In the race to be the Philadelphia’s Fiscal Watchdog, the three Democratic candidates weighed in on whether it was sound fiscal policy for the City to borrow against future tax revenues.

In the video, you’ll see a great exchange from last night’s City Controller’s debate held in Northeast Philadelphia.  The three candidates you’ll see include the incumbent Alan Butkovitz, and his two challengers Brett Mandel and John Braxton.

It starts with them responding with whether they think it’s smart for the City to balance the budget by borrowing money now.  The debate then spills over into something the three of the candidates had been sparring over all night, whether Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s plan for raising property taxes makes sense.

On borrowing to balance the budget, Brett Mandel says “it’s a horrible idea. Public finance 101 will tell you -  you don’t borrow money to solve short term problems.”  Braxton opposed Council’s five-year sales tax plan saying “It’s horrible at this point in time to increase or even think about increasing the debt on this city.” The incumbent defended Council’s strategy saying his opponents simply won’t acknowledge how severe the budget gap is. “You have a two-billion dollar deficit, and their answer is we don’t want to talk about.” Butkovitz says Council has come up with a reasonable plan because “It is not a classic example of borrowing for operating expenses.” The Controller says if we have a source to pay back the bonds (how cities borrow money) then whether it’s two or five years doesn’t make a difference.

For a little background, the City of Philadelphia faces a $1.4 billion budget gap over the next five-years. The city must cut services, raises taxes, or a combination. Right now, Council and the Mayor appear to be at odds of how best to raise revenues. The Mayor favors a temporary two-year property tax increase. The Council favors a temporary five-year sales tax hike.

The Democratic Primary is May 19. The winner will go on face the lone Republican candidate Al Schmidt who was in the audience last night passing out campaign literature. Last night’s debate was moderated by Chris Satullo who is WHYY’s executive director for news and civic dialogue and a former editorial page editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer. The debate was sponsored by WHYY and NEastPhilly.com, a blog covering issues affecting Northeast Philadelphia. In fact, check out NEastPhilly’s story on last night’s debate.

Check back with It’s Our City for more on this debate. I’ll be putting online a downloadable Mp3 audio file of the debate which lasts 58 minutes. Also, I’ll be providing a full video here later. There were lots of great exchanges at the debate. I’ll try to highlight some of them in the coming days.

Special thanks to Christopher Wink, a co-founder of the blog Technically Philly and Shannon McDonald, founder of NEastPhilly.com , and Dan Pohlig who left WHYY for an awesome job with The Campaign Group for organizing the debate. Also thanks to the Mayfair CDC and everyone at the John Perzel Community Center.