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Endorsement: Dan Hamburg for Supervisor
It has been some 16 years since Dan Hamburg has held an elected office. The citizens of Mendocino County have often urged him to run again for office. During recent years he has been director of Voice of the Environment, a national non-profit organization. Now he is about to be elected as 5th District Supervisor.
Since Mendocino citizens mostly already know why Dan is a local hero and his opponent is not, I want to focus your attention on the issues that will confront the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors. These issues are not unique to Mendocino, only the details are unique.
After the stock market bubble burst in 2000, throwing the U.S. economy into a recession, you would think that government bodies would have learned a lesson about spending. You can't assume the economy will always grow. You should not make commitments for future spending based on today's probably-inflated tax receipts, or on unrealistic optimism about where the economy will be somewhere in the future. Yet when the housing bubble started raising local revenues in 2003, the county government managed to start spending money even faster than it came in.
The total (local, state, national) tax burden on the people of Mendocino County is heavy, except perhaps on those who hide their income and so pay no income taxes. Because of Proposition 13, the burden is also lighter on those who have held their homes for more than a decade.
When tax revenues are used to create goods and services everyone can enjoy, they can be productive rather than destructive. When taxes are wasted on Homeland Security and foreign wars they hurt the domestic economy and provide no services to the people who pay them. When taxes go to red tape, they can hurt too. The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors will have no control over American defense spending. They need to work effectively with the discretionary revenues that come in from local taxes. The county has very little discretion over funds it administers for the state of California.
In our low density, largely rural county maintaining roads is expensive on a per capita basis. Services are pretty minimal outside of the Ukiah area. Rural land is of low economic value and produces fairly minimal taxes.
Given all that, the county needs to run a tight ship. Instead it has run an extra-sloppy ship. County workers were hired during the housing bubble simply because there was money for it. Salaries were raised and inflated pensions promised. The bust of the housing bubble has caused lower revenues. The pension system, which was going to be difficult to fund even if the the economy somehow kept booming, assumed high interest returns on what little funding it received. Instead returns turned negative for two years and are now near zero. Yet the obligations remain.
Layoffs and salary cuts were made pretty quickly in the private sector in 2008 and 2009. As a result, this year the private sector has added jobs at the national level, if not as many as we would like. Cuts to government workers were a political football. Late and shallow cuts just delayed the pain; job losses in the government sector continue. In addion failure to reform the pension system still looms over this county.
Once elected to the Board of Supervisors, a lot of official attention will, by necessity, be taken up by county employees, mostly by the highly-paid administrative types. These people will be your friends. You won't want them mad at you. But if you don't move the county to a defined-contribution system, which enables a rational budget process that balances citizen's needs against county employee's needs, you will be betraying the trust of the voters.
County employees' pay has to balance with the rest of the county economy. The local economy needs real growth in goods and services, not the fake growth of asset bubbles. We know Dan Hamburg is committed to protecting our greatest resources, our people and our environment. He knows the local economy is sickly and has some good ideas for making it healthy again. An enormous number of people have joined his campaign. Hopefully his supporters will see that they need to continue to be active in local governance if the campaign's good ideas are to have any chance of being put into practice.
William P. Meyers, publisher, October 10, 2010
