Covering City Council for a weekly newspaper is a task that comes with its
own set of quirks. Obviously, the fact that most council meetings happen on
Tuesday and our paper doesn’t hit the street until Thursday means the daily
media will always have the newsy-news first. That’s the downside. The upside
is that this schedule frees us from the obligation to give readers a comprehensive
list of who voted green or red on every ordinance and instead just offer a flavor
of the meeting.
At least that’s what I tell myself.
This week, though, I’m in a real pickle. The Council is scheduled to vote Wednesday night — just hours after this newspaper goes to press — on the biggest issue since Mayor Tim Davlin’s reorganization plan passed in October: the budget. Therefore, by the time your eyeballs are scanning this newsprint, some budget may (or may not) have passed, some tax may (or may not) be scheduled to increase, and some alderman may (or may not . . . well, probably) have said something outrageous to a colleague, and unfortunately, there’s no information on it here.
That leaves me with only one option: prognostication. I will look into my crystal ball (“See?” you say, “I knew she was a witch!”) and attempt to predict what might transpire at this meeting.
First, I’m going to go way out on a limb and predict that the final vote will not happen tonight. There is too much chaos, too much procrastination, too much maneuvering going on for any one idea to have gathered the necessary momentum.
Sure, you can get five aldermen to tell the WMAY-AM morning talk show guy that they will support some sort of revenue enhancement, and you know Davlin will break the tie. But can you get those five aldermen to agree on the same tax increase? Ward 1’s Frank Edwards has proposed a 5 percent telephone tax increase while Ward 4’s Chuck Redpath has proposed a half-percent sales tax increase, but their colleagues will have to choose up sides on this debate.
And before that, there’s some dozen pages of proposed budget cuts to be considered. Certain aldermen have said they won’t discuss any tax hike until cuts have been made.
Then there’s the alderman who swears he won’t vote for any tax hike tonight — but probably would later. Ward 3’s Frank Kunz says he thinks the process is too rushed.
“They read it into the record Monday night, assigned it to committee, and I just don’t believe you should vote on it the next day,” he says.
However, Kunz is not opposed to the idea of a tax hike. So if his vote is needed, look for two Democrats to call another Special City Council meeting for later this month.
Not going out on a limb at all, I predict the mayor will endorse Redpath’s sales tax increase. When Redpath first floated it, at the Feb. 10 budget hearing, he did so by reading a “prepared statement” that other aldermen say they saw handed to Redpath by the mayor’s spokesman, Ernie Slottag.
Both Slottag and Redpath deny that Slottag helped write Redpath’s statement. However, it echoed the phraseology Davlin had used in his speech at the first budget meeting (Davlin: “We can only cut fat so far before it goes to muscle and bone . . .”; Redpath: “All the fat has been cut from this budget; we are now into muscle and soon we’ll be cutting into the bone”), and Slottag does acknowledge that he wrote “parts of” Davlin’s speech.
Redpath’s statement also contained the same peculiarly jumbled explanation of a sales tax that Slottag used when he tried to explain it to me. Redpath, in reading his prepared statement, said: “Sales tax will affect around 22 percent of Springfield residents.” Slottag’s explanation: “The sales tax that we collect could be paid by 22 percent of our city residents, meaning the other 78 percent would be by people not from the city.”
Of course, what they were trying to say is that a sales tax would bring in a big pot of money, most of which would come from somewhere outside Springfield.
Here’s another forecast: During the budget meeting, at least one alderman and possibly as many as three will use the phrase “step up to the plate.” And Ward 7’s Judy Yeager won’t be one of them.
One final prediction: Somebody out there will get a big laugh out of reading this column because I will be wrong — very wrong — about something.
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2004.
