Council Prepared to Slash ‘Wish List’ in Budget Cutting

The “Wish List.”

Around San Diego City Hall, it has become the grown-up version of climbing onto Santa’s knee and asking earnestly for every toy imaginable. You know you won’t get everything, but there’s always a chance . . .

San Diego City Council members created the wish list several weeks ago as they began mind-numbing hours of deliberations over the proposed $616-million municipal budget.

Every time a worthy cause or program was discussed and council members weren’t sure exactly what to do with it, they tacked it onto the wish list, the last bastion of hope.

Now, the wishing will stop. The list is complete and it is loaded with $14.4 million worth of requests.

Trouble is, there is only $7.2 million to spend.

Council members, in their last budget session, will begin sorting through the wish list today to see what they will just have to do without.

“It may be a frustrating and laborious process to defer the decisions to the last day of business, but the public’s business is done,” said Councilman Mike Gotch, veteran of six wish list trimmings.

Among the items the council will have to sort through are $2.6 million for 58 additional police officers, a very high priority; $500,000 for Symphony Hall; $40,799 for CalPIRG; $3 million for canyon brush management; a raft of Planning Department changes; $220,000 to purchase books for the library, and $200,000 to fund the new city department of Binational Affairs.

Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer said she began to wonder why the wish list grew so much during the recent weeks of budget hearings.

“I get the impression that there must be money trees growing in the backyard,” she said.

But now the cutting will start. And Gotch, for one, said it will be a more difficult task this year.

For one, Gotch said he has never seen a bigger gap between what the council wants and what it can afford. Secondly, he said, former City Manager Ray Blair in past years would delight council members by finding just enough last-minute reserves of money, tucked away in his proposed budget, to fund some of the wish list items.

“This manager is not doing that,” Gotch said of Blair’s successor, Sylvester Murray. “It has diminished our ability to be heroes on Reckoning Day.”