Looking At The PWC Budget
By Greg L | 9 March 2007 | Prince William County | 9 Comments
I spent a little time digging through the 2008 budget proposal to which Craig Vitter so helpfully alerted his readers, and although it’s not the most riveting reading, I’d urge citizens to dig through a section or two and see if there are items which don’t seem to make much sense to them and ask questions. This is our money, after all, and if we don’t take an interest in how it’s spent subsequent whining about how much we pay in taxes is just irresponsible. We have to be the watchdogs of our public funds.
I started with the Non Departmental Budget, which is sort of a catch-all for all of the things that aren’t tagged to a specific department, and there were a couple of items which caught my attention. First is that there’s an allocation of the Transient Occupancy Tax of $602,222 for public events at historic properties “for the Board of County Supervisors use to support public events at historic properties as opportunities emerge during the fiscal year.” I read that to mean they don’t know why they need the money, or how it’s to be spent, but the BOCS is going to set it aside in case they dream up a purpose to which they can apply this slush fund. This seems like a good candidate for a cut.
The county will eliminate some positions this year, and those subject to the “reduction in force” will get an extravagant 90 days of severance pay, costing the county $800,000 in 2008. When those paying the taxes will usually get only two weeks of severance if they’re let go, it seems pretty outrageous that they’re going to pony up three months of paid time off for their employees who get cut. Maybe we can do a little better for county employees than two weeks, but three months of paid time off for getting “riffed” is hardly fiscally responsible.
Then there’s $1,366,661, an increase of $175,000, for the convention and visitors bureau “to become more competitive in the regional meeting and conference tourism market”, which is essentially a corporate welfare program despite the fact we really don’t have any large enough facilities currently to accommodate large meetings and conferences. Try to book a meeting room around the county, and you’ll see the capacity we have is pretty well fully utilized and taxpayer-funded advertisement for hotels really isn’t necessary. I’m suspicious of some of these economic development initiatives, which really duplicate the corporate marketing that the hotel and conference industry already does. To the extent that the funds may be coming from taxes that hotels are subjected to, perhaps it’s better to try to develop infrastructure to support transportation infrastructure that tourism can benefit from as well as county residents, or something more beneficial than marketing for county businesses. This item at least deserves some inspection.
A section on “Service Contribution Baseline Funding Increases” which deals with payments to charities provides details on the cost increases, but no information is provided on what the total expenditure actually is. How much are we funding charities out of public coffers? Sometimes charities provide services to residents more effectively and more cheaply when the county can, in which case it makes sense to support their efforts, but without knowing how much is being spent and who is getting the money, it’s impossible to tell. Citizens need more information here.
Now let’s move on to the Appendix. Here we learn that the Office of Information Technology spends $340 (down from $390) per year in “seat management costs” for 3,400 desktop computers. Depending on what services are provided, this might be a somewhat reasonable number, or something pretty outrageous. It seems that this cost is for software maintenance, help desk support, and possibly replacement of computers when they approach obsolescence. Even with the high level of service this funding would seem to provide, the Office Of Information Technology is expecting 21,000 help desk calls in 2008 - an average of over six calls for every supported system. If this is the support workload this seat management program requires, something seems seriously wrong. When was the last time you called technical support? Have you required assistance this often? Then why does the county seem to require such levels of support, and does that support really merit an expenditure of $340 per system, per year?
Pick a section of the budget here, and browse through it for things that don’t seem to make sense to you. Post your observations and questions in the comments section, and I can assemble these into formal questions which I will submit to the BOCS. It would be preferable to go into the budget public hearings having cleared up questions about what these items really are and why they cost what they do so we can provide good input to our representatives on the board about what changes should be made. In the end, ensuring fiscal responsibility in local government is the job of the citizens, and if we don’t do it, we can’t expect anyone else to pick up our slack.
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I think I’ve called our company’s help desk a couple of times, and it doesn’t take much of a problem to rack up several hours of work, at least for people who seem happy to be in a government service department rather than off running their own consulting business.
There’s a lot of money going to private organizations. If those organizations meet an essential government purpose, we should evaluate the expenditure to ensure we are getting a good deal for our money. If not, I don’t care about how much extra we get, or how nice the program is, we shouldn’t spend county taxpayer’s money on it.
