How much do Philly City Council bills cost? Mayor Cherelle L. Parker wants to make it easier to find out.
Producing these types of reports, known as fiscal notes, is a standard practice in many legislative bodies, including the Pennsylvania General Assembly.
How much will a City Council bill cost Philly taxpayers?
It’s a seemingly simple question, but up until now, it’s one that hasn’t been easy to answer because Philadelphia does not have a standardized process for analyzing the fiscal impacts of proposed legislation.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker on Monday announced that her administration will be changing that. The Mayor’s Office of Legislative Affairs, she said, will work with department heads to examine proposals before Council and post reports with ”unbiased and objective analysis" on a new city website.
Producing these types of reports, known as fiscal notes, is a standard practice in many legislative bodies, including the Pennsylvania General Assembly, where Parker previously served as a state representative. That experience, she said, was the genesis of her desire to launch a similar effort in Philadelphia City Hall.
“If it’s moving through the process and it has the potential to become law, we have a right to know how much it costs,” she said. “Philadelphians will be able to say, ‘This is how much what is being proposed costs.’”
But not all cities and states handle the task of analyzing proposals’ fiscal impact in the same way. Parker’s approach of using her own office to produce the reports risks alienating Council members, who may not agree with the estimates or who may be suspicious that the administration could use the process to make bills it opposes appear more costly.
In some jurisdictions, fiscal notes are produced by the executive branch, as Parker proposed. Those include New York City, where the reports come from Mayor’s Office of Management.
But many others rely on legislative or independent agencies, including Chicago’s City Council Office of Financial Analysis, Texas’ Legislative Budget Board, and the Congressional Budget Office in Washington. In Harrisburg, the State House and Senate both produce fiscal notes, as well as the Governor’s Budget Office.
Parker seemed to anticipate the possibility of the legislative and executive branches disagreeing on bills’ costs and said that Council can submit objections to the mayor’s office’s fiscal notes in writing.
Parker was not joined by any Council members at a City Hall news conference on Monday announcing the program. She said she had briefed Council President Kenyatta Johnson about the initiative but did not say whether he supported the effort.
“This is not a for or against kind of activity,” Parker said. “The process that we are implementing, obviously the information is going to be shared, and Council President Kenyatta Johnson — we work together.”
In a statement, Johnson noted that he also served in Harrisburg and that fiscal notes were “for use by the Governor’s Office, the General Assembly, and the public.”
“Mayor Parker wants to bring Fiscal Notes from Harrisburg to Philadelphia and her administration has every right to do that,” Johnson said in a statement. “The fiscal notes for Philadelphia will be yet another tool to help Council and the Mayor decide how any proposed legislation could affect the City of Philadelphia’s budget.”
Asked what the cost to taxpayers will be for the new fiscal transparency initiative, Parker did not give a clear answer, but noted that she received criticism for expanding staff and increasing salaries in the “bloated” mayor’s office after she took office.
“You have to sometimes be silent, but we knew what we were doing,” Parker said. “We had to find a dynamic team of economic experts, subject matter experts.”
Rachel Meadows, the mayor’s director of legislative affairs, said the administration hopes to produce the reports in the window between bills being introduced and when they are called up for committee hearings. The administration will not conduct analyses for zoning bills, which usually do not cost the city money, or budget bills, which already include price tags in the text of the legislation, she said.
The reports will focus on the direct fiscal impacts of bills, such as the cost to a city agency to enforce a new regulation, Meadows said. They will not consider indirect impacts, such as the purported benefits to city tax revenue of a bill designed to boost the local economy.
The website will include analyses of bills that are introduced on behalf of the administration as well as those that are authored by individual Council members, Parker and Meadows said.
Councilmember Mike Driscoll, who also previously served as a state representative alongside Parker, said he thought the move would be a “net-positive.”
“She’s entitled to run her administration as she seems fit,” he said, “but she well knows that district Council people have to represent their districts equally as well. So we’re two branches of government, and God willing, the checks and balances will work.”
Driscoll said it’s possible Council members will at times disagree with the administration’s estimates of proposals’ costs, and he expects that Council will conduct its own fiscal estimates.
“My guess is we’re going to review their review and make our analysis,” he said, “so it’ll be supposedly an unbiased mayoral analysis, and then I’m sure we’ll be doing our own analysis.”