Real World - Gulf County

Staff Writer Marie Logan’s report of Feb. 7 concerning the county’s ongoing budgeting process should be required reading for all taxpayers in the county.

Apparently, it was a real eye-opener for one commissioner, who mentioned last week that reading the story only highlighted the need for consolidation of some resources and manpower.

Consolidation was one of the main topics of the meeting as commissioners discussed putting the Road Department, Public Works, Solid Waste, Maintenance and Mosquito Control under one department with one department head.

As county administrator Don Butler noted, the 60 employees in those five departments include four superintendents/directors, three assistant directors/superintendents, two office managers and two shop foremen.

Tally that up to find just a taste of some of the fat in the county budget.

But two statements made by Butler, as reported by Logan, particularly stick out.

One was Butler’s reference to consolidation providing a template for streamlining manpower and equipment use in order to curb fixed costs “because they are rising faster than assessed values.”

In other words, commissioners will finally be forced to come to grips with the reality that all those back-door tax increases they absorbed and spent freely while the real estate market was white hot are definitely in the past.

Maybe that roaring market will return - prognosticators are all over the map on that one - but the statement highlights that too much of what passed for budgeting earlier in the decade was little more than figuring out how to spend the annual windfalls created by the real estate market.

And that, it is worth noting, does not take into account all the grant dollars - just another pipeline for taxpayer-funded mischief by elected officials - accrued to create the roughly two-dozen parks in the county - parks needing maintenance, upkeep, etc., at taxpayer expense - that commissioners continually refer to as genuine services and protect as if newborns.

In any case, Butler detailed the manifest ways in which consolidation would assist the county in not duplicating services and lead to more efficient use of county personnel and equipment.

Taxpayers take note: what is sitting between the lines is the fact that the county, benefiting from property tax collections that exploded by 150 percent over a five-year period earlier in the decade, has become a bloated behemoth of the patronage system, not the lean government appropriate for a county that has seen population actually decline in the past 10 years.

Nor the lean enterprise which much of the business owners in the county, large and small, have had to become as the economy teeters.

But Butler put a finer point on the issue when he mentioned that many of the employees in those five departments considered for consolidation were not in favor of pooling together and that “many times, political forces involved are not in favor for various reasons.”

Why? Because in a county in which governing has centered on ensuring that each district gets its fair share of pork - be it vans or parks or work crews and on and on - the long view of what is best for the county has been too often lost.

Spiking property values and the back-door tax increases they brought allowed commissioners to pad the personnel rolls, to create an unwieldy, patronage-centric workforce and, in education-speak, cost-centers that served as re-election platforms.

Consider a recent discussion about cutting Mosquito Control and the quizzing about what employees in those departments did when not actually in spraying season.

A contrast was made to the Road Department and its employees’ messy, dirty work after hurricanes but never was it broached exactly what Road Department employees are tasked with when hurricanes don’t arrive, as in, like, the past two years.

The discussion was pure protection of favored departments, not benefits to the entire county.

If nothing else, consolidation would at least be a step in the direction of the kind of work order policy and ability to trace each dollar spent that Commissioner Bill Williams has been pushing, unsuccessfully, for almost four years.

There will certainly be pain for those employees for whom consolidation could mean the loss of a job, fewer hours, doing more with less. In that sense, welcome to the real world of the private sector.

But also, dare we broach it, maybe consolidation of departments will serve as a step toward a new Board of County Commissioners: to a consolidation of viewpoints, an understanding of the value of a consolidated vision along with a consolidation of voters to whom commissioners are answerable, from the current one-fifth to the whole county.

And if nothing else comes from these weekly exercises on the budget - and it is worth considering how much these Monday meetings are costing taxpayers in employee time and expense away from their workday tasks and commissioner travel - that kind of consolidation of purpose could prove the most valuable.