Give everybody a tax cut, and let them donate their own money to charity.
I just finished the a book on charitable giving that noted that when government gives money to charity, it cuts private giving by something around 40%. Which means that for every dollar of tax money donated to charity, the charity only receives about 60 cents in benefit, because the charity loses 40 cents in private donations.
The correlary is that when government stops charity giving, private donations increase. AND if you give people more of their own money back, they give more to charity.
It is so very hard to cut ANYTHING from a budget. Look at the Senior Day Care center. It’s a vastly underused program costing lots of money for a service we shouldn’t even be considering as a government task. There’s only about 27 participants total, and only 4 are full-time.
But in TWO WEEKS, the people who want that program were able to put together a “grass-roots” organization which was able to bring more than THIRTY people to a board meeting and sit all day to fight to keep the program (that’s more people than actually USE the program).
I want the ten cents back from my taxes that pay for that program, but I’m not going to take a day off from work to go fight for my dime — I’d be more productive looking for a dime sitting around in the street.
The few who get the benefits are always more motivated than the hundreds of thousands who pay the costs.
BTW, at the meeting Tuesday, the recommendation was that if the program was underutilized, we could fix that by spending MORE money to ADVERTISE the program so that more people would use it — in other words, spend more of my money to talk more people into getting money from the government so next time around there will be MORE people who are willing to fight to keep it.
Two of our supervisors, including a republican, thought this was a great idea.
Greg,
Regarding the PWC Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB) that you reference above, this organization is fully funded via a portion of the 5% Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) that is levied on all hotel stays in the County. In effect, this tax is paid for by out of town visitors and not by local residents.
The initial 2 percentage points of the TOT are placed into the County’s General Fund. Then, the remaining 3 percentage points are used to promote tourism, travel and hotel stays within the County. It is my understanding that the Commonwealth requires any TOT in excess of 2% to be used in this fashion.
The CVB uses its funding on a wide variety of promotional programs all intended to drive business into our County from other areas (both in state and out of state). Some of this advertising has been for events such as the opening of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, our historical sites and the President’s Cup in previous years. In addition, the CVB is working with the hotels to recruit larger gatherings into our County.
Please remember that when an out of town guest stays in one of our hotels, he or she will generally shop in our shops and eat in our restaurants. This is both helpful to our local economy and to our County’s tax base.
“It’s a vastly underused program costing lots of money for a service we shouldn’t even be considering as a government task.”
Question Charles - is this just an opinion that this isn’t a “government task”?
On the federal level, it is quite clear what is and is not a legitimate government function and cost - the constitution governs that. And as a nation, we are spending oodles of money that is in no way “constitutional.”
But by what do you judge what is and is not a legitimate cost/function of local government? Is the criteria to be simply something that you don’t want to pay for and that you don’t think you’ll ever utilize? Or is there some more objective standard?
Given what I’ve read from you, it is my opinion that you would like to see virtually everything eliminated from government purview (and all of the resultant pennies and dimes back in your pocket). Fair enough, but exactly what are you using to draw that line?
anon,
yes, it is my opinion. It is based on applying the same philosophy the founders used. Not about the federal government, but about government in general, as they described it in the Federalist Papers.
How do I draw the line? That isn’t a trivial question, and the answer isn’t easy. I don’t even draw the line the same way every time, and find myself persuaded from time to time on things I would have initially rejected.
The short answer is that I try to determine if a program primarily helps individuals, or if it primarily helps the community.
I realise that any program that “helps individuals” could have a side effect of helping the community, and most programs will have some component of “helping the community” and “helping individuals”.
But in general, I see government as being for the community, not for the individuals in the community. And if a program is primarily providing services to individuals, it is suspect in my view.
This means for example that I might object to a program which provided shelter for the homeless. The argument that might persuade me on that would be the harm to the community of homeless people crashing in people’s back yards or in the woods starting fires and threatening our property.
On the other hand, we don’t issue driver’s licenses to people because we think they really could use a nice pice of plastic with their picture on it. We do so because we feel it’s important to the community to control who drives on the roads. So DMV is a legitimate government program.
