Sacramento city leaders and advocacy groups raised concerns at Tuesday’s City Council meeting about proposed layoffs, fee hikes and service cuts. They said they’re worried the city’s plans to close a $62 million budget deficit take too much of a toll on youth and emergency services.
Interim City Manager Leyne Milstein announced the cost-cutting moves in a budget letter late last month. They would eliminate 70 vacant city positions, lay off 12 full-time employees, and cut over a million dollars in youth program funding. Overall, the city’s estimated budget sits at $1.65 billion.
Stacy Anderson, with the National African American Civil Rights Organization, said the city should direct more resources to underserved youth instead of unfilled police positions.
“Sacramento's budget must reflect the needs of our youth,” Anderson told the council. “There are 80 unfulfilled police positions funds sitting unused while our youth, especially in underserved communities, lack the investment they desperately need.”
Sacramento Police Chief Kathy Lester defended her department’s needs, saying its dispatch center deals with more than it can handle.
“We had 642,000 calls come into our call center,” Lester noted. “We dispatched about 200,000 of those calls. And so their workload is huge.”
Like Anderson, Councilmember Mai Vang said the plan places too much burden on young people.
“We also shouldn’t be balancing this budget on the back of low-income and our youth,” Vang said. “In the budget, you’ll also see an elimination funding of $1.3 million for youth and families in Measure U funding. That for me is really problematic because we are in May right now, summer is around the corner.”
Responding to the concerns, Mayor Kevin McCarty said difficult decisions are unavoidable.
“As I’ve been saying for months, there are no good choices,” the mayor said. “Everything on this list is something you’d say, ‘We don't want that.’”
To raise revenue, officials are proposing citywide increases for parking meters, garages, and street permits in some neighborhoods. Costs will go up the most in busy neighborhoods like Downtown and Midtown. Some parking meter rates could go as high as $6 per hour.
Meanwhile, the employee layoffs, if approved, would be the first city worker cuts in more than a decade. Payden Martin is with Stationary Engineers Local 39, the city’s largest union. He said last week that workers are stressed.
“They still need to pay their mortgage, they need to buy groceries, and the idea that maybe the budget crunch might impact their ability to do that in the future, I think it's caused a lot of uncertainty,” he added.
Milstein told CapRadio in an interview last week that the budget shortfall comes from years of growing services faster than the city can handle.
“I was a department head who sat across from an employee and had to tell them we were eliminating their position,” she said. “I have said steadfastly that I never want to be in that position again. Yet here we are.”
The City Council is expected to vote on the final budget on June 10th.
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