Editorials

Old-time vaudeville conjurers, before they went Las Vegas, used to rely on a series of clever effects known as “hat tricks.” The magician, elegantly attired in white tie and tails, would produce a series of unexpected objects out of his top hat: playing cards, brightly colored silk scarves, and for the grand finale, a live rabbit. Audience members, particularly small boys, would avidly watch the magician’s hands to see how he did it, but they seldom figured it out. A friend of mine used to do a funny imitation of the patter with which the magicians accompanied hat tricks: “At no time do my hands leave my arms!” It was designed to do what’s called “misdirection” in the trade. The idea is that you keep the watcher’s attention focused one place while the trick is actually being done someplace else. Sleight of hand, as the stage magician’s craft is sometimes called, is also practiced in other places, notably in “the shell game,” where con artists on the street move around peas under walnut shells and lure gullible watchers into betting on where they are.  

Berkeley citizens in the past few weeks have been treated to a masterful demonstration of sleight of hand by our sophisticated and charming city manager. It’s Budget Workshop time once again, and we’re being given the illusion that our opinions on how the city spends its money will really make a difference.  

First, a few facts. Almost all of every city budget is spoken for before this process ever starts. The biggest share—perhaps three quarters—of the total, goes to employee salaries, up and down the scale. When those already at the table have consumed most of the meal (to mix in a new metaphor), the bones are thrown to the dogs to fight over. In Berkeley, the leftover funds amount to less than one per cent of the total budget, which is now close to the $300 million mark.  

This year, something like $10 million has been left to squabble over, mainly from increases in real estate transfer taxes and paybacks for revenues previously withheld by the state. But before the council’s discretionary allocation process for this fractional amount started, the city manager asked for big chunks to be set aside for expensive information technology purchases slated to replace similar systems which were lemons. A majority of the council members acceded. We hope the new models won’t be as buggy as the old ones. 

So now we’re down to maybe a couple of million in crumbs. And here’s where the sleight of hand begins. Those of you who read the gullible metro dailies will have seen a lot of recent hype about the fountain in the park behind City Hall, which has been dry for as long as I’ve been in Berkeley. One of our always dependable citizen correspondents has documented the true history of the plan to restore the fountain—see the first letter opposite—so I won’t have to bother doing it myself. Here’s the con: No one ever intended to spend general fund money to fix the fountain. 

The city manager’s recent proposal to allocate an enormous percentage of the remaining budgetary crumbs from the general fund to fixing the fountain was nothing but a clever piece of misdirection. It fooled a lot of people, notably swimmers in city pools, into believing that the reason their favorite programs were going begging was spending on frivolities like fountains. It gave the equally gullible (or perhaps disingenuous) City Council an opportunity to appear fiscally prudent by voting it down. And it gave the city manager, who has been managing the purse strings at City Hall for years as assistant to a long line of predecessors, a way to keep the audience distracted while he seemed to pull that rabbit out of his hat once more.  

The con is not working so well this time, however. A behind-the-scenes coalition of unlikely allies—people formerly known as mods, progs, grumpies and greens—has been circulating sharp-pencil documents on the Internet. These are people who could never get along in the same meeting room, but whose analyses all add up to the same result: excessive spending on salaries, especially at the highest management levels. There are also many complaints about management’s new practice of earmarking most of the small number of remaining dollars even before the so-called citizen budget workshops have happened.  

The City Council seems to be the last to get the word, unfortunately. The only one who gets it at all is Kriss Worthington. He’s that rarest of birds, a progressive who’s also thrifty—he watches the money carefully because he’d really like to have some left over for social services. He’s resigned to the 99 percent of spending that’s fixed already, but he’s still keeping track of what’s left. He’s voting no on every budget allocation vote as a protest against the hypocrisy of giving the impression that real decisions are ever made as a result of budget workshops.  

In theory, the final vote on the budget won’t happen until June. If all the people who have figured out how the rabbit gets in the hat could manage to talk to one another, they might be able to go together to talk sense to their City Council members in time to make a difference. But don’t hold your breath—constructive consensus is one magic trick Berkeley citizens haven’t managed to pull off yet.