It’s a work in progress for me, as it is for all of us. If it was simple we wouldn’t have such an argument over it.
The Founders had a wise idea which we threw away through amendments. That was that any money collected by government should be paid equally by EVERYBODY. That way, nobody can use the government as a way to take money from their neighbor for their own use.
Today, what stops government from heavily taxing the top 10% of rich people, and using the money to buy everybody else a big-screen TV? Only the fast-fading morality of the general populace that understands it would be wrong to take other people’s money for our own pleasure. It isn’t votes — the 90% would vastly outvote the 10%.
And we are losing that morality. People don’t feel any shame at all walking into a hearing and proudly asking other people to pay for things for themselves.
The Senior Day Center is a perfect example. It’s not some multi-million-dollar cost. Frankly, it isn’t much more expensive to put a senior in a program than it is to put your child into a program. It’s “expensive”, but it’s not prohibitive.
So why should I have to pay for someone else to send their parents to day care? Or think of it this way — what if every taxpayer in the county decided the government should provide day care for THEIR parents?
Then we’d have to increase taxes to pay for it all, and in the end pretty much everybody would pay as much extra in taxes as it cost to send their own parents to the program.
Instead of wasting time getting 30 people to give up a day to get the government to take money out of MY pocket by force to put someone else’s parents in day care, why don’t those 30 people do a days labor and donate the money to a facility to care for the parents? Why don’t they come ask me nicely for money — maybe I would be moved to an act of personal charity.
The answer: because it’s a whole lot easier to take things by force than to convince people to give charity. And it’s a whole lot easier to talk 8 people into giving you someone else’s money, than it is to get those other people to give directly.
Everytime you try to cut something, people come screaming out of the woodwork. Even so-called conservatives like Bob Marshall and Bert Buscher who love talking about cutting taxes but complain when it’s their ox being gored.
Exactly, BegM…no matter what cuts are made, SOMEONE (and probably many someones) is gonna complain. I heard Bob Marshall at the BOCS meeting too. However, government can not and should not be all things for all people — cuts need to be and should be made. The difficult part is determining where the hidden fat is…bureaucrats are good at hiding things. I’m looking in particular for that portion of the Library budget that funds the mobile library (in a van) which delivers books to Spanish speaking corner-gathering spots. According to the Potomac News article a couple months ago, the purpose is to demonstrate to Spanish speaking people the value of a free library. By the way, there are no fines if books are returned late…and therefore, presumably no charges if they are not returned at all.
The cost of this program may be very small relative to the cost of other things, I don’t know. However, even if small, it’s too great.
“there’s $1,366,661, an increase of $175,000, for the convention and visitors bureau”
This expense is for the old wood house in the Town of Occoquan called the visitors center. The county foots the bill right down to the phone bill.
The BOCS were gutless regarding the Manassas Senior Center. “Conservative” John Stirrup acted more like Hilda Barg in boxer shorts wanting to put a citizen task force together to seek new clients to justify the tax outlay. Corey Stewart tried, but failed, to cutoff the speakers at citizens’ time according to set rules of procedure that state:
1. No citizen can speak if the item is already on the BOCS agenda
2. Organized groups are limited to one speaker for five minutes
Stewart and the rest of gutless BOCS caved in because they hauled in senior citizens in rented wheel chairs and leased oxygen tanks trying to make the Manassas Senior Center an essential public purpose on the same realm as Hoover Dam, Dulles Airport and the U.S. Coast Guard. This all was a sham in the name of do-gooder liberalism. Just wait for the budget hearings when more unemployed rejects show up asking for even more handouts. Prince William is slowly turning into a liberal cesspool, a leftist annex of Arlingtongrad and the Peoples Republic of Fairfax County. Jenkins and Barg are the gatekeepers and the rest of the BOCS are the ushers that give liberal goons a chance at the helm to continue to steer this county towards the ash heap of liberal destruction.
Stewart failed to cutoff debate and we all see where that got us - spending more tax dollars.
Priceless.
Hmm, Stewart and May’s vote to pave over a ditch Tuedsay night must have thrown sideshow Bob off his game. No commentary regarding Hosen, May and Stewart’s radical Marxist/Socialist agenda. One vote throw you that far off your game.