SerpApi.Org
San Francisco has a balanced budget deal. And Mayor Daniel Lurie has taken another step toward the recovery of one of America’s greatest cities, after years of hard times.
The California Post noted in June that Lurie had offered a budget that would avoid more layoffs while also giving a raise to police and firefighters.
He also trimmed the massive amount of money that the city was spending on nonprofit organizations, which are often just political groups in a charitable disguise.
Critics point to the staggering size of the new budget, which has soared to $17 billion. In a city of just over 800,000 residents, that’s more than $20,000 in spending per resident.
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There’s no reason a city government needs to be that big. And if a city spends that much money, residents should be enjoying platinum-level services.
Needless to say, we’re a long way from that.
But we’re also some distance away from the worst days of the post-COVID lull, when city streets were eerily empty at lunchtime, except for homeless people and drug addicts.
Some open-air drug markets are still there. Mayor Lurie has more to do.
But the tourists are coming back, as are the businesses, which is one reason that revenues are higher than expected.
The most impressive part of the new deal between the mayor and the supervisors is what is not in the budget: Namely, spending down the city’s reserves.
When California Gov. Gavin Newsom or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani bragged that they had “balanced” their budget, the truth was that they had taken money out of savings to do so.
San Francisco doesn’t do that in its new budget. In fact, the city socks some money away in a reserve fund to cushion the anticipated effect of federal spending cuts.
That’s basic financial management. And even though San Francisco’s new budget isn’t perfect, it will go a long way toward restoring confidence in the city’s recovery, which seemed impossible just a few short years ago.
Mayor Lurie himself has admitted that the city faces serious financial challenges. The Muni system is still a serious headache.
But there is room for cautious optimism. And there are signs that San Francisco voters are being rewarded for doing what California voters rarely do, in general: Replace a failing incumbent.
LA can take some lessons from that. Sometimes all you really need is new leadership.
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