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Peaceful Budget Season Is A Reflection Of The Election Cycle

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By TOM JACKSON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 18, 2008

These are distasteful times for anyone who shares the responsibility for reconciling the bottom line. With the well-established exception of folks who ship their wares through the Strait of Hormuz, budgets are in the, well, tank. The proverbial wolf, brandishing a gas can and a bill for corn-diverting ethanol subsidies, bangs at every door.

This non-bulletin is the stage upon which major players declined to re-create last summer's county budget drama. Perhaps financial reality finally caught up with governing philosophy. Perhaps the actors couldn't divert their eyes from the heavy backdrop of a warming election season.

Cynicism, the devil on our shoulder urging us to believe the worst in our fellows, suggests the latter. We agree. For all its faults, cynicism is not always wrong.

The upshot is, even as the costs of doing business rise, Pasco County government must, for the second straight year, get by on less, the result of a double whammy: slumping property values and implementation of Amendment 1, notorious in government circles for squeezing certain property assessments.

For budget-makers, this is familiar territory. Different this time around is that Sheriff Bob White has declined to engage. Having campaigned hard, but in vain, for an increase approaching 13 percent last year, White signed off on a plan to shave $1.1 million from his fiscal 2008 spending, to $85 million.

Old Dog, New Trick

White may learn slowly, but he learns well.

As surely as a blustering Lee Cannon triggered the demise of his public career with the finger he stabbed at county commissioners in the hot summer of 2000, White was determined not to blunder similarly.

If he clears the twin hurdles of an August primary and a November general election against feisty opponents and in the face of grumpiness from the deputy's union, he'll have three years to complain about government center's meddling.

On the other hand, last year's showdown did not flatter county commissioners, who came off looking like they had more interest in preserving the pool of secretaries to assistant deputy planners and their 5 percent raises than in expanding the number of patrol deputies and keeping their equipment up to date.

But three of them - enough, paraphrasing commissioner-turned-assessor Mike Wells, to trump any good idea - are on the ballot, too. Thus were budget-crunchers under the supervision of County Administrator John Gallagher obliged to locate austerity measures, largely, elsewhere.

This was not the summer for brinksmanship.

Pressing A Memory

But what about next year, and the years beyond?

As the economy improves and the housing sector rebounds - nationally, building permits leapt 11.6 percent in June - county and city policymakers must not forget the hard-learned discipline administered in the recent downturn.

The public genuinely meant it when it declared that government had used exospheric property values to excuse a multiyear spending spree. Subsequent garment-rending by the public sector has impressed only the yappy 35 percent minority who predicted doom if Amendment 1 passed.

That left a hefty majority to impose discipline on government largess gone wild. Sheriffs and county commissioners should be mindful when the good times roll again.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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