Platform: Program for the City

This folder holds the meta-proposal — the rolled-up program for the city, synthesized from the completed policy papers in policy areas.

It is empty, and will stay empty until the first policy area passes stage 3 of the pipeline: a compiled paper with sourced evidence, class-tagged and costed mechanisms, and a steelmanned trade-offs section. The program is the distillation, not the workspace.

program-for-the-city.md will be created by /update-platform once the first paper lands.

What is here in the meantime

The emerging spine — not a draft of the program and not a substitute for it. Eight policy areas opened on one day, and read together they describe a much smaller number of recurring mechanisms than eight. Naming those is analysis of what has been said, which stage 1 permits; it proposes nothing, carries no class letters, and cites nothing, because no jurisdiction map exists yet.

The distinction is worth holding rather than blurring. The spine says this is what the evidence base appears to be about. The program will say this is what a mayor would do about it, under this instrument, for this money. Only the second needs the gate, and only the second is a platform.

How it will be organised

Not by theme. By deliverability, because that is the first honest question about any mayoral platform and the document should answer it before it argues anything. Three tables come before the policy sections:

1. What the council can do on its own motion — every class-A recommendation across every area, with its cost and the department that would carry it.
2. What needs an approval, and from whom — class B, with the approving body named.
3. What needs a partner, or is advocacy only — class C and D, with the counterpart named and the mayor’s actual leverage stated rather than assumed.

The classes come from the powers doctrine. A platform whose class-A table is short and whose class-D table is long is telling the truth about the office, and padding the first table by reclassifying is exactly the failure the doctrine exists to prevent.

Three further checks run before anything is published:

• Department capacity. Municipal delivery capacity is more binding than money. Four proposals landing on the same understaffed unit is a conflict even if each is individually funded.
• Fiscal coherence. A running total, stated as a share of the relevant budget lines rather than in absolute shekels alone.
• Council arithmetic. What majority each recommendation needs, and whether any plausible coalition on the council as it stands delivers it. A program that cannot pass its own council is a finding worth publishing, not a reason to soften the program.

Conflicts that survive all of that go in an open tensions section at the end, rather than being papered over.