Jeb Bladine: Huge cost of unfunded mandates falls to taxpayers

It’s annual budget time for state and local governments, and the numbers are staggering. There isn’t enough money for government to do what it wants, but the costs are beyond what taxpayers want to pay.

The Oregon Capitol Chronicle this week reported on efforts to cover a $128 million deficit in the state’s general fund and a $289 million deficit at the Department of Transportation. In McMinnville, final decisions are pending on continuing and adding to significant increases in property tax levies and user fees.

Throughout Oregon, government payroll costs have grown dramatically over recent decades. Those costs are increased by an estimated average of 20 percent for the public retirement system, and by another 20-30 percent for payroll taxes and benefits.

Government budgets once discussed as millions of dollars have grown to hundreds of millions, billions and, for the federal government, a $7 trillion fiscal year budget with an eye-popping $1.78 trillion deficit.

Just for reference, one trillion travel miles is about 5,375 round trips to the sun.

Whatchamacolumn

Jeb Bladine is president and publisher of the News-Register.

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Taxpayers — individuals and corporations — pay the tab. And government at all levels, despite efforts to control the trend, pass along “unfunded mandates,” adding huge costs to those taxpayers.

The most prominent unfunded mandates from the federal government to states are in the areas of environmental regulations; health care and human services; education policies; elections, homeland security and public safety standards; and civil rights and accessibility compliance.

The federal Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995 attempted to curb those pass-along costs, but states today find that many unfunded mandates have been replaced with a combination of partial funding plus more rigid rules.

From that perspective, many actions by the Trump administration could be viewed as forms of taxpayer revolt on steroids.

Oregon, in turn, passes unfunded mandates to its state government operations, cities, counties and other local government entities. Most costly among those are land-use planning and housing regulation; employment and labor mandates; retirement system obligations; election administration; and public records, meetings and transparency compliance.

I could argue that other unfunded mandates would be even greater without those requirements for government transparency.

Oregon has its own constitutional unfunded-mandate clause that sounds great: “When the Legislative Assembly or any state agency requires any local government to establish a new program or provide an increased level of service for an existing program, the State of Oregon shall appropriate and allocate to the local government moneys sufficient to pay the ongoing, usual and reasonable costs of performing the mandated service or activity.”

However, courts have so narrowly interpreted “program” that a great many costly state requirements don’t qualify for that revenue-sharing.

Here’s an interesting bottom-line estimate I found for taxpayers:

With $100,000 annual income, you might be paying $50,000 in a combination of direct taxes, indirect taxes embedded in your costs of goods and services, and various government fees and mandates. With $50,000 annual income, your costs for that spending might be $17,000.

That huge raise would be nice, but not all you might think.

Jeb Bladine can be reached at jbladine@newsregister.com or 503-687-1223.