The Common Council on Thursday voted to cut about $16 million from Mayor Ben Walsh’s final proposed budget.
Councilors made the cuts to remove a proposed 2% tax hike and water increase from Walsh’s budget.
The Council’s amended budget will include about $332 million in expenditures, albeit with no tax increase and only about $14 million pulled from the city’s general fund. Walsh proposed pulling about $27 million from the city’s general fund.
The Council and City Clerk Patricia McBride did not distribute the ordinances attached to each budget amendment to the public agenda before Thursday’s meeting. Members of the Council also opted to not make public a taxpayer-funded analysis of Walsh’s budget proposal that informed their cuts.
Common Council President Pro Tempore Pat Hogan began the hearing by condemning Walsh’s proposal and commending the council for pursuing the external analysis and drafting budget amendments.
“The outside firms’ recommendations include both broad and targeted cuts in terms of spending, and found these suggestions to be fair and affordable across all departments,” Hogan said. “…There are no reductions of police or fire department staffing, and no city jobs have been lost as a result of this.”
Now that the Council has approved its own budget amendments, Walsh will have 30 days to review the budget. Walsh has the ability to veto the budget, but the Council has the ability to override his veto with a supermajority. A supermajority on the council is six votes.
The vote has continued one of the most contentious budget cycles the city has seen in years. Typically, the council has made narrow cuts to the mayor’s proposed budget. The Council this year proposed 77 amendments. Walsh believes the 77 amendments made to his proposed budget to be the most ever.
Following the completion of the analysis, the council then drafted 7% departmental cuts across the board, save for the police and fire departments.
Public works, police, and fire were the hardest hit departments; the council cut $3.7 million from the DPW’s proposed budget, while cutting $3.5 million from the proposed police budget and $2.4 million from the proposed fire budget. The Department of Codes Enforcement also took a substantive hit, with the council reducing their budget by nearly $600,000.
Department heads joined Mayor Ben Walsh for a briefing following the council’s hearing, where city leadership took turns detailing how the cuts would affect their department.
The heads of those departments said the cuts will hinder their ability to provide critical services that increase quality of life for Syracuse residents, but the councilors have stood by the funding reductions.
In the mayor’s briefing following the council’s hearing, Walsh called the cuts “draconian and dangerous,” and accused the common councilors of politicizing the budget process.
“We’re taking this personal,” Walsh said. “This isn’t just our jobs. The talented folks in this room could be doing many other things and likely making a lot more money doing it.”
Councilor Corey Williams, who chairs the council’s Finance and Taxation Committee, said that he did not believe this process has become politicized.
“Two of our nine councilors are candidates for mayor. If they win the election, this will be their mid-year budget,” Williams said. “And so I don’t think that it is political, given that two of the three candidates are moving ahead with this fund.”
Those two councilors, Majok and Hogan, defended the council’s cuts following the hearing. Among those cuts was the city’s revaluation of property taxes.
Majok and Hogan have said in council sessions and during the first mayoral debate that now is the wrong time for the city to conduct a property tax revaluation, a major part of Walsh’s proposal that the mayor insists is a crucial step on the path to fiscal responsibility.
A Central Current reporter asked both of the candidates when they would conduct the revaluation, should they win the mayorship.
“That’s a future discussion,” Majok said. “As of now, we do know that we’re gonna put a pause on it. I don’t know when.”
Hogan echoed his opponent and fellow councilor.
“I don’t know. I guess looking into the future, I can’t tell you,” Hogan said.
Read more of Central Current’s coverage
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