WASHINGTON — The Community Services Board of Alexandria, Va., facing budget cutbacks along with many other municipalities in the country, turned to an unusual source recently to help it decide what to keep and what to pare.
City staff had worked for several years to establish a new program, called Safe Haven, to provide housing to homeless residents with mental illness. But as the program was finally about to become a reality, board members realized this fall that delaying its start would help them balance the budget. On the other hand, it would mean postponing a service they had decided was badly needed.
So the board turned for advice to its professional ethicist, Michael Gillette.
Gillette's advice was that the board, which handles the city's mental health and substance abuse programs, needed to first provide the services it had already promised citizens. Since Safe Haven was a new program, it was acceptable to delay its start in order to uphold those promises.
The city decided to delay the new program as a part of its cuts.
Having this type of a discussion about the ethical concerns of budget reductions rarely happens in municipal government, Gillette said in an interview. Cities tend to reduce their budgets by not filling vacant positions and cutting back on library hours and other services.
"We generally get into very politicized arguments about this line item and that line item," he said. "We almost never have a broader values discussion."
Alexandria is not alone in facing major budget shortfalls. Sixty-nine percent of the nation's largest cities reported a declining ability to meet needs, according to a September report from the National League of Cities.
However, the ethicist approach of the Alexandria board is rare, said Michael Pagano, dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
"An ethicist presents a perspective that is unusual and certainly needed," Pagano said. "It's an approach that asks us to think about the process of arriving at these decisions."
Gillette began advising the board as a consultant in 2000 on how to set up an ethics committee. Since 2003, he's been working with the board on the ethics of scarcity, which became increasingly important as the city's budget began to shrink.
When the board was faced with severe cuts this fall, his role expanded to helping them make some more difficult decisions, such as what to do about Safe Haven.
