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By PETE GOLIS
Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat
People in Windsor were both smart and lucky.
When the city incorporated in 1992, its leaders decided it would be wise to contract with the Sheriff’s Office rather than take on the burgeoning costs of a stand-alone police department. History has confirmed that judgment.
City status for Windsor also came too late for the rush of developer-financed improvements popular in the 1970s and 1980s — an explosion of swimming pools, parks, community centers and other facilities that were the pride of many cities.
Pete Golis
What seemed like bad timing turns out to be the opposite. While Windsor has managed to avoid the hardest hits, including layoffs, many cities now face painful decisions to shutter or even sell popular community assets because they can no longer afford the overhead.
There is an object lesson here. Like it or not, what’s happening in the world economy and here at home isn’t cyclical. Economies are changing. Government will be smaller.
Political leaders are left to choose: They can curse the fates, or they can work to reinvent government in ways that serve the public interest.
At this turning point, we don’t lack for government. What we lack are political institutions that make sense in the 21st century.
A friend newly arrived in Sonoma County once expressed bewilderment at a single ballot with five separate school elections. He was voting for an elementary school board, a high school board, a community college board, a county board of education and a county superintendent of schools.
This is before accounting for nine city governments, a county government, fire districts, resource conservation districts, water districts, sanitation districts, parks districts, ambulance districts, mosquito control districts and more — plus countless federal, state and regional agencies with local offices.
We are left with questions, such as:
• Does Sonoma County need eight separate police agencies (or nine planning departments or 10 building departments or 10 parks departments)?
• Does the county require 40 school districts? Or a separate Office of Education, complete with an elected board and an elected superintendent?
• Does California need an alphabet soup of agencies that perform the same tasks (except when they are working at cross purposes)?
Some will ask, is all this government necessary?
But the real questions are: In a changed world, how much government can we afford? And, how can government be reinvented in ways that reduce redundancies and protect critical services?
A version of this conversation will play out in Sacramento this week as the new/old governor, Jerry Brown, begins to explain how he would right a ship on the verge of sinking. His budget proposals will prove shocking to anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to what Brown calls the “delay and denial” that have guided state spending over the past decade.
Brown wants to begin “a complex reordering” of state and local government, which means he wants local government to do more and state government to do less.
If local officials are clutching their wallets, it’s because they’ve seen versions of this act before. In the past, when state government was feeling pinched, it found ways to dump the budget burden on cities and counties.
But this time feels different. Brown seems to recognize, according to county officials who met with him, that California faces a fundamental reckoning about the size and shape of government.
When the governor releases his proposed 2011-12 budget later this week, we will begin to know whether he’s up to the task. His sincerity will be judged by his willingness to restructure a bloated state government and help local government pay for its new responsibilities.
Many have noted the irony. Proposition 13 mandated a wholesale transfer of political power from local to state government, and who was governor when it passed? Jerry Brown, of course.
In the intervening 32 years, California has written the book on how to design a government to fail. From ballot-box budgeting to term limits to a joke we call the tax code, we haven’t missed many opportunities to make it worse.
Now we come full circle with a new governor with a simple message: Government is broke and broken — and we don’t have any choice but to fix it.
In recent years, some local agencies have made small steps. In the west county, small school districts now share the cost of services. Fire districts consolidated. The city of Sonoma eliminated its police force and contracted with the Sheriff’s Office. County government combined departments. Only last week, Cotati and Sebastopol announced plans to share the cost of a building official.
It’s only the beginning.
In Sonoma County, the usual suspects will have to check their calendars and discover we’re in the 21st century now.
It’s nice they can excite their passions over traffic circles on Humboldt Street, but it would be nicer still if they could get excited about creating an efficient hometown government that doesn’t stagger from one budget crisis to the next.
Voters like you and me will have to grow up as well. We can’t keep pretending we can have lower taxes and more government services at the same time. We can’t let passion for a single issue blind us to the realities of a world turned upside-down by technology and globalization.
If you don’t want to talk about creating a 21st century government, that’s OK. Just don’t be surprised if California continues its drift toward mediocrity.
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Pete some of us in Windsor wish we had those “perks” you speak of. We have lived in Windsor for years and wish our tax dollars would have been used on perks that our kids could have enjoyed. We waited through years of promises to fix Kaiser park. Instead our leaders have issued study after study and spent countless dollars on “planning” our town. We have layers of planning and town staff that are paid big saleries to plan our future. We have not had a new project in years and won’t with the present business climate, but we just hired a new planning director. What makes the town manager so busy that he needs an asstiant town manager. I would rather have the perks than pay for a big city goverment in our little town. We are just like any city in California where the folks running the city think that the town hall is the most important place in town. Lets spend the money on the kids in town and give them world class perks they deserve, instead paying a few bloated saleries!
