I had to choose between meetings last Tuesday night; San Benito County was meeting about its $5.3 million budget deficit while Hollister was meeting about its $3.5 million shortfall. I didn’t check to see if California was tackling its $9.2 billion deficiency or the federal government its $1.3 trillion problem. I’ll leave the state and federal issues for another time just to note that those are only the deficits they are willing to acknowledge publicly.
Governments in California, funded by a building boom and exploding property tax revenues that made them feel wealthy, geared up operations for almost seven years. When the bubble burst every interest dug in, determined to keep their piece of the pie because government programs become indispensable forever from the first day they are funded. It’s not greed – it’s human nature – but that does not make it any less of a problem.
Still, there is a common local government interest; neither the county nor city can go it alone, but like last Tuesday’s meetings they can and do get in each other’s way; many times more seriously. That is bad; any duplication of overhead, management, services, or capital is a waste of resources we simply cannot afford.
No other county-city combination in California looks quite like ours when you factor in population and its distribution, economics and location. The county population is small, 42 out of 58, with one tiny and one mid-sized city, the latter with 64 percent of the county population. We are a transition county both physically and fiscally – we have no access to the ocean and we’re wedged between the giant economic engines to the north and west and the poorer inland counties to the east.
Our 2009 per capita personal income reflects those factors. San Benito County was $35,331, ranking 30th in the state – 83 percent of the average. That’s better than Fresno or Merced Counties, but much worse than Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, and Monterey counties. The wealthy counties drive our costs; public employees look west for levels of pay and benefits and go there for better jobs. The poor counties to the east help limit our income providing us with little economic activity from that direction as their populations merely drive through on their way to work, shop, or play to the west.
Given those conditions, how will the City of Hollister and San Benito County pay for necessary government services? We need a long-term solution. Yes, things will get better but we have to stop pretending that the boom times were normal.
As usual, we have been offered two simple, but false, choices – increase taxes or cut critical services. The correct solution is to increase taxes and reduce the unit cost of services so we can have more of them, which is a different approach. The public should not support any plan that only returns us to a marginal level of services because unit costs remain high; budgets and proposed tax increases have to buy a lot more for the money – then the taxes are justified.
Unfortunately, promises are made to be broken and publish relation restrictions like powerless citizens committees are nothing but a waste of time. Give most politicians money without strings and they will spend it any way they can – they believe they are obliged to. Therefore, any new tax proposal needs many strings that make the spending contingent on real reductions in unit costs and a long-term strategy to keep those costs under control, otherwise it’s just the same old merry-go-round and we’ve taken that ride before only to end up where we started.
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident. His column appears Tuesdays.
