The Budget Bowl Begins
By Greg L | 19 December 2007 | Prince William County | 4 Comments
The annual budget game kicked off in full force yesterday at the Prince William Board of County Supervisors as the board wrangled over the guidance they would give to county staff for department budget requests. In many ways this opening salvo dictates how the entire budgeting process will unfold, as the next phase takes this guidance to the county staff, which will then secretly craft their budget proposals and then come back to the county board with opaque requests for funds that in no way are sufficient to explain why an agency really needs the dollars they’re requesting. The Board then wrestles over this document, nibbling away at the relatively few spending items that are sufficiently quantified until everyone gets sick of the process and the board finally adopts a budget that they don’t particularly care for. It is a game that demonstrates that while we elect representatives, the power of the county staff to control what happens is nearly unassailable where it counts the most.
Yesterday Stewart, Stirrup and Covington started out wanting the staff to prepare the budget request based on relatively flat spending and full funding for the rule of law resolution. Everyone else opposed this but Marty Nohe, who abstained citing that he wasn’t clear on what level funding was required to implement the rule of law resolution. Since that didn’t pass, a different motion was offered that would increase spending on existing services by more than the rate of inflation but wouldn’t include funding to implement the rule of law resolution that the county staff had recommended.
From what I can discern, there are three Supervisors who are clearly committed to the idea that the rule of law resolution is a budget priority — Stewart, Stirrup and Covington. Mike May seems to be under the impression that funding for this priority can easily be carved out after the proposed budget comes back from county staff. The remainder of Caddigan, Nohe, Jenkins and now Principi, seem to want to use the funding for the rule of law resolution as a political tool to get those committed to funding it to also agree to other spending increases which they normally wouldn’t support.
Here’s the likely scenario: Staff will prepare a budget that will include every wish-list spending item they can possibly cram in that will fit in a budget with a $1.008 tax rate. More than 90% of all spending will not be identified, but be identified as “baseline”, or what was spent in the past. The remaining spending items which are identified will have strong constituencies to defend them, which reduces the chances they will be cut. The fiscal conservatives on the board will be offered additional spending to implement the rule of law resolution, but it will require that they approve a tax rate increase, which puts them in a pretty difficult position. This really is all a big game about whether the board will have to consider increasing the tax rate beyond the initial guidance in order to fund the rule of law resolution’s implementation, or whether that discussion would have revolved around expanding some other spending item. By making the rule of law resolution funding non-core to the staff guidance, we get all the wasteful spending hidden in the staff budget where it won’t be discussed, rather than as the add-on items at the end of the process where they might actually be subjected to scrutiny.
Last year Stewart managed to avoid this travesty by making sure that the budget guidance required cuts be made. What came back included some real whoppers. Staff cut out a budget item to replace chairs for emergency dispatch operators which cost $5,000 a pop, for example. By making staff ferret out wasteful spending in order to fund their core priorities, at least some reforms were made. That still left the county with a budget item of $6 million this year to upgrade information technology infrastructure which never specified to the board what specific software or hardware would be purchased, and why each item was required. Buried deep within the baseline, and sometimes within the thinly-explained budget line items, is spending that certainly can be deferred or cut altogether. Let staff prepare a budget without any clear incentive provided to have them ferret out wasteful spending, as has happened so far this year, and everyone’s pet project winds up in the staff’s budget.
When this staff budget comes back, I can pretty much guarantee that it will be designed to pit advocates of funding the rule of law resolution against some key constituency — such as those who want to raise teacher salaries, or provide services to retirees — in battle framed by the false notion that if we want to adequately discourage the unlawful presence of illegal aliens we have to make our teachers or elderly suffer as a result. Meanwhile every other possible spending offset is taken off the table because its spending particulars are hidden away inside “baseline” spending explained only in terms of citizen satisfaction scores, desired outcome metrics, and other pedantry that says nothing at all about how our taxpayer dollars are actually being spent. If you can decide what the questions are, you get to control what the eventual answers will be. That’s the staff budget proposal in a nutshell.
Supervisor Mike May might be under the impression that meaningful discussion about financial priorities can be possible after the staff presentation in the budget preparation cycle, but it is not. Heavily constrained by the amount of information staff is willing to divulge about how it intends to spend taxpayer dollars, they frame the discussion in a way that ensures that while everyone bickers about the small potatoes, the big spending is safely hidden within the mind-numbing fog of the budget proposal. Staff budget proposals have never in recent memory been subjected to major alterations by the Board. The only changes that ever really happen to these proposals are minor.
Yeah, and I used to think that elected officials actually decided how taxpayer dollars were spent myself. Welcome to the power of the bureaucracy.
There is an opportunity to head this fiscal setup off. The next meeting of the Board of County Supervisors is on January 8th, and Mike May and Marty Nohe would have an opportunity to revisit their votes and support the budget guidance that Chairman Stewart proposed, which would limit spending increases to the rate of inflation plus the costs of implementing the rule of law resolution. Mike May could call for reconsideration of his vote at that meeting, and instead of this setup we could be throwing the onus back on county staff like we did last year, and force staff to find spending cuts in order to fund the spending priorities they’re clamoring for. We could stop to some degree this insidious attempt to pit citizens against each other over budgetary crumbs while hiding potentially large budget savings that would allow key budget priorities to get the funding they need. All this takes is the reconsideration of one vote.
Until county staff can be forced to present actually meaningful budget proposals for consideration, we’re going to be caught in this counterproductive game of tug-of-war between the county staff and the Board of Supervisors. The only game there is now is to push the county staff to identify savings with guidance they don’t want to get, and unless we do that there’s little chance that actual priorities are going to be put in the core of the budget rather than be used as political footballs in the post-staff presentation budget bowl.
It’s time for citizens to pile on, and make sure that the Board’s budget guidance forces county staff to identify savings. Yesterday’s vote absolutely should come up for reconsideration, and funding for implementation of the rule of law resolution must be a core component of the budget proposal.
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“…as the next phase takes this guidance to the county staff, which will then secretly craft their budget proposals and then come back to the county board with opaque requests for funds that in no way are sufficient to explain why an agency really needs the dollars they’re requesting.”
I really don’t understand what’s so difficult about getting sufficiently detailed budget reports from staff. It should actually be very simple…staff should be TOLD that, if the report is not sufficiently detailed and the requests clear and concise, their budget won’t be considered. Just as when dealing with children, the Supervisors must be consistent and demand that the staff do what they are told…no matter WHAT department screws it up they should then be required to redo the request in preparation to appear before the Board in the supplemental budget hearings to justify their funding demands. I doubt that it would be more than one budget cycle before ALL departments do their job properly. I don’t believe that the department heads would want to appear in public on bended knee more than once.
Call your supervisors, volunteer to be on a Budget Committee and rock on’….
I’ve always been under the impression that the creation of a final budget has been a series of back and forths between staff and the board. Could a few somebodies be afraid that the resolution isn’t top priority? I’d bet that more people are concerned about the schools and,of course, they’ll take a large part of our collected taxes.
But thanks for the reminder to email my supervisor.
anonymoustoo:
The schools will take the same portion of the budget they’ve taken for the last decade: 56.75%. There is a standing agreement between the BOCS and School Board for this amount.