The very first problem I can see is that everyone believes everything reported by the media. In every news article, quotes and information is taken out of context and twisted to sensationalize the story of the day.
I agree that there has to be a limit on government spending but we can’t lump all government entities into the same category.
We can’t expect employees of government agencies to work for peanuts when they have to deal with a bunch angry misinformed members of the public all of the time. I know I certainly wouldn’t especially if I could get the same job in the private sector for more money.
So, who is to blame? You and me?!- the general public. The ones that are just sitting back and complaining but doing nothing.
We need to start getting rid of the people who are only out there to further their own political agendas. It isn’t the actual workers that are taking advantage of the system, it is the ones that sit on city councils, boards and commissions receiving pay and benefits for minimal work. They sit back and cut the pay and benefits of the people that actually do the work and supply us with much needed city and county services.!!!!!
Pete, thanks for offering an evaluative and I must save conservative approach to this situation. However, respectfully, you are 10 years too late. Coming from the PD you probably are scorned at the herbal tea and organic pastry table. I posted some of the following in responsive a previous article. We need political leadership that will truly represent the 460,000 legal residents, property owners, and citizens of Sonoma County. Currently, the county is literally run by a handful of people controlling the unions, special interests especially illegal immigration and, a select few big money land and business owners. Then there are the 4000-5000 or so soldiers who benefit from supporting the politicians into office. They want pay back to control their own personal budgets and are unconcerned and undaunted about driving the county into bankruptcy. The rest of us pay for bloated pension systems and direct costs associated with illegal immigration. Two of the main reasons we are in financial problem. We pay high fees and taxes for fewer and poorer services just so to keep these special interests” deficit enablers” happy. They get their pensions but retire out of the county because of poor service, overcrowding, political turmoil and reduced quality of life. A third important action is to stop the SMART Train now as the failure of this project will drive the county to a uncoverable deficit and quality of life. Yet taxpayers will continue to pay for more bloat and poorer services. Think unions.
The new riders of the purple storm need a vision to do what is in the benefit of the county and the courage to make it happen. The first step this year is to identify the root causes of our problems, prioritize them and resolve them. In the common sense business and private world stabilizing Sonoma County at this juncture is not a difficult task. Reportedly there is a $1.1 billion dollar budget with a projected $50-$60 million deficit. That’s only 4-5% that needs to be engineered out of the $1.1 budget. The budget management and accounting skills set required to resolve this is rudimentary. There is no manager at any level that doesn’t understand this.
Because you have thrown a logic card on the table how about asking the supervisors to identify the top reasons we are in financial debt and how exactly they will solve those problems.
Thank you Pete, for underlining the extreme bloat of our county’s tapestry of local governing agencies.
No, this excess of bureaucracy is certainly not sustainable.
We wish for a brave someone in public service to step-up, to address this crisis, and re-engineer a solution — one that we all deserve.
Though I doubt thatmany city governments are taking frugality seriously, they are looking at budget cuts. By that I mean that the bloated pay/retirement packages are already straining the system. When the city looks at reality, it might actually consider looking at treating the previous mismanagement of county monies ala the pay/retirement packages as criminal. I’m not talking about the lower end where retiremnt packages are below median wages in the county, and that is well below 100k.
I don’t know why anyone thinks 100k is reasonable retirerment for any county/city employee. I don’teven know why 100kmight seem reasonable pay for typical white collar employees. Avg private income is about 30 to 40 k with wildswings for some jobs like construction. Some years and possiblyadecade is boom, but it rarely lasts. a So why does the city/county pay rate equal top pay with no ties to economic swings, and don’t tell me that they need to be competitive. Everytime there are job openings and tests the lines are around the block. The pay for incoming labor of alltypes has been lowered to some extent and yet the lines are still around the block. the high pay and retirement rates were not based on factual economics and should be considered as criminal mismanagement of funds. There is no statute of limitations on fraud, the pay and retirement can be withdrawn.
So, current county managers need to look at the mood of their constituents. We didn’t okay this pay or retirement. Future county managers might be looking at legal action against high end retirees, especially high end ones with a punitive and jaundiced eye. History has come upon us to prove the fiscal absurdity of the amounts, ande retirees claim to these retirement packages can only bolster claims of fiscal fraud.
state and feds next.
Whatever brings more accountability. Redundancy is never regrettable when failure is incountered. Division of powers is the basis of American governance.
Finally…
One may want to look into the incorporation of this city corporations.
For revenues rise and fall and employees come and go, the assets and investment of these municipalities continully grow. These numbers can publicly be verified in each of local governments Comprehensive Annual Financial Report.