Scott Ott has responded to the Don Cunningham budget preview. Since I gave a lot of space and praise to Cunningham’s budget process and his message, I’ll return the favor here to Scott. Lehigh County budget process: Cunningham's clan has it right!; Lehigh County 2010 budget glimpse: a strong outlook and spending restraint from Don Cunningham.
I also present this because, in the final analysis, the 2011 budget process is likely to involve consideration of a tax increase and some may argue again that we should have a bigger increase than needed to rebuild reserves. Others will argue that you should tax and spend as you go. It looks like Cunningham and Ott differ on their views of the reserves and it is instructive to see where they stand on the issues.
It is also painfully clear that despite the fact that your daily life is far more affected by local government, people ignore county government because, unless you get arrested, unless you are in court, or unless you need welfare-like human services, you don’t deal much with the county which is basically a very large welfare agency with a court and a $12 a day hotel (known as Lehigh County Prison). As a result, even though we have had endless coverage of the race between Sestak and Specter and either of them and Toomey that will take place next year, we see very little in the press about the race for county executive (and even less for your township supervisors)
I am going to try to leave my opinion out of this (since I am not sure what it is) but I will try to do some fact-checking.
Scott Ott notes that:
“ The Morning Call gave Lehigh County Executive Don Cunningham the headline he wanted after his vague preview Thursday of his 2010 budget...
But the career politician, and failed gubernatorial candidate, is likely less excited about the subheading...
Cunningham, running for re-election, will use predecessor's relief fund to avoid a hike
That perfectly encapsulates Don Cunningham's tenure as County Executive -- political ambition, deficit spending and the good fortune to inherit a huge tax hike from his predecessor.”
I can only quibble with Scott that Don isn’t a failed gubernatorial candidate. Having an exploratory campaign, testing the waters among party leaders, and then not running, is not failure. In fact, it is one of the things wrong with our system. The voters never get a chance to vote for many worthy candidates because, as you know well, the first hurdle is making the rounds and begging for funds long before you get to the voters.
I do quibble with Scott Ott and the MCall communist that call Cunningham the luckiest man in the world. Every office holder comes into office with either an uptrend or a downtrend looming. Bill Clinton became President because G. H. W. Bush had the economy tank at the wrong time and he then spent 8 years riding the recovery that Bush 41 had started. Barack H. Obama will be the beneficiary (I predict) of an economic turnaround. It also is 100% certain that the answer to the question in 2012 “Are you better off than 4 years before” will be yes.
So, Don Cunningham took office with a massive fund balance. He even added a little to it in one year if I recall correctly (It was before I knew there was county government). That fund was designed to smooth the need for future tax increases and some would say it did its job. Luck or design? You decide. I am guessing that the Republican commissioners who helped pass that budget with the establishment of the relief fund would argue it was by design. I know they did when Dean Browning asked to have the fund returned to taxpayers in 2007 during the campaign.
If Cunningham were truly lucky, he would have seen this downturn and not transferred $12 million from the Taxpayer Relief Fund to the Green Futures Fund. Part of it now will effectively be transferred back. I am sure he’d have preferred to have those funds available but on the bright side, we have permanently preserved open space rather than funded more short-term operations.
But there is always luck involved in any term of office. Cunningham has had his share but he has also had to govern a county during a few years when the state first turned on the pipeline of funds and then dried them up. For a pass-through like county government, that can be very unlucky.
But back to the story and in talking with Don, I think he will accept both the headline and the subheading in the MCall story. He was very strong in his defense of using the reserves (both the Taxpayer Relief Funds and the return of funds from the Green Futures Fund.) I guess, in many ways, that is the bag of revenue he has to spend and no doubt the total spending requested from the DA, the judges, the sheriff, etc. well exceeded the money he has available. It is one of those strange things (as we saw with DA funding in Philly where the city council can gut the office of another elected official) that we elected officers on an independent basis yet they rely on the county executive and the commissioners for the funding to do their job.
It is now time for those who want to save the reserves, and some may want to do so, to come forward and say what worthy programs should be cut. As much as I’d like to see the reserves stay intact, I at least give Don kudos for not slashing funds from the DA, Coroner, Sheriff and others in order to deliver a budget that maintained the reserves but which forced the commissioners to reinstate spending.
It is a strange animal, this thing we call county government. I leave it to Scott Ott and Don Cunningham to debate the merits but the question is out there. If the county has available funds, should the county executive slash budgets of other elected officials or is that up to the Board of Commissioners, the check and balance on the entire executive branch? I hold Cunningham accountable for all departments under the County Executive. He owns those budgets. He is responsible for slashing them.
The budgets of the other officials are a more difficult issue.
This was the reaction of Scott Ott to the Cunningham budget according to the Call:
Scott Ott, Cunningham's Republican opponent in the Nov. 3 election, said he was not surprised by the no-tax announcement. He said the county under Cunningham has actually spent more money than it has taken in by drawing down from the fund Ervin started.
''We have gotten Lehigh County residents reliant on money that can disappear,'' he said, adding if he were executive he would have asked department heads to cut spending 11 percent to 12 percent.
In his speech, Cunningham had Ott and other critics in mind when he acknowledged that spending the tax relief fund ''seems to bother some people.''
One of the problems with the county budget is that when you strip out all those pass-throughs, net taxes covered about $103 million in spending in 2009. Of that $24 million is in the courts, which are independent of Cunningham. Another nearly $10 million covers elected Row Offices, which again are independent of Cunningham. Another $27 million covers the prison, which while under Cunningham’s direction, has real limitations on what it can cut. That silly 8th Amendment keeps getting in the way.
So, I can understand the difficulty in what Cunningham faces when the discretionary taxpayer-funded budget is something in the area of $42 million. One hopes that the department heads and others heeded the call of Tom Muller when he sent out budget instructions, but we do have a strange budget in this county and one that doesn’t seem to have too many places to cut. My guess is that even if you cut every Pip the Mouse type of program, you’d still be dipping into reserves. We’ll see what the proposed cuts by the commissioners amount to and we’ll see public debate but do we want fewer DA’s? Do we want fewer deputies?
I don’t know, but one thing I do know is that the Lehigh County portion of its own budget is about a quarter of the whole thing. The pass-through programs are funded by the state and really a separate budget. That leaves the $100 million or so. There is nothing Cunningham can do about $4 million in additional pension funds needed or in the fact that there are 27 pay days next year. I think we all agree on that.
So, what you have left is the $100 million in base spending. Over half of that represents the budgets of other elected officials. Cunningham is responsible for cobbling those requests together and overseeing the process. I wrote before what a good process they used. I am not sure there is much more he can do other than throw it open to public debate.
Still, it is good to see Scott’s position because it gives us a way to compare the two candidates—without saying one is right or wrong. Cunningham basically kept the spending flat or slightly down after you back out some strange items. Scott would favor 11% to 12% cuts, which if they applied to the entire county taxpayer funded (since in the end it is all TAXPAYER funded) budget would have used less than half of the reserves.
Note: I had intended to start my profile of Don Cunningham today since I did the profile on Scott Ott last week but the budget seems more timely than the candidate profile. It is coming however.
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