The Buncombe County Commissioners will hold a public hearing on their budget June 1. Materials published on the budget to date are sketchy at best. They include a five-page general report replete with pie charts, a nine-page state of the county report, a nineteen-page PowerPoint presentation averaging about three words per slide, the commissioners’ “strategic goals,” and two two-page spreadsheets.
As part of the budget presentation at the commissioners’ meeting tonight a video aired that was fit to bring a tear to the welfare statist’s eye. Like a pop-psychology book, it presented case studies of named people, telling their stories and how they hooked up with county programs for teen pregnancy, affordable housing, recreation on Lake Julian, restaurant inspections, erosion inspections, snow removal, alleged child abuse, flu shots, food, air quality regulations, . . . At least the stories were not neurotic enough to qualify for an OnStar commercial.
Manager Dr. Wanda Greene invited me to take time off work and look at the inches-thick real budget, however.
