By Jerry Burris
Advertiser Editorial Editor

Mayor Jeremy Harris is one of those people who easily flushes.

He flushes when he's pleased. He flushes when he's amused.

And he flushes when he is angry.

During a meeting with reporters at City Hall last week, we're told, the mayoral visage had a distinctly red tone. And it wasn't because he was pleased or amused.

His Honor was venting a bit about his budget battles with the Honolulu City Council. For several weeks now, city officials have been working hard to sell the story that the council has been irresponsible in its writing of the new city operating budget.

What particularly got the mayor's goat was what the council budget committee did in its last-minute scramble to come up with a budget that presumably was in balance.

To make the numbers work, budget chairwoman Ann Kobayashi shifted some "excess" money from a special fund for the general fund and ordered the refinancing of about $7.7 million in city debt with low-interest, short-term borrowing.

Harris administration officials say such techniques, while legal, are not prudent because they aren't sustainable. That is, the same money might not be available next time around.

But it wasn't the techniques used by Kobayashi that made Harris mad. It was the fact that last year, Kobayashi nearly stripped the hide off of Harris and his administration for doing precisely the same thing.

She complained that Harris was saddling future taxpayers with huge problems by "borrowing money to pay back money it has already borrowed."

And shifting cash around from fund to fund, she said, is simply avoiding the reality of a city that has a budget bigger than the tax base can support.

Harris contends that these and other criticisms of his budget (including, he points out, editorials in this newspaper) had as much to do with the collapse of his gubernatorial campaign as anything, up to and including those investigations by the campaign spending commission.

And now, he says, when the shoe is on the other foot — when it's the council doing the fancy fiscal dancing — hardly a word of criticism is heard.

Kobayashi shrugs off the complaint, saying it is all a matter of degree. Harris refinanced nearly $53 million in debt and $60 million from the sewer fund.

That, says Harris, is a distinction without a difference. And he's right.

If it's bad fiscal policy at the $50 million level, it's bad fiscal policy at the $7 million level.

Up to this year Harris did everything he could to write a budget without raising property tax rates or fees. This year, with his political ambitions at least temporarily on hold, he proposed both.

Kobayashi, clearly eying a run for mayor, appears determined to hold the line on new or increased fees wherever she can.

What a difference a year makes.

Reach Jerry Burris through letters@honoluluadvertiser.com.