Check out Jennifer Roberts spinning the gloom-and-doom for Mecklenburg County’s budget:
“There’s not a lot of fat to cut (in the budget),” Roberts said. “We’re going to be cutting muscle and bone, I fear, and we’ve got to figure out how to do it without hurting the health of the whole county.”
Twaddle. Jennifer is banking on the fact that most local civic poo-bahs, reporters, editors — let alone residents — never bother to eye-ball the 600-odd page county budget. The first thing that strikes you is that half the county budget — $503m. — goes to CMS. No fat in CMS? Only Pete Gorman’s PR army can say that with a straight face.
But there is also the county commission’s own spending priority rankings, 1 through 7, which clearly indicate that some spending is more important than other spending. In 2009, the county will spend $30m. on priorities 5, 6, and 7. Might there be some fat in there? Also, as you are sure to hear that the county has “no choice” on how it spends X amount of dollars, it does have complete flexibility on some $291m. worth of spending.
Zeroing on at such spending reveals that $200K went to the CIAA basketball tournament, $62K to a NASCAR event, $1.5m. to business incentive grants, $1m. to the ill-defined WTVI “Public Square” fiasco, and hundreds of thousands in various other little drips and drabs. Again, this is the commision’s own low priority stuff. Further up the “priority” food chain you encounter things like a $475K “cultural diversity grant” to the Arts & Sciences Cabal, $100K to the Latin American Coalition, the staggering growth of the public library system, which the county now spends $30m. to operate and which is rapidly gaining on DSS as one of the largest headcounts among county departments.
In sum, if you want to maintain the status quo glidepath of growing government at every turn, then yes, the 2010 budget might be a problem. But if the idea is to restore some fiscal sanity before the county goes bankrupt, it looks more like an opportunity.
