Cozza Blasts County Budget
Former WBTV ace reporter Mike Cozza, who most recently fell victim to county budget cuts when he was axed as media relations go-to guy for Mecklenburg Parks and Rec, uses an Op-Ed in the uptown paper of record to effectively dismantle the silly notion that a global recession was the main culprit behind Mecklenburg’s budget woes.
Cozza rightly lays blame at the feet of out-of-control spending, with little regard to long-term implications but plenty to the self-serving political interests of those in charge. That would be Commissioners Chairman Jennifer Roberts and her Democrat cohorts, for anybody bothering to keep track. Cozza obviously has been. From his Op-Ed:
Roberts and the other Democratic commissioners insisted sharp cuts were needed because of an unexpected “revenue shortfall” caused by economic recession. Another way to describe it would be that the county spent too much for too long and carried too much debt. Whichever side of the ledger you blame, the total required budget cut was $71 million.
That’s actually only a 5 percent cut from last year’s county budget of $1.42 billion. You would think commissioners could handle 5 percent with a moderate, balanced trim across many or all departments. Instead, they massacred Park and Recreation with a 35 percent cut (40 percent over two years). They slashed libraries and veterans services. Using a so-called priority ranking system, they hacked programs that average taxpayers use while protecting programs to redistribute wealth, promote diversity, sustain bureaucracy and serve illegal aliens.
Cozza goes as far as speaking the unspeakable, taking CMS to task for its complicity in the county’s irresponsible spending binge, much of it driven by political expediency rather than in response to fiscal realities or necessity:
While it’s almost heresy to say this, part of the county’s problem was years of out-of-control spending for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Funding education is primarily a state function in North Carolina, yet the county’s total funding for CMS, now up to $474 million (operating, capital replacement and debt service), grew an astonishing 191 percent since 1996. That’s almost eight times the growth rate for everything else in the budget. It’s not sustainable!
Anxious to curry political favor with a voting bloc of 17,000 CMS employees, politicians bestowed funding increases of 9, 12, even 16 percent on CMS in some years. It’s similar to the way governments pandered to teachers unions in California, New Jersey, Illinois and New York – all in serious budget distress.
This year Mecklenburg County is in serious distress. So much so that Roberts and the Democratic commissioners have begun to dismantle Park and Recreation, libraries and veterans services.
If re-elected, what will they slash and burn next?
Cozza’s piece is worth a full read. My only question is would it have seen the light of day, if his Park & Rec gig had been spared the budget ax, or would he still be churning out public relations spin for the department, defending the county’s budget and our elected leaders’ misguided spending habits?
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