Budget Crunch Forces Hard Decisions
It seems that newspapers, magazines and Web sites are announcing budget cuts by local governments practically every day. Public-safety and fire departments in particular are seeing their share of the budget crunch with layoffs, brownouts, station closings and training cutbacks. Other agencies are seeing the postponement of apparatus or equipment replacement and there is a nearly universal curtailment of travel and outside training.
At the same time, our residents — who also are feeling the pinch of the current economy — are adamantly opposed to new taxes. Their frustration is felt mostly at the local level because that is the only place they feel any semblance of control.
At least one of my neighboring fire departments is facing brownouts now and possible layoffs in the future. Most of its non-operational budget already had been decimated, and now it appears that fire and EMS operations won’t be spared. How did we get here? Obviously this stems primarily from the economic downturn, but why does it seem the first thing cut to balance any budget are safety services? Are politicians using the fear factor to scare voters into accepting more taxes? Sound cynical? Here’s an idea that may be worth considering in the near future.
In the greater Cincinnati area, the Hamilton County auditor W. Emerson “Dusty” Rhodes has proposed that legislatively all property taxes should expire on the same date. He believes that would provide voters an opportunity to clearly support whatever they believe is important and oppose what they believe to be superfluous. That may sound crazy, but it would allow voters collectively to prioritize where they’d want to spend their tax dollars and eliminate services they no longer wish to support.
If a person believes fire, EMS, police, schools or libraries take priority, then those taxes pass and those services are funded — there would be no general operating funds. I have the feeling that most citizens would want to adequately fund essential safety services such as fire and EMS, while looking to cut those service they may deem more frivolous.
While we live in a republic where our representatives are elected to speak on our behalf, would any of us in the fire service dread the outcome of an election where fire and EMS operations were put head to head with other money issues? If we have any reservation on the results, then what do we need to do now to provide better, more efficient service with the resources we already have today to ensure we will have adequate funding tomorrow.
August 6th, 2009 at 1:34 am
Auditor Rhodes presents an interesting idea, and you pose the right sorts of questions for us to consider were it to become the norm for funding municipal services. It might be worthwhile to note that in the part of our country where direct democracy remains the rule rather than the exception, New England, the volunteer service delivery model remains the norm. This suggests that direct democracy works best in communities of small scale, where the scope of services remain within the ken of most residents and taxpayers.
The more removed people become from the goods and service they pay for and what it takes to deliver them, the less realistic such a decision-making process becomes. For starters, such an arrangement almost inevitably assumes the structure of a zero-sum game, when, in fact, the pie can be enlarged rather than being cut into smaller and smaller pieces, if only people are willing to tax themselves to do so. Since this seems unlikely, the inevitable result is to turn the contest into one that relies more on emotion and compromise than reason and cooperation.
The fire service has already discovered the practical limits of the former strategy. People fear crime and a number of other ills, real or imagined, far more than they fear fire and its effects. In response, fire department have taken on a broader array of services, often with little or no public mandate to do so. Meanwhile, firefighters have become more and more active politically to the point in some communities that they and the teachers’ unions are among the biggest donors to candidates’ campaigns. In some instances, they have used the access and influence that comes from patronage to award themselves pay and benefits that few private sector employers can rival and many communities can no longer afford.
I would like to see much more public involvement in processes of public sector budgeting and performance auditing. We can and should seek to improve both efficiency and accountability in the fire service. Democracy, in this case, however, is not something that happens only at the ballot box.
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