Sanders: No Bankruptcy for S.D.

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders ruled out bankruptcy and pledged to balance the city’s structural budget deficit within the next 18 months in his annual state of the city address this week.

San Diego last month closed a $179 million budget gap over the next 18 months with a combination of $82.6 million in ongoing structural budget cuts — cutting 530 jobs — and $96.5 million of one-time solutions.

Sanders didn’t give specifics, but he said California’s second-biggest city must use the year and a half covered by the budget fix to develop a plan to balance its revenue and spending over the long term.

“We must be a city with a single agenda: to live within our means, honestly, without expecting someone else to pick up the tab,” Sanders said Wednesday evening. “Before that 18 months is over, I will have come back to you with a plan to resolve the city’s structural deficit.”

Sanders ruled out bankruptcy, which has been a topic of discussion among local bloggers and some conservative political activists. Neither Sanders nor the City Council have endorsed the idea.

Sanders has cut more than 1,000 city positions since taking office in 2005 and pushed public employee unions to accept less generous pension benefits for new workers. While the Republican has refused to support tax increases, he came under fire from some local conservatives last month for using one-time solutions to fix the budget deficit.

At the time, the mayor argued that at least part of the deficit was due to a temporary, cyclical downturn in revenue, not structural overspending.

“Hard times give rise to extremist views, but we’ve experienced nothing that warrants the simplistic arguments you hear for bankruptcy, or for decimating our services, or for pinning our hopes on pension take-backs that courts have said are illegal,” Sanders said. “We must not compound our troubles by embracing the false promise of easy answers, or by ignoring hard truths.”

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