EDITORIAL: Bronson’s budget is no fantasy

On Monday, Mayor Dave Bronson submitted his administration’s budget for the next fiscal year, a mostly status-quo affair that came in $2.4 million lower than the revised budget from the current year. And while $2.4 million may sound like a big difference, when the budget in question is just shy of $600 million, that’s a 0.4% difference. There are differences in the budget when it comes to funding amounts and specific fiscal priorities, but on the whole, it’s a document that very closely resembles the current budget — as proposed by Bronson, revised by the Assembly and after a fair amount of supplemental appropriations to account for unplanned needs as the year progressed.

But that didn’t stop Assembly Chair Christopher Constant from writing this year’s proposal off as a “fantasy budget,” saying that when considering the effects of inflation, the mostly flat-funded departments will be considerably worse off than last year in terms of the services they’ll be able to provide.

While Constant clearly prefers higher taxes and more municipal spending, the mayor’s budget is fair, not fantasy.

It’s true that inflation will have some effect; as of September, the annual rate of inflation this year stood at 3.7%. That’s higher than most years in the past decade, but substantially lower than 2021 and 2022′s inflation rates of 7% and 6.5%, respectively. And although Constant is right that inflation means municipal dollars won’t cover as much, given contracted salary increases and increasing costs of material goods, the inflation argument cuts two ways. But it’s also true that most taxpayers’ incomes have been negatively affected by inflation. It’s not unreasonable for government to look out for residents’ tax burden, given that increasing the budget by 3.7% to offset inflation would result in residents bearing a heavier burden for the same services. It’s admittedly a difficult balance to strike — but that’s what the next several weeks of public input are for.

What Constant’s dismissal of the administration’s budget failed to acknowledge is that the budget process is a conversation and a negotiation. Bronson is well aware that the Assembly’s impulse will be to increase spending and probably bump up against the municipal tax cap; with the budget he submitted coming in at $12 million below the limit, there is room for negotiation — as well as for the Assembly to make revisions and additions, as its members surely will, and still come in below the cap.

There are even tacit acknowledgments of past budgeting mistakes (in particular, a $1.5 million bump to snow-clearing funds in this year’s proposal after last year’s plowing debacle), a relief in an administration not keen on admitting its failures.

We’ve seen what a fantasy austerity budget looks like; Gov. Mike Dunleavy began his first term with one. The backlash from the public was so strong that Dunleavy has yet to attempt anywhere near the same level of cuts in any successive year. Bronson’s budget bears little resemblance to that kind of slash-and-burn accounting; it’s the kind of budget you would expect from a candidate who ran on a platform promising to keep spending in check. And it’s probably better than you would expect from this administration in particular, given the various other ways it has fallen down on the job so far.

Bronson and the Assembly have often been at loggerheads on policy, but what doesn’t help is the kind of hyperbole Constant employed in denigrating this year’s budget proposal. But it shouldn’t be too much to ask that if Assembly members want to wear the mantle of the adults in the governance process, they speak like adults, and get down to the business of tweaking a fairly reasonable opening proposal from the administration instead of dismissing it as fantasy.