ACCORDING TO his biography, the only office in local government that Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue has ever held was the appointed position of member of the Houston County Planning and Zoning Board. That lack of experience and dimension is starting to show badly.
Recently Perdue defended his suspension of the homeowner tax-relief grant program, which reduces property taxes on the local front, by flaying all the state’s hometown and home county governments and school systems for allowing unrestrained growth in services, and hence costs.
“The growth of local government has been overwhelming,” he said. “While the [homestead tax credits] had great motives initially — to reduce the local tax burden — it has not worked out that way.”
That’s a rather interesting “spin” on the budgetary woes and pounds of flesh being extracted from state agencies to pay for them. That Perdue doesn’t like the credits, installed by his predecessor over the current governor’s opposition, is a given. Nonetheless, local spending actually hasn’t gone up all that much more as a percentage than state-level spending has in the same timeframe.
Worse, a lot of the local spending boosts have been necessitated by the state’s perpetual abandonment of services rendered in the past, or mandates to do this or that.
NOT ONLY THAT, but one suspects a good argument could be made that as local governments were increasing their outlays the citizens were actually getting something in return while the state has been spending more even as, before the current cutbacks, it was giving the citizens less and less.
Granted, the state’s population growth has spread revenues thinner even while the tax take was actually increasing. Still, one begins to suspect that Perdue’s view is that local governments and schools are doing “too much” for their constituents.
To be sure, a calm and reasoned re-evaluation of what government does, whether it should be doing it, or if it should be doing so much of it, is a valuable exercise worth undertaking regularly and not just when a recession arrives. However, one doubts many taxpayers see a lot of “fat” in the Rome and Floyd County operations. Here, such “tough decisions” tend to come down to whether the public needs police or fire protection more — which one can go? (Atlanta just picked fire, by the way.)
It’s really striking — in Greater Rome, at least — to observe how local services have improved in recent years even as a marked deterioration has set in regarding what the national and state governments think they can do.
ONE ALSO wonders why Perdue doesn’t use his bully pulpit to castigate the pork-barrel mentality of many of his peers in the General Assembly ... or to condemn the state’s continued spending of what, in a real crisis, should be deemed expendable.
For example, the state is still planning to borrow $1 billion (more) for construction projects even as its annual principal/interest payments on existing debt exceeds $1 billion in the same budget. There are 470 “local grants” in the budget now in so much difficulty ... and no talk about putting every one of them off.
It’s pretty hard to convince citizens that their government is starving when it has a slab of bacon for breakfast.
Nor, for that matter, has there been any mention of rescinding or delaying the latest “tax breaks” piled up to supposedly improve the business climate and lure new enterprise. Perhaps such are worthwhile investments in good times, but this year’s new handouts (piled atop the hundreds already existing) went to insurance companies, private-school scholarship groups and pig farmers. Apparently, these are more important than homeowners who lose their tax credits?
AND AS PERDUE’S across-the-board whacks chop both state jobs and capacity to provide services to citizens, where’s the talk about slicing off some agency/department heads, or reducing the big-salary corps of “bosses”? If the state is going to do as much as 10 percent less because it has 10 percent less money, shouldn’t that take 10 percent fewer supervisors?
Or are such positions needed in order to staff the meetings to discuss what to cut next?
Nobody’s going to disagree with those running state government that tough times call for tough decisions. Indeed, many citizens are facing variations of such choices of their own. One doubts many will decide to buy the baby less milk in order to keep the premium channels on their cable.
There’s comparative silence regarding criticism of the approaches currently being taken among the politicians sitting in elected offices, with some exceptions. This probably has to do with it being the final months of an election year — and the difficulty in running against the leaders of one’s own party as well, given that just one party pretty much dominates the state decision-making ranks.
Thus, as a scapegoat must be found. Apparently local governments have been selected for the role.
ALL IN ALL, this latest exercise that pretends to be protecting the taxpayers’ nest eggs appears directed by those acting like chickens with their heads cut off.
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