Boston-Bound Board Passes County Budget
Mecklenburg commissioners approved a $1.35-billion budget that calls for about $75 million in cuts to programs and services and includes pink slips for nearly 300 county employees.
That was Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, many of those same commissioners were jet-setting to Boston for a three-day junket of fine dining, site seeing, and luxuriating in posh hotels, courtesy of tax dollars that only hours earlier they had insisted were being stretched to capacity during a brutal budget year. Wonderful.
Commissioners slated to attend the Boston bash, which to be fair includes a few business workshops, are Chairman Jennifer Roberts, Vice Chair Harold Cogdell, George Dunlap, Dan Murrey and Karen Bentley.
In any event, the county’s budget was approved by a 6-3 party-line vote, with Democrats in the majority, like they have been for the last several years. And that, Republican Commissioner Neil Cooksey said Tuesday night, is why the county finds itself in such dire financial straits.
“This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” Cooksey aimed at his Democrat colleagues, cribbing a line from Oliver Hardy.
From 2005 to 2008, Democrat majorities on the board of commissioners managed to balloon per capita spending by about 5 percent, Cooksey said, burning through hundreds of millions of dollars on pet projects and programs designed to grow government at any and all cost. By contrast, during that same time period, Wake County saw its per-capita spending decline by about 8 percent, Cooksey said. Mecklenburg’s recent history of wild spending, he argued, has led to its current budget crisis and unsustainable debt levels.
“The majority on this board has been making promises to the public they cannot keep,” said Cooksey, who also blasted the Democrat majority’s decision to increase sales tax revenue projections for the coming fiscal year. The move magically added $9.5 million to the budget, which Democrats promptly used to restore funding for some services and programs.
“I fear this will be another promise we cannot keep,” Cooksey said, echoing concerns that the revised revenue projections will fall short and trigger mid-year budget cuts.
Democrats took exception to Cooksey’s characterizations, claiming that most of the spending he referenced was done by commissioners who are no longer on the current board.
Over the last two years, with Democrats in majority control, the county has cut about $140 million from the budget, said Democrat Commissioner Dan Murrey.
“If I was a free-wheeling spender, we wouldn’t be closing libraries,” Murrey said. “If I was a free-wheeling spender, we wouldn’t be laying off any teachers.”
But they would, apparently, still be trying to print money out of thin air to fund programs and services. Democrats on the board tried to do it again Tuesday, when Murrey made a motion to add about $316,000 to the budget, by increasing the amount of revenue from delinquent taxes county officials expect to collect, and providing additional funding to parks and recreation.
The motion hit a snag, however, on a couple different fronts. Cogdell said he thought it was more than a little suspiciously convenient that the amount of new revenue projected to be raised, almost exactly matched the amount parks and recreation officials needed to save a few jobs.
Other Democrats didn’t seem as much concerned about how the money was being raised, but how it would be spent, arguing that it should be used to restore funding to some social programs that were trimmed during the straw vote process. Commissioners Dumont Clarke and George Dunlap wanted to use $132,000 of the money to provide more funding for the Coalition for Social Justice, the Latin American Coalition and the Community Building Initiative.
When that was met with resistance, the Democrat duo suggested simply increasing the projected amount to be collected from delinquent taxes to $449,000, giving the social programs they favored $133,000 and giving $316,000 to parks and recreation.
That idea fizzled as did, ultimately, the original proposal to give $316,000 to parks and recreation.
“I’m very troubled by what seems to have become a bidding war,” Roberts said. “I resent the implication by anyone that we are fiddling with or playing with numbers. Our numbers are fact-based and carefully researched.”
You know, kind of like the research Roberts & Co. will be doing in Boston, between duck boat rides, gallery crawls, concerts, cocktail parties and a ballgame at Fenway Park.
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