Deep cuts in Mayor's office, Mayor's entourage, cost of City Council, top-level of city bureaucracy must be made: and now.

Goldman for Mayor - 19 August 2008 - For Immediate Release - Contact, 804-833-6313

"Any budget deal without deep cuts to Mayor's Office, the Mayor's entourage, the cost of the City Council, the top levels of the bloated and most expensive city bureaucracy in the state, is both unacceptable and irresponsible."

Goldman calls the 1% solution headlined in today's RTD "a an election-year back-room deal that someone with level of graduate education in public budgeting knows to be - and I am sorry to have to say it - amateur hour."


(Richmond) - Paul Goldman, candidate for Mayor, said today that "the revelations in this morning's Richmond Times Dispatch - based on material given to the newspaper only after Delegate Jones and I showed real leadership by challenging City Hall and City Council to reveal their wheeling and dealing behind closed doors - prove that Delegate Jones and myself "peeped Mayor Doug Wilder and City Council Bill Pantele's hole card" as they say in poker.

My experience had taught me that when elected officials order financial wheeling and dealing in the back-rooms so as to keep the public in the dark, there is usually something they are trying to hide from the public.

If Mr. Jones' reporting is correct, then our elected officials actually think that it is both fiscally prudent and fair to the people that the parks, the libraries, and other vital services be cut as much as the most wasteful, expensive, bloated and top-heavy City Hall and City Council in Richmond's history.

This kind of across-the-board budgeting technique is considered the height of amateurism by those of us who have studied public budgeting at the graduate level.

With all due respect to my friends Doug Wilder and Bill Pantele, they have allowed a bloated, top-heavy, wasteful City Hall and City Council bureaucracy to bleed the public treasury dry, to the point where we now, by their own admission, face a record budget deficit.

They have created an unprecedented fiscal mess, with Richmond now almost 2 months into the new fiscal year, with a deficit budget, something that is not permitted, much less even contemplated, by the City Charter.

City Hall preaches accountability, so does City Council.

The time has come for them to accept their responsibility and be accountable for the fiscal mess they have created.

There is only one way to achieve a fiscally responsible and fair resolution to the budget mess they have created: And that is going to require deep cuts in the Mayor's Office, the Mayor's entourage, the top levels of the city bureaucracy, the cost of City Council, for starters."



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