THE Mi ichkigan , Daily Volume LXXXIV, No. 5-S Ann Arbor, Michigan-Tuesday, May 14, 1974 Ten Cents Sixteen Pages Ouncil votes in $18 million 1975 budget Approved following lengthy debate Dily Photo by TOM GOTTLIEB City Administrator Sylvester Murray looks through the proposed 1975 budget at last night's CityCouncil meeting. Supreme Court dsmisss federal wiretap evidence By GORDON ATCHESON and CHERYL PILATE After a marthon debating ses- sion, City Council early this morn- ing approved an $18.0 million fiscal 1975 municipal budget which will go into effect July 1. The very tight budget was ap- proved by an 8-3 vote as the Re- publicans along w i t h Democrats Carol Jones (D-Second Ward) and J a m e s Kenworthy (D - Fourth Ward) voted in favor of the docu- ment. CLEARLY ALL three parties had dis- agreements with the budget as designed by the city administration. "All of us have our sacred cows and all of them have been hit hard in the city budget," Councilman L o u i s Belcher (R-Fifth Ward) said. ALTHOUGH the $18 million budget represents a record high amount, most of the additional funds will be used to offset the effects of the rapid inflation rate during this year and to cover sal- ary increases mandated under existing employe contracts. The division hardest hit in the 1975 city budget is Human Resources, which encompasses drug treatment programs, child and health care, and other related services. Previously these operations received a large financial boost from federal Revenue Sharing dollars but in the up- coming budget those monies have been diverted to other projects. THE PRIMARY cause of the austere budget is a $600,000 appropriation to cut the municipal debt which currently tops $1 million. The state government ordered the city last winter to eliminate the debt within three years - fearing bud- get problems had reached the crisis stage. During the present fiscal year - the first in the debt reduction program - over 170 city employes had to be laid off to balance the budget and still include funds for debt repayment. The possibility of further lay-offs looms in the distance if voters fail to pass an emergency property tax increase that appears on the June 10 school board elec- tion ballot. WITHOUT the additional monies raised by the proposed one-time tax hike, the city will not be able to balance the fiscal 1975 budget, according to Murray, there- by necessitating further cut-backs which would probably take the form of per- sonnel reductions. But none of the parties could muster the necessary s e v e n votes to make wholesale alterations in the document. However, two relatively minor changes were made as coalitions agreed to re- allocate a total of $30,000 to re-establish crossing guards near several scho-sls and to make a grant to the Community Grow program. WASHINGTON (') - The Supreme Court dealt a sharp setback to the Jus- tice Department yesterday by invalidat- ing a number of anticrime wiretaps be- cause federal officials failed to follow the proper procedure in applying for the taps. The decision invalidated federal crimi- nal charges against 626 defendants, in- cluding many prosecuted for alleged or- ganized crime and narcotics offenses. THE CASE which prompted the action was filed by Dominic Giordano of Mary- land, who was charged along with others with federal narcotics offenses following wiretaps authorized in 1970. Giordano and other defendants filed motions to suppress evidence gathered by the wiretaps on grounds that the wire- taps were legally defective. The case turned on whether the Jus- tice Department under former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell followed the demands of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act in requesting wiretaps. THE COURT held that Mitchell did not follow the requirements of the act in a series of wiretap requests that were signed by his executive assistant Saul Linderbaum. The law specifies that ei- ther the attorney general himself or a specially - designated assistant attorney general approve wiretap requests. The wiretaps requests in question are made to federal judges, who must give approval before the taps can be made. Justice Byron White, writing for a unanimous court, noted that the Nixon administration insisted that it should have wide latitude in delegating the attorney general's authority to request wiretaps because the federal law grants wide latitude among state officials in approving wiretap requests. WHITE SAID, however, "it is apparent that Congress desired to centralize and limit this authority where it was feasible to do so, a desire easily implemented in the federal establishment by confining the authority to approve wiretap appli- cations to the attorney general of a designated assistant attorney general. "To us, it appears wholly at odds with the scheme and the history of the act to construe it to permit the attorney gener- al to delegate this authority at will, whe- ther it be to his executive assistant or to any officer of the department other than an assistant attorney general," White said. In a companion case the court permit- ted the government to preserve the evi- dence gathered in a number of other questioned wiretaps. IN THIS CASE the issue was whether the evidence should be suppressed be- cause the applying officer in the federal government was improperly identified. The applications bore the name of the assistant attorney general but had ac- SSee SUPREME, Page 10