The 3 Percent Solution

County commissioners have decided that saving 3 percent today might ease some fiscal headaches down the road.

Last week at the urging of commission chairman Carmen McLemore, commissioners approved an across-the-board hold back of 3 percent of current budgets for all departments and constitutional officers.

The aim would be to save some money in cash going forward to help balm the wounds of what could be an even tougher budget year than last year.

And Mr. McLemore has already stated that he has no intention of overseeing “another” tax increase.

With the county potentially facing a second-straight double-digit decrease in property tax revenue, 2010-11 could be ugly.

But this is a commission that seeks to trumpet the fact that it required five years after first proposed to finally implement a work order system and that they generally maintained an onerous status quo on taxing levels the past several years.

Apparently after larding, er, lording over the largest tax increases in county history from 2001 to 2005, any failure on the board’s part to increase taxes by double digits, percentage-wise, is an achievement of note.

But if this commission is to argue with straight faces that times have changed and they have seen the light, a 3 percent across the board spending decrease seems like a lazy way to go about reform.

That is simply akin to rewinding to those heydays of the real estate market when all commissioners needed was to check how much property values were going up and calculate spending increases accordingly.

If commissioners were serious about rooting out the problems in their budget they would be reducing spending in proportion to the growth of each department between 2001 and today.

What budgets grew the most? Which the least?

Cut departments and constitutional officers according to how many employees they added on during the go-go years, and reduce spending inversely to how spending was increased line-by-line from 2001 forward.

Do that to arrive at a 3 percent combined total, or the $500,000-plus that 3 percent would represent in Mr. McLemore’s presentation.

That would be a fair and sage way to go about trying to squirrel some money away on the bottom line for the next fiscal year when that bottom line almost surely will be whittled by the state and federal governments – in the form of grants, mandates, etc. – and property values.

Instead the route chosen is an all too familiar one.

In particular, the emphasis on ensuring that constitutional officers tow the line on the 3 percent cut.

Another example of the board’s, and in particular Mr. McLemore’s, seeming bone-in-the-craw for the constitutional officers, who if their budgets are examined will be found to be working with pretty much the staff they were 10 years ago.

There might some fluctuations here and there, for example the sheriff no longer operates the jail and there are no election mandates, but by and large constitutional officers have maintained lean operations through the board’s fat years.

And several years ago when a state constitutional amendment mandated certain reductions in spending, constitutional officers in general were first in the county to step up.

However, there is one important difference between constitutional officers and commissioners – commissioners face 20 percent of the voters in the county; constitutional officers 100 percent.

Those are the numbers that provide constitutional officers higher ground, and as everybody learned in school the way bullies operate is to bring everybody down a notch or two to their level.

So this populist rhetoric of fiscal restraint diverges from substance pretty quickly under a microscope.

If there was actually 3 percent of fat in the county budget, why not trim it last year?

Will $500,000 really place a proverbial finger in any fiscal dyke the county encounters next year when revenues figure to be even tighter?

In a budget that totals out over $31 million, $500,000 is practically pocket change, barely over 1.5 percent of the total budget.

And isn’t mandating that department heads or constitutional officers plead to the board if they need back any of this sliced 3 percent before the fiscal year runs out little more than moving that $500,000 to under the purview of the Board of County Commissioners, adding another $500,000 to its budget, whether on a reserve line or not?

Finally, underscore the fact that these are officials elected by one-fifth of registered voters telling officials elected by all voters in the county how to spend their already tighter-than-Joan-Rivers’-face budgets.

From Washington to Tallahassee to the Gulf County Courthouse Annex government seems to be of one ilk – a world apart from the rest of us.

A 3 percent cut in spending, effectively a mid-year moving of money from one budget line to another and nothing more, seems more a sound byte than a solution to the fiscal ills facing the county or relieving the taxpayers’ burden.