Accomplishing this will require shared sacrifices from our city workforce and our residents. The proposal to address the current anticipated shortfall has a number of critical components. This plan looks to capture efficiencies that make city services more productive and less costly for residents and commuters. The plan also anticipates that our employee unions will contribute in ways needed to preserve our core services and economy by foregoing wage increases, volunteering for unpaid work days, generating savings through changes in work rules and absorbing more of the cost for their pensions and health care.

These efforts alone are not sufficient to balance this FYP: the depth of the downturn will require the City to pare back services further, although it will be done without closing any City facilities. Finally, balancing the plan will require residents and non-residents to pay more in taxes over the next three years to preserve services. However, this Administration remains committed to a continuous examination of services and use of facilities to ensure that the City is operating at the highest level of efficiency, so that taxes are not higher than necessary to provide the services that citizens deserve.

The City of Philadelphia will need significant legislative assistance from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to successfully implement the Mayor’s FY10-14 Proposed Plan. The Mayor’s proposal does not ask for direct financial assistance or support. Instead, the Mayor is asking the Commonwealth to provide the City with the authority to implement new funding assumptions for its pension plan, which would save $331.6 million over the FYP, and enable the City to impose a temporary increase in the City’s sales tax rate from 7% to 8% for the next three years, providing $341.7 million in acutely needed revenue.

Without Commonwealth approval of these two initiatives, the City will have to implement dramatically deeper reductions in services, totaling $405 million over the FYP, including, among others, cuts in the size of the police force, reductions in the number of fire fighters, less frequent trash collections, and a permanent 6% increase in the City’s property tax rate, to generate $252.9 million in revenues to replace the loss in savings and revenues from the pension and sales tax proposals. Just as the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania needed the assistance of the Federal government to withstand the current downturn, the City of Philadelphia will need legislative support from the Commonwealth to help weather the economic downturn. View the Contingency Plan.

These are difficult times, actually unprecedented times, and they require tough choices and extraordinary approaches. One such extraordinary approach has been the Mayor’s efforts to reach out to Philadelphians to hear their concerns and to solicit their ideas about how best to balance the budget. Many of those ideas have been incorporated in this fiscal stability proposal. View the public's input on FY 10-14 budget.

There are hard choices incorporated in this budget, but they are choices that preserve important city services at a time when residents, particularly Philadelphia’s poor population, will need them most. Philadelphia is home to one of the largest concentrations of urban poor in the United States and its population is among the least educated of urban populations in the United States. The Mayor’s Proposed FYP protects City services for those who are most vulnerable in this economic storm. View the City's demographics.

These difficult times will require all of us to sacrifice a little so that we can emerge a stronger and better City after the economic storm has passed, a City that is poised to continue its march to becoming one of America’s greatest cities.