City Budget Office Director Beth Goldberg, the woman responsible for stabilizing our depressing, recession-era city budget under the McGinn administration—a budget with virtually no new revenue that nevertheless managed to preserve much-needed social services—is resigning, according to everyone.

Here is a nice quote about her from mayor Mike McGinn:

"When I entered office, we were experiencing the longest, deepest recession since the Great Depression. Beth quickly stabilized our city budget in the face of dramatically reduced revenues. She crafted policies to rebuild our Rainy Day Fund to record levels, including proactively restoring depleted reserve funds. Beth worked hard to make the City budget more accessible to the general public and won an award for municipal budget transparency last year. And she was instrumental in securing an innovative, long-term jail contract with King County that provides financial and operational security to both of our governments. I am grateful for her service in my administration and strongly believe that she is leaving City government in better shape than when she arrived.”

She may be resigning but, according to sources, Goldberg is only doing so because she was pressured by Ed Murray's camp. "It's the prerogative of the Mayor-elect's to hand-pick department heads and he's exercising that prerogative for the Budget Office, among others," confirms Murray spokesman Jeff Reading, who adds: "I think there will be a greater opportunity to articulate the answer to the inevitable next question — 'well, then why that department?' — when he names his selection for the job."

It's also fairly common knowledge that Goldberg didn't work well with folks on the second floor—or rather, they didn't work well with her (the council's budget committee chair, Tim Burgess, banned her from attending his budget meetings earlier this year).

Peter Hahn, the director of the Seattle Department of Transportation is also, ahem, "resigning," as is Office of Intergovernmental Relations Director Marco Lowe, Personnel Director Dave Stewart, and Rick Hooper, Director of the Office of Housing.