Council OKs ‘optimistic budget’
$320 million spending plan reflects 18 percent cut in face of pandemic
After painting a dire financial forecast for the city of Santa Fe only a few months ago, Mayor Alan Webber said a $320.7 million spending plan the City Council unanimously approved late Wednesday night is an “optimistic budget” that preserves jobs and “reimagines” the way City Hall delivers services.
“It says we should plan for hard times but work toward good times,” Webber said at the beginning of budget deliberations. “It not only cuts items but reimagines city government in the face of a health crisis and fiscal crisis.”
The budget represents an 18.1 percent decrease in spending from the last fiscal year and forecasts a $12.8 million decrease in revenue in the general fund, which pays for day-to-day operations, forcing cuts in spending for everything from travel to basic office supplies in almost every department.
Among the exceptions: community services, which includes senior, youth and family services.
“The community services budget was increased by 2 percent rather than decreased as a way of accounting for these very difficult, challenging times where people’s lives and their livelihoods are being very much challenged by the public health crisis and the resulting financial crisis,” Webber said, referring to the coronavirus pandemic.
The city initially projected a $100 million budget deficit. As the revenue picture became clearer, the city’s Finance Department revised its projections, putting the budget gap closer to $83 million, which the city plans to close with a hiring freeze, reducing operating expenses and dipping into cash reserves, among other cost-cutting measures.
While city councilors were voting on the mayor’s spending plan, much of the discussion Wednesday night centered on a separate but related proposed reorganization, which the governing body will consider next month.
City Councilor JoAnne Vigil Coppler said a big portion of the proposed budget “has the reorganization built in.”
“I’m not so sure that the approach was the best approach to act as if reorganization had already occurred,” she said. “I will say this: I don’t think a pandemic is a right time to reorganize.”
It was a concern echoed by Local 3999 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents 51 percent of the city’s workforce.
“We feel this is pushing, forcing, if you will, a reorganization under the guise of a budget approval,” Therese Martinez, a city librarian
who is the union’s recording secretary. “This budget needs to stand on its own without departments, divisions and employees relying on the proposed reorganizations dictating changes to their classifications, positions, expenses and duties where they don’t even know what to expect or what is expected of them.”
City Councilor Signe Lindell said the Webber administration had to pivot to develop a budget after the COVID-19 crisis upended the city’s finances.
“We all have areas of this budget that we’re disappointed with, but we should be pretty happy that we were able to pivot as quickly as we could and put together a balanced budget and, astoundingly enough, no one got laid off,” Lindell said. “That’s an amazing thing for the amount of money that we took from the original budget and the budget that we are now proposing.”
About two dozen people participated in a public hearing on the budget, many of whom urged city councilors to “defund” the Santa Fe Police Department and instead use that money on affordable housing and other community services.
Before the council meeting, Webber said in a live Facebook video that his administration started the budget process in February when the economy was
“booming and moving aggressively.”
“Our hotels were filled. Our restaurants were chalking up great business. Our stores were doing excellent work. Everybody was looking forward to the continued expansion,” he said. “We actually put a budget together that was based on significant financial increases to the city’s coffers.”
But in March, when the novel coronavirus pandemic spread into New Mexico, “we fell off a cliff,” Webber said, adding that it represented “a complete blowing up of the city budget.”
At that point, the city had to start the budget from scratch with the presumption that spending would have to be slashed by 42 percent to make up for lost revenues, Webber said.
While revised budget projections became more optimistic as revenue collections from March and April revealed a less dire financial crisis, the city still had to make “serious reductions” in most of its departmental budgets, the mayor said.
“Even though we have less money to work with, the goal of the budget is not simply to cut city government,” Webber said.
“It’s to reimagine city government and to streamline it and to make it more effective and, ultimately, to bring better services to the people of Santa Fe.”
About two dozen people participated in a public hearing on the budget, many of whom urged city councilors to “defund” the Santa Fe Police Department.