Rochester’s City Budget Is Not a People’s Budget
On May 10, Mayor Malik Evans released Rochester’s proposed city budget for the 2024 fiscal year. While he refers to it as a “prosperity budget,” there is much in it that will not help the people of Rochester prosper.
Over the past month and a half, your People’s Slate-backed council members have spoken out against the budget, highlighting its many deficiencies and calling for their peers on City Council to vote “no” when it came time to decide the fiscal future of Rochester for the next year.
Despite their efforts—and the efforts of all the many community members who showed up at Speak to Council meetings to express their disapproval—the budget passed, although by a narrow margin. People’s Slate-backed council members Martin, Lupien, and Smith, along with council member Lightfoot, all voted no—the other five members voted yes.
In the paragraphs that follow, we’ll highlight each of your People’s Slate-backed council members’ rationale for voting “no” on this year’s city budget.
Stanley Martin
For the past three years, Council Member Martin has asked to be involved in creating the budgets for her department, seeking to make space for such provisions as providing health insurance for all council staff, offering full-time positions to legislative workers, and taking action to address misogyny and gender discrimination. Each year the Council President and Mayor’s offices have failed to honor these requests.
This lack of transparency permeates the budget process in Rochester, and has resulted in an annual budget that does not speak to the stated priorities of the Rochester community.
Evidence of this lack of transparency exists in the Police Accountability Board’s requests to add positions being denied by President Meléndez without input from the council body. When Council Member Martin asked for rationale for these denials, the justification lacked details, using the pronoun “we” without providing the names of the decision makers. Meléndez also sought to move the PAB’s offices to an unfinished basement with severe water damage, citing the “council” as the decision maker, despite never having consulted with the body.
“Ultimately,” Martin notes, “I’m concerned that a lot of the non-legislative decisions claimed to be made by council are not in fact brought to the entire body for consideration.”
In addition to attempts to stymie the PAB in their democratically-elected duties, the 2024-25 city budget maintained the RPD budget at $110 million—that’s more money for the police than for city IT, emergency communications, neighborhood & business development, recreation, and youth & human services combined. This is in direct contradiction to the will of the people, who—in the mayor’s own budget input session–did not rank policing as a top-three consideration for investment.
What’s more, alternatives to policing—which Rochesterians have expressed an interest in expanding—have once again been grossly underfunded. The community responder program, for example, was only funded at $500,000—that’s around half of 1% of the overall police budget.
As Council Member Martin notes, “the administration consistently talks about prevention and enforcement and using the whole toolbox to address the issues we have.” And yet, they persistently fail to allocate adequate resources to “tools” other than the police force.
Martin also notes the botched and unfair (and totally opaque) property reassessment and the wage gap between managers and providers of essential services (most notably in departments that require Spanish-speaking employees) as reasons they could not vote in favor of this budget.
Mary Lupien
Council Member Lupien’s remarks on her “no” vote share many of the same sentiments.
Lupien acknowledges that the budget does take some steps in the right direction, offering “free admission to the Genesee Valley pool, continued support for social-emotional health for youth, and funding for an exciting expanded community responder program.”
However, when your city is in crisis, as Rochester most certainly is, small steps simply aren’t enough. Half of Rochester’s children are living in poverty; a record number of our neighbors are currently unhoused, while many more families are being displaced from their homes due to spiking housing costs.
The steps this budget will take may, in some instances, move us toward becoming the city we want to be, but they simply are not enough to meaningfully address the needs of our community. They demonstrate a moral misalignment between the will of the people and our governing bodies—“our community deserves more than what this budget will deliver.”
Kim Smith
The lack of consideration for the stated priorities of Rochesterians is at the forefront of why Council Member Smith voted no on this budget. For months, Rochesterians have been showing up to Speak to Council sessions to express their monumental disapproval for, as an example, the reassessment. Their outcries have been loud, persistent, and passionate.
Rather than seeing this passion as an indication that the Rochester community was willing to come together and stand up for what they believed to be right, Council Member Mitch Gruber dismissed them. He claimed “good government is not sexy…good government is not chants. Good government is not catch-phrases. Good government is not little slogans.”
His ignorance was particularly perturbing to Smith, who pointed out “chants, catch-phrases, and slogans were an integral part of the social justice movement that gave me my rights and the right to sit on this council.”
Ultimately, there is a deep disconnect between the majority of council members who voted yes on this budget and the people of Rochester whose needs are not being taken into consideration. This is the commonality at the heart of all three People’s Slate-backed council members’ opposition of this budget: it underfunds programs that would improve the quality of life of Rochesterians in real, meaningful ways while heaping money upon a militaristic police department that time and time again fails to protect or serve our community members most in need of protection and service.
So What’s Next?
The fight to transform Rochester for the better is far from over.
2025 is a local election year.
That means we have the opportunity to increase the presence of People’s Slate-backed members on our city council. The budget only passed by one vote this year. Imagine what we could accomplish with just one more aligned council member—such an outcome is entirely achievable with the support and engagement from our community—that’s you.
If you’d like to do your part in making Rochester’s governance more transparent, fair, and aligned to the will and needs of Rochesterians, here’s a few ways you can help out:
Register to attend the upcoming People’s Slate interest meeting on July 31 at 6pm at 1150 University Ave, Suite 8. We’ll be discussing our movement to reclaim, reimagine, and refund Rochester; how you can get involved; what it means to be a candidate for public office; and taking the first steps towards building the team that will work to further transform Rochester for the better.
Make sure you’re registered to vote and know where your polling place is so you can take direct action to elect more progressive candidates to our city council.
Join our mailing list (if you haven’t already) so you can stay up-to-date on the fight for Rochester’s future.