The Mayor's approach to balancing the city's budget in 2012 lies heavily on the expenditure side of the city's ledger and underscores a message of fiscal austerity.
This report lists the budget options the City faces after the recession. The recession caused the loss of a significant amount of state aid and federal cutbacks, as well as growing pension and health expenditures, debt service, and other costs. These problems must be rectified and the options listed are potential solutions.
The city is currently in relatively good fiscal condition, due to steps to cut costs and raise revenue. However, the Mayor's budget does not address potential new problems, leaving pressure against City Hall to ensure the preservation of programs that will be affected by these problems. Economic uncertainties threaten the city and can affect the city's employment growth and tax revenues.
This report explains the features that contribute to the stability of the property tax system. It shows how caps on growth in assessed value can lead to higher assessed values and how assessments move through the pipeline and how the pipieline grew through 2008, the year of the downturn.
This report compares schools proposed for closing against other schools. The schools proposed for closing are found to be low performing, with below average student performance. However, there is no guarantee that a closing school will be replaced by a more successful one.
This article presents the budget challenges faced by the City in the upcoming fiscal year. The City faces challenges arising from rising pension costs and the expiration of federal funding, which makes it more difficult to keep the budget balanced.
Following with the City Council's Safe Housing Act, the Alternative Enforcement Program was implemented by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. The purpose of this program was to improve the conditions of the city's rundown apartment buildings. Landlords have four months to fix their rundown apartments. After those four months, the city will reinspect the building, repair it, and send the bill to the owner, who will have to repay the city.