A priority is something that changes where the next dollar and the next position go. Berkeley assigns each department a percentage instead — and then arithmetic, department boundaries and the accidental distribution of vacancies decide what survives.
Berkeley’s FY2027–28 budget eliminates 138 positions. One hundred of them were unoccupied.
Eliminating an unoccupied position produces real budget savings — the money comes off the top line and the appropriation is gone. But no employee stopped doing that job when the position was eliminated. Only 38 of the 138 were occupied. This is the City’s own table:
| Status | Baseline FTE | Proposed reductions | After sales tax |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unoccupied | 211.69 | 100 | 126.69 |
| Occupied | 1,347.85 | 38 | 1,327.85 |
| Total | 1,559.54 | 138 | 1,454.54 |
These are the figures if Measure V fails; passage restores 33 positions and brings the reduction to 105. Every count on this page is the without‑the‑tax scenario, which is the one the City used to describe the cuts.
The larger number is the one in circulation. Asked at an August 2026 debate whether Berkeley had considered alternatives to the Measure V sales tax, Mayor Adena Ishii answered:
“What my — what the opposition does not maybe understand is how painful it was to cut a number of different employees over 100. I think nearly 180 employees that we had to cut in the city of Berkeley.”
Mayor Adena Ishii, Measure V debate, August 2026
Nearly 180 is the cumulative position count — the 138 in this budget plus 45 unoccupied positions held unfunded the cycle before. The City publishes that total and publishes the breakdown beside it: 145 of those 183 positions were unoccupied. The word used at the debate was employees.
How Berkeley decided what to cut is.
Departments were assigned percentage reduction targets. A department carrying vacancies could meet much of its target by deleting empty positions. A department that happened to be fully staffed had no such option and had to eliminate jobs people held. The City Manager’s Office describes the consequence in its own budget submission:
“Because four vacant positions were removed during the FY 2026 Mid‑Biennial Budget Update, meeting the new reduction target required eliminating not only vacant positions but additional filled positions.”
Proposed FY 2027 and FY 2028 Biennial Budget, May 19, 2026
Read what the office is saying about its own exposure. It reached occupied positions because it had already spent its vacancies — not because anyone examined its work and concluded that work elsewhere in the City mattered more. A target is a number handed down. Nothing in it says what the office does.
A department that happened to be carrying vacancies had more room to absorb its target without cutting occupied positions. A department that did not, did not.
An organization that knows what matters can act on it. It can protect its highest‑value work and cut lower‑value work more deeply. It can move people and money toward the things it says come first. It can explain why one function should grow while another shrinks.
Take the simplest case. One department is at capacity doing work the City cannot go without; another has carried four unfilled positions for months. Those four chairs are authorized capacity Berkeley already has. A process that began by ranking the work could have moved one — staffing the pressing need by giving up an unfilled position somewhere less pressing, and cutting nobody.
An across‑the‑board reduction cannot produce that result, because it never compares the two departments. It asks each one separately what it can cut from what it controls, so a vacancy is only ever an asset to the department that happens to hold it. An empty chair in one part of the organization and an unmet staffing need in another should at least trigger a cross‑department comparison. An across‑the‑board process does not naturally produce one.
This is the part worth sitting with. A percentage target takes the existing structure as given and distributes reductions across it. Every department survives; every department shrinks; the boundaries between them are the one thing the exercise never questions.
So the chart ends up performing the function a priority system is supposed to perform. What gets protected is whatever sits inside a department with slack, and what gets cut is whatever sits inside a department without it. That is a ranking — it is just not one anybody chose, and it does not correspond to any statement Berkeley has made about what it values.
It also puts every department in the same position: able to examine only its own budget, unable to ask whether two functions should be combined, whether two units could share space or management, or whether capacity should move across a boundary. One four‑person office ran into exactly that wall, and its answer shows what the method cannot reach.
In 2013 the City Auditor’s office asked the Goldman School of Public Policy for alternatives to what Berkeley was already doing — in the Auditor’s own words, its “modified ‘across the board’ approach to General Fund budgeting.” The study described the mechanism and judged it:
“the City Manager asks each department to make the same percentage reduction from the prior year’s baseline… From this baseline, the City Manager adjusts the final funding amount, based on a process and criteria that do not appear in the Budget Documents, and are essentially invisible to the public.”
Across‑the‑board cuts are “ill equipped to address major structural changes.”
Berkeley Based Budgeting, Goldman School of Public Policy, May 29, 2013, transmitted to Council by City Auditor Ann-Marie Hogan, April 1, 2014
The study was never City policy and Berkeley was free to reject it. What it establishes is that the City examined this exact method, on its own initiative, and was told what it is bad at. Thirteen years later Berkeley faced a structural deficit and reached for substantially the same method.
It is not 138, and it is not nearly 180.
One hundred unoccupied positions is the measure of how much of the reduction could be absorbed without deciding which occupied work mattered least. And the way those vacancies determined which departments had to go further is the measure of what replaced deciding.
Berkeley says it has priorities. A priority should change where the next dollar and the next position go. When every department receives a percentage instead, the organization chart is functioning as the priority system — and Berkeley is cutting by arithmetic because it has not done the harder work of deciding what is important.