Armed with calculators instead of bullhorns, some of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s sharpest critics, including members of Occupy Baltimore, showed up Saturday to join her in a budget-balancing workshop.

The last time these activists had tried to make their voices heard about budget priorities – pushing for more money for recreation centers – they’d been threatened with arrest by city police. Before that, five of them actually had been arrested at a “Schools not Jails” protest on the site of a proposed youth detention center.

And now here was Mike McGuire (one of those who’d spent a night at Central Booking) standing face-to-face with the mayor, telling her what he thought of the two hour exercise he and about 90 people had just been through.

“For the record, I support what you’re doing here, I appreciate the opportunity, but I just don’t think it goes far enough,” McGuire said.

Rawlings-Blake listened to McGuire calmly, but turned combative later when she encountered a participant who wanted to tell her in more detail what she thought was missing from this exercise.

Questioning Developer Tax Breaks

Their tense exchange came after city officials conducting the exercise had shown participants a Power Point presentation about the fiscal 2012-2013 budget, then distributed sheets of paper with a list of budget items that could be cut and revenue sources that could be added. (“Reducing street light maintenance” to save $2 million, imposing a “grocery bag tax” to bring in $1 million, and so forth.)

Participants were asked to scour the list, pick out some combination of taxes or cuts and aim to close the $52 million gap.

“Why don’t you lower TIFs and PILOTs to fund rec centers and libraries?” Casey McKeel asked, using the acronyms for two kinds of property tax breaks that the city grants to developers to build hotels and office buildings. (TIF stands for Tax Increment Financing and PILOT is Payments in Lieu of Taxes.)

PILOTs excused developers last year from paying $14.5 million in taxes, according to a report by a city agency. TIFs and PILOTs were a hot issue in last year’s mayoral election and the subject of a review panel chaired by City Councilman Carl Stokes. Eliminating developer tax breaks was not an option Saturday’s exercise offered.

“TIFs and PILOTs are an economic development tool,” Rawlings-Blake told her. “It’s not like we get nothing in return.”

McKeel, an Occupy member who lives in Waverly, then referenced the Stokes report and made the mistake of saying it recommended a moratorium on the use of these tax subsidy programs.

“That is not correct!” Rawlings-Blake shot back. “It did not say that! Show me one place in that report where the word moratorium appears!” (It was Stokes and two members of his task force who verbally called for a moratorium in November.)

The exchange quickly devolved into an argument over what McKeel did or didn’t say, and that was pretty much the end of the discussion.

“What We Have to Go Through”

Yesterday’s was the third, and by all accounts the best-attended of the public budget workshop meetings Rawlings-Blake has held this year.

This was the second year the city has conducted the sessions, which city budget director Andrew W. Kleine said Saturday are intended to be more meaningful than simple “open-mike nights” for taxpayers.

“We wanted to give residents as clear an idea as possible of what we have to go through each year when we try to balance the budget,” Kleine.

He talked about an anticipated decline this year in property tax receipts and the increases they face in fixed costs, items like pension contributions for retirees, debt service and mandatory payments to the school system.

With fixed costs rising by $130 million in the last four years and revenues remaining flat over that time, the city has already been trimming spending.

“We’ve already plucked the low-hanging fruit and beyond,” he added.

Police Helicopters: Out! Billboard Tax: In!

There were those who entered into the process with gusto, seemingly relishing the idea of playing budget director for a day and sending the-powers-that-be a message.

Julius “Julio” Colon, reading from his marked-up sheet, told the audience he increased employee deductibles and co-pays and contributions to health coverage (“Hey, as long as they still have a job”) and axed the police mounted unit (“I love the way they look, but. . . ”).

Among the eight fees and taxes offered, Colon chose taxing billboards and charging a fee for the downtown Circulator.

As for the Recreation and Parks budget, that got nothing but love from Colon, CEO of Park Heights Renaissance.

“Closing pools, reduction of after school programs? That’s an area you shouldn’t touch,” he said, prompting cheers and applause from the crowd. “Double-funding for after-school programs!”

Looking at Broader Reforms

But several speakers rose to critique the whole exercise, saying it was too limited in scope.

Among other things, they said the workshop failed to take into account the impoverished city’s reliance on its high property tax rate and the widening gap between revenue and budget needs.

Kim Trueheart asked Kleine why his presentation didn’t include the 10-year plan. Until the city repairs its “property tax compression ratio,” said Paul Warren, vice president of the Mount Vernon-Belvedere Association, “homeowners will simply pack their U-Hauls.”

“It’s not like we need to balance the checkbook for the year. It’s more like ‘How do we address these big sweeping problems?’” said John Duda, of Bolton Hill, said to the group.

“Are We Rearranging the Deck Chairs?”

Duda, a co-founder of the Red Emma’s Bookstore Collective, and several other audience members spoke later about elements they thought should have been included in the exercise.

He cited procurement reforms that, he said, could save the city millions from “waste” on public works projects and a heavy reliance on outside consultants.

“This is really just an exercise in political polling to help her determine what’s popular or what’s not,” Duda said.

“I completely agree with him. Are we just re-arranging the deck chairs [on the Titanic] here?” said Sarah Ying, a Tuxedo Park resident said to the women at her table looking at the budget worksheets.

“It pits fire stations against schools against public pools – that’s not what you want to do,” she said. “We want to build a better Baltimore.”

McGuire spoke up and asked Kleine if the half-hour allotted to discussion could be extended and the answer was “no,” another group was coming in. Afterwards, McGuire told Kleine he found the exercise, for which he’d prepared for days, “kind of empty.”

Duda and others others, meanwhile, pressed on. They approached Kleine to ask him to consider adopting some form of “participatory budgeting” in Baltimore.

The innovative process allows citizens to make real decisions about public money. It has been used in other countries and adopted in such U.S. cities as Chicago and recently New York, where four city council members are letting their constituents decide how to spend $4 million.
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2013 BUDGET TIMELINE AND LINKS

The mayor is scheduled to present her proposed fiscal 2013 budget at the end of March. The City Council is required by law to approve a balanced budget by June 25. The budget will go into effect July 1.

* Blurb on Saturday’s budget exercise
* Online version of the exercise
* Citizen Guide to the 2012 Budget
* Links to full budget