Thread by @socialistdogmom

city 👏 budget 👏 work 👏 session

(i don’t want to be here)

galvin: declining cigarette tax revenue is a good sign, from a public health point of view
jones: we raised it to discourage people from smoking, not to raise revenue!
asst city mgr: ... people are just buying them in the county, where there is no additional tax.

A+ use of toner

fuck raising property taxes, let’s charge families a few extra bucks for youth basketball! really nickel and diming the poor.

way to go heather: asking if this can be subsidized for low income families. youth basketball is being added to the scholarship program, but she wants to know how we’re letting folks know about that, getting them enrolled.

meanwhile, here’s kathy with the opposite take: how can we monetize the skate park & charge fees for use? apparently they’d have to change the design to control entry if they were going to charge fees. LET THE KIDS SKATE KATHY, ffs.

guys don’t worry, the FY19 budget is gonna fix racial inequality.

nikuyah pressing hard on what this office of human rights position actually entails. the budget increase will take an existing outreach coordinator from 20 to 40 hours per week, but it’s unclear what the increased hours will accomplish. this office needs an ATTORNEY.

heather is asking for a comprehensive review of the history of this office & its programs and personnel. jones is trying to push it off, but she’s insisting. thank you, heather!

jones: “it makes sense for us to have a discussion about this, the question is can we have an in depth discussion about this before the budget is finalized?”
sure, better to just spend the money without getting the facts. good call.

kathy thinks valuing overwhelming community input instead of waiting for an underfunded office with an unclear set of goals to make their own recommendations is disrespectful to that body.
or, more accurately: kathy wishes the community would fuckin’ can it with the input.

nikuyah is reiterating her concerns about meeting the schools’ full (increased) funding request without any plan from the schools to close income & race based achievement gaps. city atty says they don’t really have the power to require programs/policy, just approve/not approve $.

“i know there was some interest in continuing to address a living wage...” for city employees. some interest! in continuing to think about it!

if i had a dollar for every time someone said “holistic” at one of these meetings, i would break even on parking & could probably get a coffee on my way over.

mayor nikuyah walker is a city employee as her day job. kathy just cut her off saying it’s a conflict of interest for her to have an opinion on living wage for city employees.

nikuyah: “i would leave my position versus not fighting for it [living wage], if it came down to it.”
she’s speaking from personal experience, not out of personal interest. let her speak.

they pay so much lip service to public engagement, to reaching out to low income residents... but when THEIR OWN MAYOR, a working class woman of color, tries to speak from her own experiences as a low income person or former resident of public housing, they get so uncomfortable.

i’m PRETTY SURE this meeting is scheduled to be over in 17 minutes, but we’re 2/3 of the way through these slides and the number of things they’ve promised to revisit with more data is HOURS worth of additional meetings that will probably never happen.

kathy suggests we could cut the proposed new position of “media relations” person — give the new communications director a year and see if we still actually need this. mike argues it’s more of a community engagement role, but the job description seems generally unclear.

guys, guys, i have an idea: pay me to do this.

upcoming dates! you, too, can experience overwhelming boredom & witness the agonizing passive aggression & condescension toward our mayor from her collckkHvLfs