Mecklenburg County Budget Director Hyong Yi picked an interesting metaphor to describe county’s budget woes.
“The recession is over — economists have said it, people have declared it — but this is the eye of the storm for us,” Yi told the UPoR.
So the county has been blindsided by a fiscal hurricane, a cruel and capricious Katrina leaving devastation in her wake, destroying years of work and effort by diligent public servants. Not so fast, Hyong.
A more suitable weather phenomenon to compare the county’s fiscal crisis to would be something wholly expected — like the monsoon or the Nile flood. Sooner or later, it comes. It always comes. Order is restored, normality resumes. Revenue growth of 35 percent in five years is abnormal. Yet Mecklenburg County spent like it would go on forever.
Here’s another vaguely geographic point we’ve tried to make for a couple years now. Cities have a shelf-life. Accidents of history or the will of men thrust them up and tear them down. They grow fabulously wealthy based on the needs of the day — and luck. Think Salzburg, sitting on a mountain of salt. Or Sarai Batu, the capital of the Mongol Golden Horde on the Volga River, once home to 600,000 in the 13th century, but ultimately a temporary creation of sheer military might.
A serious person has to ask if the Charlotte of roughly 1990-2006 was likewise a temporary construct. It certainly was fueled by multi-trillion dollar Ponzi scheme of a banking system which circled the globe, depositing spoils here, for Mecklenburg County and the city of Charlotte to tax. However there is still a great deal of denial about this fact — as witnessed by the standing ovation Ken Thompson received at the Foundation for the Carolinas shindig the other day. All that mattered was that Wachovia under Thompson wrote several million dollar checks to the Uptown crowd, where the money came from mattered not — nor that Thompson lost his company and thousands of jobs by chasing the Golden West illusion. But we digress.
The county lost 11,000 jobs in 2009 and a whopping 30,000 jobs since March 2007. If the recession is indeed over, the new normal means a smaller private sector for the foreseeable future. Either the public sector shrinks to reflect that — or we go the way of Sarai Batu.
Update: WFAE adds several interesting datums, not the least of which is the fact that Gaston County budget is not in similar distress, despite arguably even a worse local economy. Also this Clip-N-Save quote from Yi: “There’s nothing we could have done on the revenue situation.”
How about not spend it all?
