In which Alex sees the silver lining on being down in a $2,000,000,000 hole

So i know you all know that much of the Wire is based on Philly, but the current budget crisis REALLY makes the parallels obvious.

In October, Mayor Nutter announced a $1B deficit, and proposed massive cuts, particularly to libraries and pools. He was nearly run out of town on a rail (yes, we still do that in Philly). Then, a month ago, he announced that the deficit was actually more like $2B, cause what's another billion dollars between neighbors.

Now, he's called for every single department in the city to plan for 10%, 20%, or 30% cuts. It's crazy and awesome.

• They're talking about possibly closing fire departments, and doing so in the middle of winter, when fires are at their worst due to poor heating systems.


• They're talking about laying off thousands of cops, at a time when we're still reeling from the 2004-2007 wave of violence that made us the shame of the nation.


• They're talking about scaling back trash pickup to just twice a month in this already filthy city, reversing the good will garnered by increasing recycling to weekly just last month.


• They're talking about eliminating street cleaning, while scaling back rat patrol. More garbage + less rat patrol = bring out your dead.


• Oh, and of course they're talking about shuttering city health centers that provide health care to thousands of the city's most vulnerable residents, resulting in untold millions of dollars in unnecessary health care costs due to increased ER utilization. Costs that we will all bear because of the high rate of uninsured that rely on those health centers. Of course, this last scenario may be less likely if we all get bitten by rats and die of the plague before we can get to the ER.

At any rate, this is probably really all a bunch of doom and gloom posturing so that Mayor Nutter can get city council to propose a massive tax hike to avert this catastrophe. That way he ducks the criticism both ways. And to that I say bravo.

Anyway, his comment about using PhillyStat as a scalpel for targeting cuts is pretty sweet. I only wish my MPH program taught us how to cook the stats on rat patrol. Wait, what if we legalized rats in certain neighborhoods? We could call one Hamsterdam!

Anyway, here's the list of meetings where the people can come on out and voice their opinion about all this:

Thursday, February 12, 2009 - St. Dominic’s School 8510 Frankford Avenue (Northeast Philadelphia)

Wednesday, February 18, 2009 - Mastery Charter School Pickett Campus 5700 Wayne Avenue (Germantown)

Thursday, February 19, 2009 - St. Monica’s Catholic School 16th & Porter School (South Philadelphia)

Monday, February 23, 2009 - Pinn Memorial Baptist Church 2251 North 54th Street (West Philadelphia)

Doors open at 6 pm. All meetings are from 7 pm to 9:30 pm. Seats limited.