The city that budgets in public
New Orleans does its hardest math where everyone can watch. That is a feature, not a bug.
NEW ORLEANS: There is a particular theater to budget season in New Orleans, and I mean that as a compliment. The hearings are public. The amendments are public. The millage vote is public. The city's hardest math gets done where everyone can watch, which is more than you can say for plenty of places that do their cutting in memoranda.
This fall's production has all the elements: a new mayor's first budget, a nine-figure gap, a shelter on the table, a tax vote that will make somebody furious no matter how it goes. The audience, as always, includes the people who will live with the result and the people who will leave town before it matters. Democracy does not distinguish between them at the microphone, and neither should we.
What I watch for in these weeks is not the outcome, which the council will decide, but the quality of the argument. A city that can discuss a $2.5 million shelter saving honestly, naming what is lost and what is gained, is a city that can govern itself. A city that hides the tradeoffs behind jargon is just postponing the bill.
The conditions strip under our masthead carries the river stage and the storm outlook. It should probably carry the budget gap too, because in New Orleans the fiscal weather is as real as the atmospheric kind, and just as capable of flooding the streets.
Show up to a hearing. Read the amendments. The biography is being written, and it reads better when the subject is paying attention.
The budget documents are public too. Read them before the hearing, and the theater becomes a seminar.
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