shocking they wait until election day to do some actual reporting
At the August meeting, Duchen argued that reclassifying recurring expenses as one-time expenses was what had gotten the city in its budget mess to begin with, citing the council’s decision to use about $100 million worth of one-time pandemic relief funds to pay for ongoing homeless initiatives.
“That was an unreliable funding mechanism for that kind of expense,” he said during the budget hearing in August. “Now those funds have dried up and we're essentially raising taxes to cover an idea and a hole left in the budget from that.”
Granof agreed, saying the federal relief dollars were meant for one-time expenses, not ongoing operations, and using them for continuing homelessness programs ran counter to the spirit of the law. Unless the money went toward short-term projects, he said, the city would eventually face questions about how to sustain those efforts once the funds ran out.