DOOMSDAY DOOMSDAY! - Eliminating Libraries, Less Cops, and NO COURTS?!

Mayor Nutter is somewhere between a brilliant politician using Machiavellian techniques, and a man who is trying to get his way by making threats that would, in the end, hurt the very people he was elected to help and make better.

Nutter is in between a rock and a hard place with the Philadelphia City Budget. Despite the cries and protests from residents last year, Nutter not only has Libraries on the chopping block, he has them up front, ready to shut them down in a heartbeat if the PA State Budget doesn't get approved.

But to a much more important and scarier end, he wants to shut down the Philadelphia Court System.

WHAT THE HELL?!

The problem with this is actually very simple: It is next to impossible to do that. Why? Largely because his Plan C budget, the "Doomsday Budget", isn't legal. He has no legal right to shut down the Philadelphia Court System, and it has been decried by critics as being nothing more than a scare tactic.

So lets get this straight: We have a Mayor who is threatening his citizens with no legal system in his city if his budget doesn't get approved. At the same time, other cities and states have faced similar problems but have made other cuts in other places. Nutter is simply using a scare tactic to get what he wants, which is a pension freeze and a 1% raise in the city Sales Tax for "only 5 years".

When I ran for office, I kept saying the same thing over and over again: I want long-term solutions for long-term problems. You can't just put a band-aid on something and hope it works, you need something that will have a long-term effect.

The thing that urkes me the most is the fact that, while Philadelphia got money from the Stimulus earlier this year... does anyone know where it went? What happened to the money?! All I've seen so far is that they re-paved some streets that really didn't need it! We got over $700 MILLION!

So what should Nutter do? How does he save Philadelphia from fiscal collapse and make sure he can actually deliver on his promise? The Committee of Seventy says it best:

The proposals include reducing the cost and size of city government; fixing how property taxes are assessed; evaluating the need and functions of the city's four independently elected row offices; consolidating city housing agencies; and improving the 311 call system to generate greater savings.

Is it going to be easy? No, but, really, this needs to happen and it needs to happen NOW.