Tucson Weekly: Budget Crunch (September 10

Guess What? There's A Good Reason The Cost Of Government Keeps Increasing.
By Emil Franzi
IF THERE IS one subject candidates seeking and incumbents holding local office share, it's a general cluelessness about why the costs of local governments keep going higher and budgets keep getting bigger. It's almost like many of them don't know where babies come from.
What most voters want to hear is what they'll do to keep the costs--and the commensurate taxes--down. Most candidates and incumbents respond by pandering and belching generalities about "waste" and "pork." Some know better, but they ain't talkin'.
Currents Is there waste and pork? Of course--always was; it's government. Is there enough to matter? Not really, unless you define whole programs as waste. The problem of ever-increasing local budgets is caused by three major factors, all of which are basically beyond the control of those we elect to local office.
The first factor is mandates on local governments from higher authorities--federal, state and judicial. The easiest way to cut the budget of your jurisdiction is to dump the costs of some of what you do onto another, lower jurisdiction. The feds and state are doing this with everything from healthcare to cops. This flows downhill and counties, cities and school districts are at the bottom.
So they graciously give your local government a federal grant--out of your federal taxes, by the way--to hire more cops. Now you get to pay for all the other things that come with those cops, from the cars and other equipment to the jails to hold the crooks. And then you get to buy those crooks a lawyer.
Other items are court-ordered, giving local governments little discretion. The role of the judiciary in increasing governmental costs is ever-present--try telling the judicial branch they can't spend what they want on their perceived needs. Check Tucson's new Federal Court House and you'll get the drift. Same thing in Pima County, or even the Town of Oro Valley.
The second factor is the cost of population growth. Budgets grow when you get more people--a no-brainer that too many people ignore. New residents don't make up the difference by adding enough to the tax base. That's why local governments like Marana and Oro Valley love to gerrymander annexations around houses and into revenue-generating shopping centers, a simple admission that governments really can't afford and don't want any more citizens to serve. Of course as soon as they build all those houses they keep giving rezonings for, their budgets will blossom and the new homeowners' taxes go through their ugly pink roofs.
There's a myth that as governments get bigger you get the benefits of economy of scale, a false premise that has driven the idea of metropolitan government. When governments get bigger, they cost more per capita, not less. The city manager and other bureaucrats in a town with 50,000 people are paid more than those with 20,000, and have larger staffs. Worse, that in itself causes them to invent new programs with even more new bureaucrats as they all justify their roles and constantly try to expand them. It costs more per capita to run L.A. and Phoenix than smaller places like Laramie, Wyoming. Higher densities bring higher per capita costs for roads, cops, healthcare--and new functions.
The third factor is that local government is now more complex and performing functions it never did before. We now have whole buildings devoted to tasks that local government didn't previously do, some acquired voluntarily, most mandated from above. And the primary functions are more complicated and require more and more people to perform.
Take one function of local government that no one except a few fringe anarchists believe isn't legitimate--law enforcement. (Even the Posse Comitatus dudes believe in local sheriffs.) Match how it's done now to how it was done when we structured the governments designed to handle it more than a century ago by comparing today's costs to those over 100 years ago in a then-high-growth community, Tombstone.
When a cowboy got hauled in for cattle rustling, he didn't get a public defender. The dispatching method consisted of somebody looking for one of the Earp brothers and telling him some guy was shooting up a bar. After somebody like Wyatt or Bat knocked him on the head with a gun barrel, they hauled him in front of a JP after a night in jail--no prosecutor, no lawyers. When the stage coach got robbed, they rounded up a posse, who brought their own horses and guns--flexible staffing, minimal equipment requirements. There was no training academy to maintain--Virgil Earp just handed Doc Holliday a shotgun and a badge and told him to head for the corral. Sheriff Johnny Behan's jail didn't have a shrink on the payroll to check out the mental condition of deputies after they shot a perp.
While some folks might like to return to those simpler days, it's impossible. And when you hire more cops, you must pay for all the stuff that goes with them. The biggest single growth item in the Pima County law-enforcement budget this year is indigent legal defense.
Other areas of local government have been similarly affected by added functions and increased personnel, from healthcare to road construction. Some may be unnecessary, but most are part of what we taxpayers and citizens claim we want and have passed bonds to buy. You will have to maintain all those new roads, and hire people to guard the prisoners in that new jail, and buy these folks the equipment they need to perform those tasks. This simple fact is both highly obvious and simultaneously rarely discussed, particularly when they're selling you on voting for the bonds. Which they will do again.
While some elected officials may be irresponsible, most of the spiraling costs of local government they hand us are not really under their control. Much of their power has been eroded by higher jurisdictions and an ever-expanding judiciary, while the high costs of ever-increasing population growth does not pay for itself, either short or long term.
It's past time they just 'fessed up and told us that.

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