What now?
What does Prop Q's failure mean for city services?
Two weeks before the election, a reader sent me an email with the subject line, "What happens if Prop Q fails?"
"Can you help us readers understand this question?" he wrote.
I replied: "I don't have a simple answer because it's really up to City Council."
There are two views on City Council about what Prop Q was and what its failure means.
The view pushed by Mayor Kirk Watson is that City Manager T.C. Broadnax proposed a decent budget and then the progressives on Council added some extra stuff, which became Prop Q. The voters rejected the "extra stuff," so now the logical course of action is to simply adopt the original budget, which the voters did not reject.
Other Council members see no reason to treat the city manager’s budget as the baseline. They acknowledge they have to bring the budget down under the 3.5% cap, but they would say that everything included in Broadnax’s proposal should be considered for cuts too.
The big question is whether these Council members have the guts to address the elephant in the room: the public safety labor contracts.
