By SF Public Press ~ City Budget Watchdog: Covering San Francisco’s Half-Billion-Dollar Hole
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The Public Press will cover the dismantling of San Francisco city government as a regular beat for the three months leading up to the implementation of half a billion dollars in cutbacks to city services.
San Francisco has embarked on an unprecedented process of cost cutting and layoffs in just about every corner of city government, and based on the distribution of the proposed cuts, the poor and infirm stand to be the most directly affected.
The reason is clear: taxes have plummeted as the recession, fueled by the depressed housing market, has fallen through the floor. The city is required to balance its budget, and finds it politically and logistically cumbersome to raise more revenue quickly.
As a result, city departments have been asked cut their own budgets by 25 percent, at a time when the network of city services in public health, poverty alleviation and affordable public transit are needed most to help vulnerable populations weather economic hard times.
With the few journalists still employed by newspapers and broadcast outlets distracted by celebrities and sensational crime stories, the fate of an entire metropolis’ citizens has gone virtually undocumented. Whole city departments in San Francisco are being eliminated and hundreds of city employees laid off. What coverage there is tends to trivialize the drama being played out within City Hall and outside in the streets.
Our coverage will hold our city leaders accountable. At the same time it will examine the rationale behind the political decisions on cutting services and raising taxes -- and what the implications might be for a new crop of city supervisors and Mayor Gavin Newsom as he prepares a bid for higher office.
It will seek out stories and perspectives of those least able to advocate for themselves and who are dependent on some or another form of public assistance through homeless services, employment training and medical care.
The funds will be used exclusively to pay reporters to work this beat part time. The reporters will work as a team to interview politicians, civil servants and citizens, examine and compare obscure and little-noticed documents and make sense of this unprecedented reduction in local government’s ability to care for its residents. All efforts will be coordinated through the Public-Press.
The Public Press is a nascent professional journalism Web site that has been covering news, trend and public policy stories since early March with the help of a small seed grant from the San Francisco Foundation. Its aim is to cover under-reported, but important stories for broad and diverse audiences through the Web site and eventually a print edition. You can find news and views online at www.public-press.org. Michelle Fitzhugh-Craig is news editor of The Public Press, where she oversees about two-dozen volunteer reporters, photographers and videographers. Before joining the project she was city editor for the Oakland Tribune. She also writes a weekly column for Globe Newspapers, called Stirring the Pot. She got her start in newspapers at The Arizona Republic more than a decade ago. Her awards and recognitions include first place for investigative reporting for her work with the Chauncey Bailey Project; an Associated Press Managing Editors Award for column writing; and participation in the Maynard Institute Media Academy at Harvard University and NABJ/New York Times Leadership Academy.
If we can raise 5k in the next three months we should be able to try this pitch again and cover city hall an additional three months. The team will produce at least three news or trend stories a week, plus multimedia content such as photo-audio Soundslides, videos and postings of pertinent documents. The stories will be directed and edited by journalists at The Public Press and made available to other news outlets through Creative Commons licensing. Audio portions of the work will be prepared by the news department and offered to our public radio partner, KALW-FM, for airing on its daily evening news program, “Crosscurrents."
