Philadelphia preparing 2 percent cuts as revenues fall

The city of Philadelphia might have to trim its budget to deal with declining revenues.  

Mayor Michael Nutter says money coming into the city fell over the summer due to the economy.

“What we are doing is proactively as we have in the past looking at what happened in July and August we saw some downturn in wage and sales tax receipts, unfortunately unemployment has gone up a bit so those two things go together,” said Nutter.  “We’ll have some September numbers shortly and that will tell us what happened in the first quarter of new fiscal year.”

Department heads are reviewing their budgets to find more potential areas to cut.

“We’ve asked the managers to look at two percent and we want to know, given the cuts that have already been made over the years what would would you have to do to achieve the two percent savings,” said Nutter.

Mayor Nutter says he is not asking the police, fire department or prisons to prepare these cuts.