The budget book for fiscal year 2027 went online quietly a couple of days ago. It’s not yet linked from the city’s main website, but it looks complete, and odds are good that this will be what the mayor presents to the City Council at a special meeting on Thursday.
It’s important to note that the budget book is distinct from the actual budget. The book is a glossy digital document hundreds of pages long. It’s filled with narrative descriptions and charts. The budget book lays out changes and goals for the year in human, readable language. The budget, on the other hand, is a dry, three-page PDF with columns of numbers. That tabular “just the facts” presentation is already attached to the City Council agenda.
The actual budget is just rows and columns of numbers.
I wrote a fairly bleak assessment of our budget process back in 2020. Here’s the short form:
- The mayor proposes a budget.
- The council talks a lot. Like, a lot a lot.
- The council approves the budget basically unchanged.
- The mayor mostly does whatever they want, including midterm appropriations and fund moves. The council approves all those too.
While the council does have the power to make cuts, those cuts are to the numbers in the three-page PDF – not to the paragraphs and pie charts in the book. Those are presented at the discretion of the mayor, as are the staff positions and project priorities. When councilors propose cuts, they always talk at length about the particular roles or programs they are targeting. It is traditional for them to hold forth about how they hope the mayor will reallocate the money.
At the end of the day, the council’s actual power is to lower (never increase) the money allotted to whole departments. It’s up to the mayor how to turn that reduced funding into a functional department , which often includes completely ignoring what the council said.
To cause significant changes to the budget, quoting myself from six years ago, the council would need to “blow up the negotiation.” It would have to wield members’ power more like a chainsaw than a scalpel to provoke a significant rethink. Any cuts big enough to force the mayor’s hand would necessarily be big enough to disrupt city services significantly. While the council could in theory slash whole departments or reject the budget entirely, it’s politically unfeasible to make moves that create a risk of trash piling up in the streets, social workers going unpaid or similar.
My point in laying out the limitations of the council’s power is to dispel the notion that it’s useful to yell at the council to make significant changes to the mayor’s budget. That ship has sailed. By the time we get to tomorrow’s presentation, the important decisions have already been made. Significant changes and compromises have certainly happened – I was present for some of them – but they were decided behind closed doors over the past several months, not in the open at a council meeting.
So what happens next is a bit of a show. It’s far from useless, but a person should go into it with the correct expectations.
I started watching the city’s budget process in 2018. Back then, the Finance Committee was chaired by alderman Bill White. Under his leadership, the committee met with the heads of each and every department. The department heads gave presentations and councilors asked detailed questions. A person who was willing to put in the time to attend those meetings came away with a thorough understanding of how the city worked. This is how I learned which departments did various things. Maybe more important, I learned who to talk to about particular topics. While the council’s formal power over the budget is limited, members exercise “soft” power by convening public conversations. While these meetings were occasionally fractious , they were also a useful window into what can be an opaque operation up on Central Hill.
When councilor Jake Wilson took the reins of the Finance Committee in 2022, he streamlined the budget review process. Over his four years as chair, Wilson significantly reduced both the wall-clock time and (more importantly) the back-and-forth interaction between the committee and the city staff. He front-loaded the process with odd and ultimately nonbinding attempts to get the council to come to consensus on priorities. Councilor Ben Wheeler seems to plan to take the process still further in that direction , doing away with the staff presentations entirely and insisting that questions and answers be submitted in writing ahead of time. I’m honestly not sure what will be left for the committee to discuss.
While I can certainly understand the desire to avoid creating stressful situations for the staff, it’s a loss to drop the presentations entirely. I always appreciated seeing the directors come to the microphone to say, in their own words, what they hoped to accomplish in the coming year. I also appreciated hearing my representatives ask questions, obvious or subtle, on my behalf. A lot of the role of the City Council is to have these public conversations. It’s a mistake to cut them short.
In terms of the budget itself , that will take several more articles to unpack. Even a cursory skim raised questions for me. It’s a significant reorganization, and I’m left uncertain who is responsible for several important functions. Because of all the changes, it’s super difficult to tell whether investment in some initiatives is increased, steady or reduced.
I will also admit to a bit of suspicion: I supported Wilson in the election, but some of his early moves have given me pause. Credit where credit is due, the early part of 2026 has been a breath of fresh air in terms of transparency and access to the mayor and to his senior staff. He literally opened the door of the mayor’s office, holds office hours and attends council meetings regularly. Wilson’s presence on social media, particularly on Instagram, is giving me flashbacks to Joe Curtatone. For all that, last week’s layoffs were poorly handled, and the timing on his refusal to voluntarily recognize a new union couldn’t be worse. The administration has maintained a stony silence on the departure of some popular senior staff. Finally, the stubborn push to give the police a significant retroactive raise in exchange for adopting body worn cameras – without other significant reforms or oversight – seem misguided.
I look forward to hearing the story Thursday, and look forward even more to digging in on the details.
Reach out via cdwan@csindie.com.
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