On June 20, Oregon’s Portland City Council unanimously voted to approve a budget that had been one of the most grassroots-contested examples of austerity in recent memory.

Weeks earlier, in a vote to approve the framework of this budget on May 29, the City Council’s long-maintained show of consensus was broken when Commissioner Amanda Fritz voted ‘No.’ (More on her vote later). However, by the final budget vote last Thursday she had been compelled to change her mind.

How has the 2013 budget developed? When the Portland Budget process began several months ago, newly elected Mayor Charlie Hales announced a $25 million deficit in the city’s General Fund. Each bureau was told to submit budgets with 10 percent cuts, signaling Hales’s determination to oversee mass lay-offs and the slashing or elimination of essential programs that many Portlanders have come to rely on.

This latest round of cuts promised to be the worst of several successive years of austerity measures. Each time city officials have told the public that ‘temporary’ sacrifices need to be made now to enable the economy to turn around tomorrow. Each time there was no turn-around and more cuts were, predictably, peddled the next year despite this economic ‘tonic’s’ miserable […]