Why not run all of City government as a Foundation?

As a non-profit ourselves and an organization that takes a fairly skeptical approach to much of what government does, we at the Rio Grande Foundation were admittedly intrigued by the launch of the “One Albuquerque Fund.”  Although the link to the group’s website was not working as of this writing, the Fund is meant to provide private support to the City’s efforts in areas such as “police recruitment and housing vouchers for the homeless” (according to the Albuquerque Journal.

The idea seems to be that if the City does not have the resources for a particular project, then private sector funders will step up.  As long as the process is transparent (and they say it will be), we at the Rio Grande Foundation have no problem with this approach, in fact we’d applaud it.

But, as usual, we have questions:

1. Albuquerque just passed a massive budget increase in 2019, why is that not enough? Might the issue be priorities, not a lack of money?
2. If this model proves successful, then perhaps more areas of government should be funded voluntarily rather than by force?
3. If the model fails to generate significant donations, then what does that say about the lack of interest in funding government when they won’t be put in jail for NOT funding it?