SHIP Shifter

“Nothing personal here, just good business for the county.”

That was the assertion made by Board of County Commission chairman Carmen McLemore in suggesting that the county take over the State Housing Initiative Partnership (SHIP) program and place it in the building department.

Maybe the desire to take the SHIP program back from the Gulf County Community Development Corporation (CDC) was not personal, but good business – not so much, either.

When such a discussion is started by statements that the Building Department has four employees who do not always have enough to fill the 40 hours of each week, and therefore could fold in the duties of the SHIP program with little sweat, Houston we have a problem.

In this day and age when private sector employers are carving workforces to the bone, when governments are searching for all kinds of creative ways to find revenue because the property tax burden is already too burdensome, to assert that there is a department with fat and employees in need of busy work is to render as hypocritical all other statements of fiscal woes.

Commissioners have become fairly rote in their answers to just about any request for assistance or new purchases or anything requiring money, feigning poverty and empty pockets that only figure to become lighter when property values for this year are provided in a couple of months.

Typical is meeting these days that includes commissioners asserting over and over that they do not have money, don’t know where any additional funds might come from and are holding back funds in preparation for a fiscal Armageddon this coming year.

And, yet, according to the chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, there is a department that is fat, is in need of work and maybe moving SHIP back under the county’s umbrella can save a job.

Two central problems with that assertion, not that it ever stops commissioners when the gums are flapping.

First, the county long ago sought to partially support one position, that of the grant writer, by, in part, taking some of the administration fees paid to the CDC for operating SHIP to partially fund the grant writer’s position, the grant writer earning those funds by performing the required annual reports.

However, when those reports proved to be too time-consuming, detailed and logistically impossible for the grant writer to undertake, that idea was scuttled.

But the lesson remains that taking over SHIP is no easy undertaking.

The county has farmed out a portion of the work before and the training and education required to bring somebody on the county’s staff up to snuff on the annual requirements almost in itself begs for the county to leave the program with the CDC.

The second wobbly leg at the foundation of the county’s taking over SHIP is that it is hardly a guarantee of keeping a position, as was noted by another commissioner last week.

Commissioners do not yet know all the gory details, but it has been made clear that property values will continue to drop this year.

That will put further pressure on the county’s funding for operations and will almost certainly lead to some tough choices ahead.

Somehow the $40,000 or so the county expends to the CDC for administering the SHIP program does not seem like a life preserver, particularly when considering that those are administration fees carved from the SHIP program amount sent to the county.

Not exactly extra dough just sitting around, it is money the county can take out of its allocation from SHIP for administration.

And wow tough a fiscal year it will be for the county is not yet known but what is known is that there are few certainties about the upcoming budget, let alone what positions may be in jeopardy or in need of trimming.

If the board chairman is to be believed, one good place to start would apparently be the Building Department.

Lastly, commissioners taking back control of the program – whatever it looks like in the future – would be carving a path back to where the Board of County Commissioners wanted to get away from when commissioners contracted out SHIP – politics influencing purchase assistance or home rehabilitation for folks in need of a hand.

In the early years of this decade, commissioners’ fingerprints were all over everything from the lottery that determined who got assistance to the amount of assistance individuals received. It was another political football with which commissioners were happy to play.

They contracted SHIP away almost because they could not help themselves.

In sum, there might be mitigating factors that require the Board of County Commissioners to more closely examine the current and future operations of SHIP.

But taking back the program is anything but good business for a county looking to rein in spending.