Public needs to face up to cost of providing services

It’s budget time for cities, counties and special taxing districts around the state, as the July 1 start of a new fiscal year looms. And the dominant local refrain seems remarkably consistent — we lack the money to meet the demand for services in the face of ever-escalating costs and other trends at odds with legal mandates.

McMinnville City Manager Adam Garvin put it this way in his message to his budget committee: “The demand for services will continue to grow, and the resources available to support those services will remain constrained. The gap between those two realities is not temporary, it is structural.”

Fundamental questions arise: Is public demand for maximum, expensive services as universal as government portrays? Are government spending practices so inflated that major reforms should precede new taxes and fees? Should Oregon adopt a three-legged-stool tax strategy by establishing a general sales tax with exemptions and an offset to current income taxes?

McMinnville city staff has recommended adding back the final 50 cents per thousand of city taxing authority the city suspended when voters approved creation of a new fire district to assume local firefighting and EMT functions.

At the county, Sheriff Sam Elliott lamented, “The cost of doing business is increasing at a staggering rate,” saying that $10 million more in total county funding wasn’t sufficient to fully maintain the status quo.

County Administrator Ken Huffer agreed, saying, “You can only slice that pie up so many ways, and that’s where hard decisions need to be made.” He went on to warn, “Our expenses could be quite a bit more than they are this year,” based on salary and benefit negotiations now underway with four different bargaining units.

The picture is not any brighter in local school budget meetings.

At the McMinnville School District, faced with rising costs and plunging enrollment that determines state funding, dozens of positions will need to be eliminated next fiscal year, including those of 47 teachers. Superintendent Kourtney Ferrua hopes actual layoffs can be held to a minimum by simply not filling positions opened through attrition, but it’s not something any district likes to contemplate.

How about the county’s smaller communities? Do things look better there? Well, not judging from the situation Lafayette is facing.

To pay down debt and build a more realistic capital reserves, the city is proposing to hike the base water rate 4%, increase the base sewer rate $2, and add an only partially temporary $15 surcharge to improve a malfunctioning wastewater systems. And Lafayette has never been known to resort to tax and fee increases short of absolute necessity — something widely shared among the county’s rural communities.

This sort of news never seems to go down well with constituents, though we must say, we’ve never seen them offering to go without water or sewer service to help hold down rates. The typical stance is, please keep providing us with a full measure of services; just find a way to do it without charging us any more money.

In Dayton, the forecast is so dire that staff recommended eliminating funding for the very popular Dayton Friday Nights summer event series. “Why have this town if we’re not doing the fun stuff for our community?” committee member Robin Pederson questioned.

A state-level example of systematic failures is the contentious gas tax increase, which most expect will be overturned by voters next week.

Because of a growing trend toward electrification of Oregon’s motor fleet and major efficiency gains among its legacy gas-powered component, the state’s gas tax revenue has been falling precipitously. Tacking six cents onto a pump price now topping $5 a gallon would not increase state road and bridge revenue, or even hold it steady, rather replace just a fraction of an ever-growing shortfall.

Driving 12,000 miles a year at 25 miles per gallon, the typical Oregon motorist would only pay another $29 a year, relinquishing a small portion of the cost relief through increasingly fuel-efficient cars.

Are we really prepared to do without badly needed roads and bridges over $29 a year? If not the gas tax, what’s your solution? We certainly don’t think tolling would prove any more palatable.

Do we have any answers to address this dichotomy? Sad to say, we do not.

We need to find ways to blend acceptable new revenue strategies with major reductions in government spending largesse. If not, opposition to any form of tax or fee, no matter how badly needed and expertly framed, is going to drag down our society and culture. It is going to erode a way of life we’ve worked 250 years to build.

We believe in prudence and caution on the tax front ourselves, as demonstrated last week in our editorial about falling too hard for system development charges as a wellspring of new revenue.

However, we think the electorate has to be realistic about the cost of services on which our society and economy so fully depend, while rightfully demanding more government prudence in managing those costs.