This is how brutal, needlessly brutal, Mayor Daniel Lurie’s budget proposal is shaping up to be:
At a hearing Wednesday, both the budget director and the director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development admitted that most of the impacts of Lurie’s cuts will fall on low-income communities and communities of color.
Budget Director Sofia Kittler said that there is “no fat” in the budget. The cuts, she said, are just “things we can’t afford.”
Sup. Shamann Walton asked the Budget and Appropriations Committee to consider the impacts of cuts on workforce development programs. Sup. Cheyanne Chen asked about impacts on affordability and families.
The message from the Mayor’s Office was simple: Those vulnerable communities are not a priority.
Community development grants alone will be cut by $8.5 million, damaging a lot of inexpensive but critical programs.
Chen asked Community Development Director Julia Saborg if the Mayor’s Office had considered equity in its budget decisions. “Did the department conduct any equity studies at all?” Chen asked.
Saborg: “All of the cuts will impact low-income communities and communities of color.”
Walton pointed out that many of the cuts to workforce development hard the some communities that will be devastated by the MOHCD cuts. “I don’t mean to propose that communities will not be impacted by cuts,” Kittler said.
Sup. Alan Wong, who also sits on that committee, said nothing the entire time and asked Saborg and Kittler no questions.
Anya Worley Ziegmann, with the People’s Budget Coalition, noted that, while MOHCD says it’s cutting $8.5 million in community services, nonprofits who have the contracts to serve those communities have been notified that $13.5 million is going away.
Saborg said the city was moving back to pre-pandemic levels of services, but “we are going back to six years ago, without even considering inflation,” Worley Ziegmann said.
Meanwhile: “Law enforcement has seen an increase of 30 percent. This is abominable.”
Yes: Massive amounts of new money for the cops, who are arresting drug users and clogging the jails while Harm-Reduction programs, which save lives, are eliminated. Basic, simple, services that cost far less than cops and have a much greater impact on crime prevention, are on the chopping block.
“This,” Worley Ziegmann said, “is abhorrent.”
It’s also the budget that Lurie’s allies on the Board of Supes will likely approve—while the mayor is working to defeat a measure that would tax the richest corporations to prevent some of these cuts.
