Susan Brown-Wilson, foreground, and other members of City Council at council’s legislative session, Tuesday, Feb. 11.
During her opening statement at last night’s legislative session, a few moments before she and her colleagues swiftly gutted the proposed pay raises and new positions in Mayor Eric Papenfuse’s 2014 budget, City Council President Wanda Williams asked the assembly to remember Feb. 13, 2010.
On that day, she recalled, council rejected the proposed raises of the newly elected Mayor Linda Thompson, whose first budget included a similar raft of pay increases. “I have to be consistent and fair,” Williams said. “I cannot treat this administration any different when it comes to fiscal responsibility.” She then proceeded to lead council members through a series of votes that, amendment by amendment, strained the Papenfuse proposal through the sieve of austerity.
They cut the proposed raises for the communications director, Joyce Davis ($9,500); the finance director, Bruce Weber ($4,950); the human resources director ($4,000); and the special assistant to the mayor ($5,000). They trimmed the salary for the heftily titled “Senior Advisor for Education, Youth & Civic Engagement,” Karl Singleton ($9,500), and removed a new position, director of sustainability, from the budget entirely. They even slashed the vacant position of business administrator, from $79,500 to $75,000—less than the cut to Singleton and Davis, which makes sense, because it’s better to save the biggest slaps for faces that are actually there.
To sum up, it was the old familiar scene in city hall. Facing requests from the mayor, council members threw up a wall of resistance and naysaying in order to achieve—well, what, exactly? Apparently not savings. No sooner had council stacked up the clippings from the Papenfuse budget than they proceeded to spend them all, restoring a “diversity officer” position at an annual salary of $50,000. The decision effectively reversed a separate proposal of the mayor’s, to consolidate the diversity officer’s role, which had been vacated in early January, with another position in human resources. This led to a long and tortured discussion about whether such a position was necessary, followed by council’s conclusion that it was, followed by a recess, as it was realized that the sum of council’s alterations was an imbalanced budget. (This was finally resolved by a $5,000 cut to the restored, and vacant, diversity officer position.)
It’s fair, of course, to question whether the mayor’s proposed raises are really about attracting the “best and brightest,” as he has said. Papenfuse filled many of the positions with close allies from his campaign—no surprise there—who will no doubt stay on board irrespective of the lure of a higher salary. But residents who were pleased with council’s performance last night might pause to reflect on what it represents, and whether it’s really worth celebrating.
For one, it would appear that communication between the mayor and council has already broken down. During the recess, Papenfuse said his overtures to discuss the budget had been rebuffed by every member except Ben Allatt. (Allatt, in any case, voted in favor of the cuts.) Instead, council simply sent him their proposed amendments by email on Tuesday afternoon. One member, Sandra Reid, seemed delighted with this strategy. When asked whether she had tried to engage with the mayor, she referred, with a smile, to a “gift” she had given him—a bag of sugar cubes, with a message about everyone “having to take their lumps.” It’s one thing to disagree with the mayor, but quite another to skip the step of negotiating and head straight for childishness and snark.
The second disturbing thing about last night’s session is how little council seems to have bothered with Papenfuse’s rationales. The boost to the human resources director, for instance, was meant to reflect the addition of a labor-law background to the position’s qualifications. In testimony last week, Papenfuse explained that the solicitor’s office was routinely inundated with legal questions from human resources; by placing a lawyer at the H.R. helm, he hoped to free up the solicitor for other matters. Council ignored this justification and made the cut without discussion. They did the same for the position of mayor’s assistant, despite the fact that the “raise” really reflected a consolidation of positions in the former mayor’s cabinet, from two assistants to one.
Before and after their votes, members of council claimed to defer to a sense of fairness, particularly with regard to the financial pain distributed across Harrisburg’s populace. They wanted to be the voice of residents, who have put up with increased taxes, and workers, who have put up with frozen wages. And indeed, at the start of Tuesday’s session, a handful of residents admonished council not to grant raises to a few in the mayor’s cabinet when many continue to endure cuts in the name of recovery.
But council went a good deal further than fairness, and wound up making adjustments that were indiscriminate and, in many cases, petty. The city will now spend exactly what it would have before, but in place of the mayor’s own cabinet priorities, we have a redundancy in human resources. And, thanks to the preferred style of several members of council, we also have that old Harrisburg standby—pointless acrimony.
