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When Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) was elected speaker in January, she promised to refashion the budget process. Transparency was in. Back-room deals were so last year. Now that the $52.9 billion budget for 2007 has been set, those involved in this year’s budget work say the reforms were a step in the right direction, but more are needed.

“We want to continue the process of reform,” said Quinn spokeswoman Maria Alvarado. “These were the first and significant steps.”

When Quinn announced plans to revamp the budget process in April, she said her goal was to implement the budget process envisioned within the 1989 City Charter revisions.

“The Charter Revision Commission envisioned an expense budget in which every agency budget is broken out by particular program, purpose or activity, accompanied by statements of the goals each was designed to accomplish and the amount of funds allocated,” Quinn said in April. “But this has never happened.”

Typically, the annual budget dance has gone something like this: the mayor proposed a budget favoring his pet projects and cut funding for popular programs like the arts and libraries. City Council members cried foul and called hearings to restore money. The speaker, who chooses which programs to lobby for in negotiations with the mayor and controlled the Council’s multimillion-dollar operating budget, was handed little scraps of paper with money requests for programs from Council members. Huge sums of money were doled out behind closed doors, and some members complained that no one asked for their input at all.

“These were the first and significant steps.” – Quinn spokeswoman Maria Alvarado

This year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) agreed to baseline five-day library service, summer jobs and trash pick-up—when the mayor proposes his 2008 budget, the money will already be there for those programs.

“This was a major step,” said Finance Committee Chair David Weprin (D-Queens).

Weprin called for more cultural money to be baselined in the future, in addition to the budgets for the public advocate and five borough presidents.

In place of scraps of paper and backroom dealing, Quinn allowed Council members four program requests each. Members had to get signatures from 10 fellow Council members in three of the five boroughs. Council members were limited to supporting seven proposals in addition to their own four.

Maria Doulis, a city budget analyst at the non-partisan Citizen’s Budget Commission, said requiring signatures was a way for Quinn to “put a cap on pork.”

“It also discourages what can be seen as frivolous requests,” she said.

This year, budget requests for six programs were broken down, including for the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), which takes a sizable chunk of the budget. Doulis called Quinn’s reform on the units of appropriation limited but a good step.

“Insofar as they can accomplish getting a little more detail in there,” she said, “I guess we’ll see. That’s why this is a trial. I’m sure there’s an opportunity by breaking it down a little bit more to see how efficiently the money is being used.”

New York City set aside $2 billion in surplus money in this year’s budget to pay for city employees’ health insurance upon retirement, the first major city in the country to do so.

“We’re very happy with the health insurance trust fund,” Doulis said. “We would have liked to have seen the same aggressive action on the pension front.”

This year’s budget did take longer to finalize than in previous years, with negotiating continuing up to the late night June 29 full Council vote. Doulis attributed this to a new speaker with a new staff, and their consequent learning curve in the budgeting process.

Weprin, who chaired the Finance Committee and sought his own individual requests under the old system throughout the last Council term, called the overall progress positive.

“We learn from the process, and hopefully we’ll even streamline it a little bit more,” he said. “But there’s no question it was more open.”