The horrific crane crash on Friday was the second such construction site accident in three months. It placed the dangers of misallocating city resources in sharp relief.

One of New York City’s jobs is to monitor construction sites, private or public. For years advocates, watchdogs, elected officials, and community members have warned that there are simply not enough building inspectors to go around. They say that a largely unchanged budget at the Department of Buildings has not been enough to keep up with the rapid pace of development.

A modest increase in staffing was made last summer and again just two weeks ago, but those increases are too late for the dozens of people who have died in construction accidents in the city over the last few years.

The reality is that New York has some money. We are emerging from our third straight year of massive tax revenue surpluses.

The tragedy is not Mayor Bloomberg’s fault. Still many of us feel that it is time to ask why pressing problems such as those at the buildings department were allowed to continue in flush times.

Over the last two years, for example, I have written op-eds about the need for more inspectors and better management of the Buildings Department. Others are concerned about the department of education. To us it seems curious that the mayor continues to plead poverty in the upcoming 2009 budget. He is planning to cut other vital agencies as part of his program to shore up New York finances for what he predicts will be huge deficits beginning in 2010.

This is an especially strange position because the Independent Budget Office — New York City’s historically conservative, a-political fiscal watchdog — recently released a significantly rosier economic outlook for our city than that of the mayor’s office, projecting that we will have $1.2 billion more by the end of 2010 than the administration predicts.

Even in an era where city budgets reach $60 billion, $1.2 billion isn’t pocket change, and it’s a large enough discrepancy to raise questions, such as if the administration is painting taxpayers an accurate financial picture, and if the mayor should even be the authority on the city’s revenue.

Of course, economic forecasting is in no way an exact science, and it is better to err on the side of caution and estimate conservatively rather than frivolously. We are also certainly facing an economic slowdown of some magnitude. But the buildings department debacle is a good example of how the mayor has sometimes cut corners in the wrong places, and potentially sacrificed the overall health of the city to line up numbers on its balance sheet.

The real irony which has been missed so far though is that it is the mayor’s own administration that has made many of the funding promises and policy moves — such as initiating the building boom with rezonings — which now force us to sharpen the budget axe.

Furthermore, in giving inaccurate predictions — intentionally or not — the mayor avoids scrutiny altogether of his miscalculations, and has a means to renege on funding promises that in retrospect may have been too bold. By predicting shortfalls, rather than admitting its mistakes or owning up to empty promises, the administration can blame cuts on an economic downturn. A pattern emerges: after dire predictions by the mayor in each of the last few years, there ended up being large surpluses of $3.7 billion, $3.5 billion, and $5.3 billion respectively between 2005 and 2007.

Also, the mayor may want a reason to make cuts to a city budget that has grown by nearly 30% under his watch. To wit: he has kept initial cuts to the 2009 budget in place, even after his own office predicted a significant uptick in expected revenues last month following a particularly chilly winter forecast.

The most inexcusable cut will go to the city’s schoolchildren, whom the mayor promised he would never underfund. A proposed property tax roll-back to alleviate an earlier hike would be eighty-sixed as well in 2010 under his multi-year budget. To say the least, these proposals are unpopular, but surely the cuts would be downright unjustifiable if the mayor didn’t have his grim revenue projections to point to.

The mayor has also used a bleak outlook as a contrivance to substantiate the need to dump projects he promised at the neighborhood level. In Greenpoint and Williamsburg, where I live, the Bloomberg administration in 2005 agreed to build a 28-acre waterfront park as well as hundreds of units of desperately needed affordable housing. Years later, the city has started some construction of the park, but the largest parcel has still not been purchased, never mind developed. Nor has the affordable housing been built. Instead, the city is pleading poverty, saying it does not have the funds.

When evaluating the budget, it’s also important to remember the recent federal investigation into the city council’s accounting practices — fraudulent discretionary spending items approved by the mayor’s office, evidently created in order to pad the budget. In other words, there is a history of malfeasance when it comes to the budget, and a strong political benefit to fudging the numbers — too strong to trust politicians with.

Instead, we should start the budget process from a non-partisan place: the Independent Budget Office. Making the IBO the first and last word on forecasting would not cost the city a dime since the agency already regularly reports on the budget, while adding the dual benefits of impartiality and taxpayer savings after eliminating duplicative services at the OMB.

It would also not supersede the mayor’s charter-granted authority to initiate spending priorities. Unlike in federal government, where there is actual debate between the president and Congress about revenue projections, the Charter of New York City explicitly gives the mayor the responsibility to present a revenue forecast, and requires IBO to respond, but it does not prohibit the mayor from working with IBO to set forth a spending plan based entirely on IBO’s revenue projections. If he simply adopted IBO’s revenue forecasts as his own, and based his spending priorities on that projection, he would remove all doubt that the prognosis would be the best guess available.

One way or another, if the mayor doesn’t make such a change, put an end to unjustified cuts, and keep his past promises, the most serious deficit he will face as he ends his term will be one of trust.

Mr. Thies is a Brooklyn Community Board 1 member and former City Council staffer.