By its very nature, a city budget is a bit of a bore, a bloodless document full of endless numbers.

In glancing at the preliminary budget for 2002, though, we were immediately struck – perhaps even smote – by the fact that the largest single expense category is something labelled “support for developers.”

Golly, (or words to that effect), we thought. If the island’s developers are indeed reaping the benefits of rising home prices, why do we need to “support” them with $3.2 million of our tax money. On the contrary, shouldn’t the city be trying to rein them in, and control growth and development?

As reported elsewhere in this issue, it turns out that the issue is one of semantics. The category refers to the city’s costs of regulating development through its building and zoning codes. So what the budget terms “support” for developers could just as easily have been termed “regulation.”

As the recent elections demonstrated, this is no minor matter. Growth and development were the hot-button issues. Deborah Vann ousted incumbent Jim Llewellyn by arguing that “taxpayers subsidize most of the cost of development.”

Would Vann’s argument have been as convincing had the budget referred to “regulation,” which Vann favors, instead of “support?”

The question of whether development is “subsidized” is a close call. City Finance Director Ralph Eells, who coined the “support for developers” term, argues that because nothing can be built without a permit, then permits must benefit the would-be builder. To the extent that the city does not recover its full costs of regulating building, Eells says builders receive a subsidy.

But that’s hardly the only way to look at the question. Builders point out that they don’t ask for regulation – the citizenry does, and so citizens should bear the costs.

From a legal and historical perspective, the builders actually have the better of the argument. Creatures of the 20th century, zoning codes were instituted to make development more responsive to non-economic imperatives.

Builders frequently challenged codes as unlawful restrictions on property rights.The U.S. Supreme Court blessed the zoning concept in 1925. But in so doing, it said that codes were intended to benefit the public at large, saying that zoning ordinances “must find their justification in some aspect of the police power, asserted for the public welfare.”

Legal history aside, there is the highly practical matter that builders are economic beneficiaries of this community’s amenities, including a zoning code and a somewhat lower density than is found in many cities. So while zoning may be for the benefit of the public, the builder gains when zoning creates a more desirable product.

We doubt that there is any completely satisfying basis for resolving the question of who benefits from planning, and who should therefore pay. Forceful arguments on both sides suggest that a 50-50 split of costs between applicants and the public may be as good as any.

And that policy debate is important. But it should not be skewed by an inflammatory label in an otherwise objective budget document from the administration. Both the city council and the citizens should be able to rely on the budget to present facts in an unbiased, straightforward manner.

With this line item, the city fell short.