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Council rewrites Mayor's budget
Plan would free up about $17 million
Budget winners and losers
Winners
Metropolitan Detention Center: The council sets aside $9 million for its operation.
Cops: An additional $2 million for recruitment and retention programs, plus $450,000 for tactical planning along Montgomery Boulevard and a party patrol.
Paramedics: $675,000 for a unit based out of Fire Station 21 on the West Side.
Public financing of campaigns: $400,000.
The little things: Increases for mental health, recreation, homeless services, storm drainage and code enforcement, among other categories.
The City Council: Council Services, the office behind the councilors, sees an increase of $600,000, to $3.4 million.
Losers
Metro park: The proposed $4 million Downtown park, which was to be located just north of Civic Plaza, now has no funding.
Extreme sports park: The council earlier had partially gutted this project, to be located at the Big-I, but this budget finishes the job.
Chief Administrator's Office: The mayor's deputies lose $150,000, taking their budget down to $1.6 million.
Postponed
Tax cut: The one-eighth-cent gross receipts tax reduction will go into effect six months later than planned, freeing up $9 million.
Council meeting: 5 p.m. Monday, Vincent Griego Chambers, One Civic Plaza.
What else on tap
Red-light cameras: Bills to reduce red-light camera fines, audit the red-light program, prohibit any new camera installations for six months, create an independent city office to hear offenders' appeals and to reduce the fee that offenders have to pay if they send in their check too late are up for consideration.
Neighborhood association reform: Faced with accusations that some are not democratic or transparent enough, this bill would set up a task force to consider tweaking how neighborhood and homeowner associations are run.
Parking: Don't do it on your lawn, if this bill passes.
Greens fees: Golf course fees will rise several dollars per round under this measure.
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The City Council appears to be seizing control of another budget, with a veto-proof majority of six councilors issuing a rewrite of Mayor Martin Chavez's proposed spending plan.
Details released Friday have the councilors keeping the mayor's proposed one-eighth-cent gross receipts tax cut, but postponing its implementation date by six months. It would take effect July 1, 2008 rather than Jan. 1.
The delay, plus the wholesale gutting of a proposed extreme sports park and a Downtown park Chavez had proposed, frees up about $17 million.
The council plan calls for spending $9 million of that on the Metropolitan Detention Center, an idea the mayor fiercely opposes as an unaccountable giveaway, but which a majority of councilors favor as a way of keeping the state from forcing an even bigger bill on the city.
The budget also one-ups the mayor on law enforcement issues. Chavez had proposed spending $1 million on recruitment and retention of police officers. The council's budget adds $2.1 million to that, and another $450,000 for tactical planning along Montgomery Boulevard and a party patrol.
The budget, designed to pay for the city's operating costs in the fiscal year that begins July 1, is unique in that it also tinkers with other budgets. The zeroed-out extreme sports park, for instance, sits in a separate spending bill that the council signed off on unanimously in March.
Councilors want to fill the hole by shifting items from the operating budget - which covers such things as payroll and office supplies - they think should be classified as infrastructure, such as buildings and equipment.
The budget is also noteworthy for continuing to follow a theme of basic, nuts-and-bolts projects trumping big-ticket items - a theme the council asserted during the last budget battle as well.
Instead of the extreme sports park, for instance, the council budget doles out a long series of small increases to such categories as mental health services, homeless support, storm drains and code enforcement.
While the bloc of six councilors - Debbie O'Malley, Martin Heinrich, Brad Winter, Don Harris, Michael Cadigan and Isaac Benton - is enough to override any mayoral veto, council President O'Malley cautioned that it's not a done deal.
"You don't make a decision until you vote," she said.
That was the only point she and Chavez agreed on Friday. While not specifically promising to veto the budget if it passes at Monday's council meeting, he did remark that "It's amazing what can happen between a veto and a vote on an override."
As for the details of the budget, the mayor came out with guns blazing, especially on the delayed tax cut and jail funding.
He sought to frame the councilors as opposing tax relief altogether, and favoring a giveaway of tax money to Bernalillo County with no questions asked.
"If you're ever going to see tax relief in Albuquerque, this is the economy to do it in," he said. "Somebody in this process has got to be the grownup. If need be, that's the role I'll play."
