Harris urges fee
hikes in budget fight
The mayor and the City Council's disagreement over how to balance the city's operating budget has turned into a war.
"This is the worst that it's been," Mayor Jeremy Harris said yesterday. "It's never been this bad."
The tiff has the mayor ripping the Council's latest budget plan, which he says uses "phantom" and "fraudulent" revenues of $15 million that could lead to an unbalanced budget and the layoff of 740 city employees, or nearly 10 percent of the city's work force.
"You can't in the middle of the year fix these problems. The only thing that you're going to do is lay off large numbers of people simply because money that they say is going to come in isn't really going to come in," Harris said.
But the Council's Budget Committee chairwoman said that it was the administration that first began using the nonexistent $15 million to balance the current budget and which it now plans to carry over next year to help balance the budget.
Both sides agree that the $15 million in revenue does not exist, but both have used it in their versions of the budget.
"Usually you carry over money that exists, but to carry over money that does not exist is rather surprising," Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi said.
Harris said the $15 million is the amount the administration has predicted as revenue that would come in from the sale of the city's downtown Block J municipal parking lot. But the property, which just went on the market, has not been sold.
Harris said the administration believes that the lot will sell by the end of the year, and so it carried over the amount to next year's budget.
Kobayashi said she does not believe that the budget will be out of balance.
The projected revenue from the Block J sale and about $5 million in cuts to department expenses is part of the Council's budget-balancing plan.
Harris said the "responsible" thing for the Council to do to avoid potential problems in balancing the budget is to pass at least three of the fees that members have indicated will be rejected: charges for commercial tour vehicles at Hanauma Bay, commercial trash hauler fees and the $8 fee for a second day of trash pickup.
The comments came at the end of about nine hours of testimony heard by the Budget Committee yesterday. One by one, department representatives and supporters asked the Council not to make the cuts to the budget.
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