Lid Closed on Budget Pot Idea : Council Panel Shelves Plan to Set Aside $5 Million

Two weeks ago, San Diego City Councilman Dick Murphy had what he thought was an “innocuous” but interesting idea.

He asked the city manager to set aside a $5-million pot so that, at the end of budget hearings, when the rest of the city’s approximately $95-million capital improvements budget for 1986 had been appropriated, council members would still have a little extra cash to spend on each of their districts.

Murphy thought he was onto something--a way to add horse trails or a small park or a variety of small improvements that are important to city neighborhoods, although not always to the city as a whole.

But to Murphy’s surprise, top city staffers suggested Wednesday that his idea was a frontal assault on San Diego’s 54-year-old city manager system of governance.

In a 4 1/2-page, single-spaced memorandum delivered to a council committee, City Manager Ray Blair and City Atty. John Witt tore Murphy’s proposal to shreds.

And soon after receiving the memo, the Public Facilities and Recreation Committee sent Murphy’s plan to the councilmanic version of Siberia. By unanimous vote, council members--including Murphy--decided to “note and file” it.

“That means, ‘Forget it!’ ” Blair said with satisfaction shortly before the committee voted to shelve the plan.

As Witt and Blair construed Murphy’s plan, it called for setting capital improvement money aside from any final budget the city manager developed. The $5 million set aside was then, they thought, to be divided equally among each of the eight districts, with each council member able to decide by himself--without a full council vote--what to do with his share of the pot.

Such a plan violates the city manager’s “plenary,” or absolute, power under San Diego’s City Charter to develop a budget, Witt and Blair argued in their memo.

If each of the eight council members would get to allocate money based on his or her own perception of a district’s needs, that “clearly violates the charter’s mandates and restrictions that provide for the council to serve as the city’s legislative body and the Manager to administer the affairs of the city,” the memo said.

In addition, Witt and Blair wrote, “the public perception could be that the owner of the real estate or business (benefiting from improvements) was being rewarded.”

Blair, in a hallway conversation with reporters, added that the city manager system has given San Diego a reputation for honest, efficient government for years. Any attempt by the council to change the charter made no sense, he said.

“If you want to change the form of the charter, take it to the voters!” Blair growled.

Despite all the fireworks, Murphy said he believed the city manager and city attorney had completely misconstrued his proposal.

“The report is really inaccurate. It’s not what I proposed,” Murphy said after it had been shelved.

Murphy said he had never intended to have council members deciding individually how to spend district money. He had always envisioned at least five council members voting on how to allocate money to each district, he said.

His plan was simply an effort to preserve some flexibility in the budgeting process by asking the city manager to leave $5 million in the budget “that was not committed to anything,” Murphy said.

“The reason is that every time at budget hearings, (Councilman) Bill Mitchell will want to add $100,000 for horse patrols, and I will want to add money for street sweeping, and (Councilman) Gotch will want to add money for the library--and there’s always this struggle about what will we cut out.”

It was not his intent to intrude into the city manager’s functions, Murphy said. Still, it appears that his proposal was such an intrusion, he said.

“The manager has the right to propose any damn budget he wishes to propose. As innocuous a proposal as I have, it violates the City Charter,” Murphy said.

Although he had agreed to shelve his idea, Murphy had one other thought on how to revive it in a new--and perhaps more acceptable--form.

When city budget hearings begin, he would ask the city manager, “ ‘If we told you today not to spend $5 million, what would you cut out?,’ ” Murphy said. “That way it doesn’t violate the City Charter and it’s not a departure from the current process.”

And that way, Murphy hopes, he wouldn’t create a tempest in a teapot.