Sacramento city council members have some tough choices to make as they look to close a budget shortfall of $66 million.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Sacramento city council members have some tough choices to make as they look to close a budget shortfall of $66 million.
Cuts to jobs, pools, parks, youth violence prevention and more are all on the table.
At Tuesday’s city council meeting, members discussed their own counterproposals to the city manager’s budget.
Last month, City Manager Maraskeshia Smith presented the council with her proposed budget. It includes eliminating 46 occupied full-time positions and 101 vacant full-time positions, plus cuts to the parks department, closing or limiting hours at pools throughout the city and sharply reducing funding to youth violence prevention programs.
Some of the cuts were met with pushback and alarm from community members and council members alike, so at the council’s May 5 meeting, Mayor Kevin McCarty told council members — if they want to restore any of the programs in the city manager’s proposed cuts, they’d have to find other ways to offset the costs.
Council members submitted memos to city staff by Thursday, May 7 with their own proposals. By law, the city council has to pass a balanced budget, which means they have no choice but to find $66 million to cut.
At Tuesday’s meeting, council members discussed all those options now on the table.
ABC10 reached out to all the city council members to ask about their priorities, ahead of that meeting.
Sacramento City Council member Lisa Kaplan represents District 1, which includes Natomas. She said public safety is one of her priorities to preserve.
“Making sure we are not cutting positions like traffic safety enforcement, making sure we have enough officers on the street,” she said. “This is three years in a row we’ve had an ongoing structural deficit.”
Kaplan said she also wants to keep funding park maintenance workers, wading pools and youth violence prevention programs, among other services.
To offset those costs, she proposes cutting nearly $9 million earmarked for micro-communities for 80 unhoused seniors and, instead, “let’s expand our hotel-motel program to allow seniors – and get 80 seniors off of our streets, which will give them a room with a bathroom because the homeless sheds don’t have bathrooms in them. And instead of it costing $8.9 million, it’ll cost a little over a million dollars to house those 80 seniors.”
She said the programs she wants to restore only cost about $4 million, leaving a surplus of $5 million that can be applied to restoring other services.
Council member Roger Dickinson of District 2, covering the northeast part of the city, also wants to restore funding for youth violence prevention.
“First on that list is the violence prevention money, that’s about $1.8 million. That’s money that’s incredibly important to what we do in North Sacramento and throughout the city, where we have organizations that are both working with young people to prevent youth violence and then intervening where kids start going in the wrong direction, to help them get a course correction,” he said. “If we lose that, then we diminish our ability to prevent violence. It actually not only affects the community directly, but it also becomes an issue for the police department that has to respond to more incidents of youth violence.”
He also wants to keep pools open and fully operational.
“The kids and the families in North Sacramento don’t have a lot of alternatives during the summer with swimming pools and wading pools,” he said. “Most people living in that part of the city don’t have their own pools, so the public resources and assets become incredibly important.”
To offset what he wants to save, Dickinson proposes cutting vacant parking enforcement officer positions and moving over some of the city’s reserves.
Phil Pluckebaum of District 4 also wants to restore funding for pools, plus the Hart senior center and the mounted police unit.
He’s proposing parking cost increases, selling the 102-acre, still-vacant property the city bought several years ago and reducing some homelessness spending.
“What I’m looking to do is stop spending money on things that are redundant, duplicative, and harmful,” he said. “We’ve all seen the harm that with people getting just swept to nowhere. We’re not trying to just continue to perpetuate these old patterns. If there’s an opportunity for us to get folks into housing, we want to take that opportunity.”
But he knows money is tight.
“We’re going to hear pretty much all night and for the next month how important all the things are that people are looking for funding for, and that there just isn’t enough,” Pluckebaum said.
Despite that, he said, he’s open to the idea of further cuts – to the tune of an additional $35 million – to plug the predicted budget shortfall for the following fiscal year, 2027-28.
“If this year we cut the $35 million as well, it’s going to hurt that much worse – not pleasant. But next year, theoretically, we won’t have to make any cuts,” he said. “And we have the important benefit of telling city staff, ‘You’re okay.’ Like, right now, everyone is on pins and needles, not knowing which departments are going to get impacted, especially parks. Parks always seems to take it the worst. So what I would like to do is provide a financial model that says to the city staff and city residents – but really the city staff, in this instance – ‘We’re going to do the hard thing now so that we don’t have to do it again. We’re not guaranteeing everyone a job forever, but at the very least we’re not going to have this constant risk of layoffs coming every year.’”
Kaplan said she has long advocated for passing two-year budgets.
“What I’ve said is, we need to balance the first year and then be within 1% to 2% of balancing the second year, which means we could be, like, $20 million plus-or-negative,” Kaplan said.
The council plans to pass a budget by June 9. That’s four weeks from now, but Council member Kaplan said Tuesday’s meeting is the big one, where council members will essentially set the budget. After that will be more fine-tuning.
ABC10’s Gurajpal Sangha is at Tuesday’s meeting and will have a recap of the discussion.
Meanwhile, council members are also keeping their eyes on a couple of key developments happening this week.
On Wednesday, Sacramento Steps Forward plans on announcing the results of its Point in Time Count, which took place back in January. That’s considered the official count of Sacramento’s unsheltered homeless population and can be a metric for how effective Sacramento’s spending on homelessness has been.
Then, on Thursday, Governor Gavin Newsom will unveil his revised budget and whether he’ll allocate more money to cities for homelessness solutions.
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