We’ve got some catching up to do.

Marney Cox’s analysis published here last month offered too few encouraging words on the San Diego economy in light of the effort spent framing the national picture. An upbeat conclusion was buried in his final paragraph: “San Diego’s economy will be skating on thin ice during the first half of 2003…”

Well, metaphors are fun and his is reasonable, but just as accurate and certainly more hopeful is the realization that if San Diego’s economy grows by only 2.5 percent this year — less growth than any year in recent history — it will still move forward from $127 billion to $130.1 billion. And Cox doesn’t expect it will be that weak.

The point: There is a lot of work, service, productivity, liquidity and movement of cash, despite difficult times, to keep nearly everyone busy, well fed and sheltered, with leisure time built in, if not time to spare.

In a relatively weak economy, San Diego will produce about $100 billion more in 2003 than Iraq, presuming Iraq isn’t obliterated, and Iraq has about seven times San Diego’s population. The point, made all the clearer since Sept. 11: Counting one’s blessings is way more important than counting one’s dough.

But counting money is indeed important, and we encourage the San Diego City Council, dominated now by members sensitive to the city’s big labor unions, to persuade the Police Officers Association to back off that 11 percent two-year pay raise until the entire budgeting process is sorted and settled. Let’s talk again in a year. No council has been better equipped to persuade the unions to ease off. If we have entered a budgeting period of crisis proportions, then belt tightening is appropriate everywhere.

However, we’re not persuaded that either public or most private budgeting is in crisis. Rather, it has become more difficult, not impossible, and made shrill by exaggeration from some policy-makers and a press too eager for the sensational. There’s great danger in fabricating budget crises – layoffs when attrition would do, cutting off vendors and suppliers when modest reductions would suffice.

For instance, the state’s estimated budget gap grew from $6.1 billion this year on a $76 billion budget to an estimated $15 billion gap next fiscal year, according to Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill, who is usually right. But when the governor, aided by new budget director Steve Peace, made his dire announcement Dec. 18, the “budget crisis” grew to $34.8 billion without sufficient clarity, at least in the San Diego press, that he was now talking about an 18-month worst-case scenario rather than a traditional 12-month scenario of reasonable expectations, and without acknowledging how much spending had grown since he took office four years earlier. Politicians have used warnings of shortfalls and crises for many years to help justify difficult decisions because it’s not easy to say no, and perhaps because it’s more heroic to solve a budget crisis than a budget gap. And we don’t mean to minimize California’s or San Diego’s current situations. But making tough decisions while everyone’s on the same page, and in the same year, will build credibility even in hard times. Clarity in the press’ reporting will help.

At the San Diego Metropolitan, we have experienced our own difficult times, like others in the private sector, including salary reduction and employment reduction through lay-off and attrition since early last year, surviving what the trade journals assure is the worst downturn in advertising revenue since the Great Depression. And so we are certain that San Diego’s police officers, too, and other public employees can survive another year or two without raises, regardless of how deserving of raises they may be.

We hope the city’s largesse with its police officers does not stimulate the same kind of acrimony from the Municipal Employees Association that we are witnessing as one segment of the hospitality industry criticizes another, but we won’t hold our breath. We fear that hotel operators will come unglued as raising the transient-occupancy tax (TOT) becomes a more attractive option among many methods that must be employed to help ease these difficulties. But it’s quite true, San Diego’s 10.5 percent TOT will remain well below most other large cities even if the City Council hikes it by two or three cents on the dollar. These are difficult times, but can be made bearable and even comfortable by spreading the burden. Our visitors can afford it; won’t even notice.

Of the 180 or so recipients of the TOT, only the Convention & Visitors Bureau and the Convention Center Corp. generate large sums of TOT. Their cash flow from City Hall should not be reduced unless the city wants to trigger a decline in TOT and related visitor spending. Economic generators are not places to cut.

We say this with full disclosure that the Convention Center Corp., the Metropolitan’s largest client, intends to eliminate publication of Events as a result of the City Council’s cutback of CCC cash flow in the current fiscal year. We hope the council rescinds this cutback, even if Events is not continued.

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As for belt-tightening in the private sector, we are discouraged to learn of some of the excessive spending, including first-class air fare, enjoyed by the chief executive of at least one of the formerly publicly traded corporations in San Diego that have filed for bankruptcy protection, and we wonder about a very few excessive salaries among not-for-profits, especially those accepting public funds. Excess in the executive suite is only a step above cooking the books. Fiscal prudence in good times or bad is not only decent, but may be a company’s only salvation during the most difficult cycles. We suspect most business people are prudent.

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An alternative to the approach being pursued by the Chargers/stadium task force is to consider the best land-uses for Mission Valley first, and the best place in San Diego for a stadium first, then work on the economics that will accommodate both. As it stands, the task force is responding to a single ambitious proposal, the Chargers’ suggestion that a $400 million stadium and mixed-use complex replace the existing Qualcomm Stadium on the same site.

Urban planners might argue that the best use for the Qualcomm Stadium site is passive park, landscaped to return the San Diego River flood plane to a more natural state. It is one of the few places along the river where such restoration can be accomplished on a large scale and would powerfully advance Mayor Murphy’s river revival plan.

For reasons similar to why Downtown San Diego became the best possible place for the new Padres Ballpark — Downtown’s existing street grid, the confluence of public transit and the existence of a redevelopment district – Downtown may be the best place for a new Chargers stadium. And while we don’t think a location next door to the Padres Ballpark is appropriate because a third giant footprint would be one too many next to the ballpark and San Diego Convention Center, we do wonder about the workability of the historically sympathetic Balboa Stadium site, now part of the City College complex, a benefit in that the Community College District is one entity with which City Hall can work. We suspect land given up by the district could be replaced across C Street.

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And if Murphy really wants to be remembered as the mayor of parks, having championed Mission Trails years ago, he should persuade Caltrans to abandon Old Town and build 350,000 square feet of office space Downtown where it belongs, in the real hub of San Diego’s transit and government office district. He’d be able to double the size of Old Town State Historic Park, the most popular and often most-crowded state park in California, and he’d get his only chance to connect open space in Old Town with the San Diego River and Mission Bay, just a nice stroll away when Caltrans clears out and the underpass of Interstates 8 and 5 are beautified. Perhaps the multi-tasking mayor, who is performing better than that senior columnist allows, can ask for such an analysis.