“I don’t have the luxury of prolonging any of this stuff,” Bob Buckhorn told CL 11 days ago, discussing how he was going to handle finding a way to balance a budget that needed over $34 million in cuts.
"I’d rather fix it now, take the heat for it, but have a healthier city and a structurally more sound and more efficient city, so that when we come out of this recession, we’ll be ready to start growing again.”He said that on July 7.
But in fact the budget that the Tampa Mayor announced to members of the media on July 18 won't be nearly as painful as one nightmare scenario proposed last month by his own finance director, which predicted that up to 700 employees might need to be laid off.
But the mayor said late Monday afternoon that was always the absolute "worst case scenario," the 15 percent solution if you will, that he found he didn't need to use to get the budget balanced.
This article appears in Jul 14-20, 2011.