Consolidating Numbers

Who could have conceived two, three, five or even 10 years ago that the Board of County Commissioners would be setting the tempo for holding the line on property taxes in the county?

That is pretty much what happened two weeks ago when the county set a tentative budget and millage rate, effectively locking in the current millage rate for the coming fiscal year.

For the city of Port St. Joe, where commissioners had set a tentative millage rate increase of two mills to provide flexibility, the county’s actions were sufficient for the mayor to declare he would not vote for a millage increase.

Yes, he agreed with a fellow commissioner, the county had been over-taxing property owners for some time, but in a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world, Mayor Mel Magidson said the writing was on the wall for all taxing authorities.

But in making their decision two weeks ago to lock in a tax cut of nearly $2 million, county commissioners also made convincing arguments, perhaps  inadvertently, supporting conclusions drawn in recent years.

Last year it was the contention, held firmly by commissioners, that the county simply could not cut any more and the 2009-2010 budget was as lean as could be.

At the time we made the argument that the county should be cutting to essential services and state mandates and requirements and not one penny more.

There was a gap of nearly $2 million between those requirements and mandates and the county’s final budget, money that we argued could be sliced without a significant loss of services but with significant savings to property owners.

This year, working with essentially the same numbers – save the 21 percent decrease in taxable property values – the county has done precisely what was proposed on this page last year and cut roughly $2 million from the budget.

And has been reported over recent months any thought about a loss of services seems misplaced at best.

Commissioners, as they have the past two years, blasted through their in-county travel budgets before leaving their driveways in fiscal 2009-2010, establishing a baseline for in-county travel that was above the budget line item and provided a nice side income for commissioners, whether they actually traveled the miles or not.

In addition, the county, exceeded the line item for litigation as it fights, among several other court actions, a lawsuit that has made its way to the First District Court of Appeals and resulted in the county being taken to task for not enforcing its own land-use rules.

The reality that the county continues to defy an appellate decision is a testament that line items are as blurry as a wiper-streaked windshield during love-bug season.

The only thing that matters is if the bottom line balances.

Implying that there are always dollars to be moved around to make up any overruns on a specific budget line largely undermines the concept of long-term planning and budgeting.

This is all but implied in commissioners’ dictate that all constitutional officers cut their budgets by 3 percent.

At no time during the county commission’s run up of the budget during the past decade, years of raking in property tax increases carte blanche and then making theater of reining in spending, did the constitutional officers enjoy such a windfall.

Overall, constitutional officers have actually seen their budgets shrink or remain largely static while the Board of County Commissioners enjoyed the fruits of a rolling real estate market – before it stopped rolling.

Constitutional officers already operate with workforces similar to or even smaller than they had five and 10 years ago.

Those same constitutionally-elected officials have also proven to be among the most frugal and careful spenders of the public money even as county commissioners tried to show them how it is really done with public money in hand.

And this is critical to consider when pondering that those officers provide some of the most essential services in the county, from law enforcement and public safety to supervising elections.

This brings us to consolidation of five departments under the umbrella of Public Works.

Largely an exercise in cutting workforce, and one that did not require what has become a costly and wasteful moving or constructing of buildings at a central site, consolidation had its logic, as spelled out recently by the county administrator.

Don Butler noted to staff writer Melissa Dean that, “With five separate departments we had five supervisors, five assistant supervisors and so on. By consolidating, we have become better focused on priorities and can run (Public Works under which the departments were consolidated) much more efficiently.”

No better case for consolidating the county under county-wide voting could be made.

Property owners and taxpayers have felt the pain for much of a decade because the county is divided into five distinct fiefdoms lorded over by commissioners with often competing agendas as well as desires for how to spend public dollars.

Any pie must be sliced five ways or not at all.

Taxpayers have paid for a model of proven inefficiency, a model that diffuses the focus on priorities and elevates commissioners by leaving each, in comparison to constitutional officers, answerable to just 20 percent of the county’s voters.

That is an equation taxpayers and voters know all too well.