Mayor Riordan OKs Budget With Council’s Changes

In a fitting finale to one of the most amicable City Hall budget seasons in recent memory, Mayor Richard Riordan on Thursday kept his veto pen in his pocket and signed into law an ambitious $3.9-billion spending plan for the coming fiscal year.

Riordan’s decision to accept the relatively slight City Council modifications to his original budget plan signaled the end of what some feared might be a fractious budget process because of a $170-million deficit.

The hallmarks of the final budget include 600 more officers for the Police Department to continue Riordan’s four-year police buildup; a buy-out program to eliminate 300 jobs in departments with reduced workloads; a study to rewrite the city’s archaic tax code; $2.7 million to streamline the city’s often bewildering development permitting system, and a 25% cut in the city’s business tax on wholesalers and manufacturers.

As a bonus to taxpayers, the 1995-96 budget was smaller than it had been in the previous year, and it included a first-time ever public disclosure of each department head’s goals for the coming year, an innovation designed to bring a new era of bureaucratic accountability to City Hall.

Deputy Mayor Michael Keeley, Riordan’s tough-minded budget czar, called the spending plan a “customer-driven budget” and put together a corporate-style budget summary document, replete with a readable narrative on each department and charts and tables.

In his budget letter, issued Thursday, Riordan praised his budget-drafting counterparts on the council for improving his original budget proposal and for their “diligence, expedience and fiscal prudence.”

Still, the mayor had his qualms about several council modifications, including a plan to spend $1.4 million to beef up the city attorney’s domestic violence unit and one to hire 32 new parking enforcement officers.

Riordan may still have the final word on the parking officers, threatening in his budget letter to use his authority to maintain a hiring freeze to prevent the new officers from being employed until inefficiencies in the city’s parking enforcement program are corrected.

Council President John Ferraro and Councilman Richard Alatorre, chairman of the budget committee, credited the lack of rancor to the mayor’s engaging in dialogue with the council about what would be a politically workable budget before unveiling his own proposal.