to the same bargaining that will be happening between the administration and the union’s representatives.  If the taxpayers, many of whom are also city employees, can come to an understanding with the city workers, maybe it will make it easier for those representing each side to come to an agreement.  I’m so naive to think that this would be easy to do or even possible to get an equitable and productive conversation since one side would clearly be better organized.  But it’s an idea.

And we’ll need a budget next year, right?  Get ready to do 10 or 12 of these workshops starting in January.

The media:

It’s clear we’re still not doing our job of informing and educating about the process by which tax dollars get turned into services (or don’t), the relationship between taxes and economic activity, and other aspects municipal finance and budgeting.  In fact, aside from my colleagues Ben and Sandy at the Daily News who have been dutifully acting as the voices in the wilderness at It’s Our Money and the good folks at NPR’s Planet Money, very few are reporting on the budget or economy for the sole purpose of educating.  Most just look into it when there’s a “story” or some “news” and often produce something that leaves us with more questions than answers.  If there’s one thing that these workshops have shown us, it’s that people want to know more about this stuff.   They want to learn how this all works.  We don’t have to present all of the minutiae - in fact, we shouldn’t even refer to it as “minutiae.”  But we should figure out how to make it fun, informative, easy to understand and constant.  I like cartoons.  If anyone has any ideas that include turning “pension obligation bonds” into a cartoon, I’m all ears.  (Ugh and no more of these analogies to the household budget.  When is the last time you had to lay off one of your family members when cash flow got tight?)

The bloggers:

Keep doing what you’re doing.  That’s the beauty of the blogosphere is that there are so many ideas out there for all of us to see that we’re bound to cobble together something that’s innovative and minimizes losers while maximizes winners from the pieces of everyone’s ideas.

And finally, the people:

Stay interested.  Stay involved.  Demand more than just keeping your library open.  Demand that the city explain to you what it actually costs to keep that library open and that we check it to make sure what they’re saying is true.  Demand that the media and/or the city track every dollar to see whether the programs being funded by those dollars are achieving their goals.  Try to get as much of an understanding of this process as possible so that when it’s time to put together the 2011 budget and you’re in another small group trying to figure out what gets cut and what gets more money and that guy stands up and declares something ridiculous, instead of nodding along with the rest of the group, you can respond, “well, actually…”