New year, old problems; no resolutions in sight
I’ve finally found a New Year’s resolution I can keep. I’m going to resolve to listen to the same old resolutions from others year after year. I’ll hear about promises to lose weight, pay off debt, keep tempers in check, and do nice things for others. And I’ll be able to hear them make the exact same unfilled promises next year.
Wouldn’t it be nice if governments made the types of promises citizens do — and actually kept a few of them?
Losing weight, in a government sense, means trimming bloated budgets that expand payrolls like Santa’s belly and annually fill a taxpayer-provided sleigh with shiny new equipment, like the seven new computers bought last week by the county.
Waiting in the courthouse outside a closed-door meeting where who knows what was being discussed, another person remarked about furnishings in offices we could see from the hallway.
“I’ve seen the chairs over at your office,” she said. “They’re scuffed and worn, and where there used to be layers of leather, the fabric is flaking off.”
That’s the way things are in many private offices. Pioneer spirit, in which we take justifiable pride, has us make do with what we have — except, of course, in the government offices, where income is fixed not by selling more but merely by levying taxes.
When private businesses hire outside contractors to handle tasks staff used to perform, they typically reduce their workforce, opting to lay off or not to fill vacancies. When government offices do such things as hiring firms to print and mail their bills, they don’t eliminate billing clerks. They may even add a position to serve as liaison to the contractor.
If a private business hires someone not yet trained to do a job and hopes he or she will learn, they don’t wait years like government does with waterworks employees. If the learning doesn’t happen quickly, employer and employee part ways. Government workers stay on, are transferred to another job, or when they finally qualify get hefty raises.
We rarely hear government resolutions on New Year’s Day, but we often hear them on Election Day, when candidates perennially promise, like dandelions popping up each year, to increase efficiency and lower taxes and debt. Alas, such resolutions seem even less likely to be kept than individuals’ resolutions.
Few of us can look back and be proud we’re the same weight as we were when we graduated from high school. Consider how big local government was when you graduated and how big it is now.
Are we really getting that much more service out of government, or are such things as city streets and county roads in close to the worst shape we’ve seen them? Are we catching criminals who harass and try to trick us by phone and email, or are we issuing meaningless warnings to people driving on US-56 without license plate lights? How many of us work in offices with automatic dishwashers even though our offices can’t serve food to the general public? County health department workers will.
On Jan. 1, average people promise to try to pay off debts. Throughout the year, governments try to increase them. When a loan to do one thing is about to be paid off, officials quickly think of something else they could borrow money for — a new concession stand and locker room, for example — and thrust us into debt for these. They may justify such things as educational expenses. But I didn’t realize school curriculum now included how to pop corn, pour soft drinks, and put on jock straps. Those projects were undertaken not for education but for entertainment. There’s nothing wrong with that — provided we don’t have to go deeper in debt to pay for them.
We’ll wait and see what happens regarding keeping tempers in check in the new year, but our bet is that our new county commission will more like our old Curly, Larry, and Moe commission of recent years. Commissioners will go back to — if they ever actually stopped — micromanaging departments. We’ll be in for yet another merry-go-round of conspiracy theories and purely symbolic actions against such things as the probably-soon-to-be-dropped 30-by-30 conservation plan. And wind farms? If you thought they were all commissioners talked about before, wait until the coming year’s commissioners get going.
At some point, commissioners are going to realize that the vast majority of people who pay for county government live in towns, not the rural areas they constantly focus on.
At some point, city council members who run municipal utilities are going to realize that profiting from electric bills balances budgets on the backs of the poor.
Resolutions to do something nice for others might at least have them questioning such things, like whether to insult Florence by dropping “Wildcats” so a few parents can buy fewer T-shifts, but they’re unlikely to happen.
The reason most of us make resolutions Jan. 1 is peer pressure. We see others promising to use the new year as an incentive to take action, and we join in.
If government ever is going to make New Year’s resolutions, it will need not peer pressure but taxpayer pressure — people willing to speak up and ask questions like these of their elected officials.
There are plenty of great things we could be doing with taxpayer money to help make life better, but increasing government’s girth and the depth of its debt aren’t among them.
Who knows? I may be as misinformed about things I’ve mentioned here as government officials are about wind farms and 30-by-30 programs. We’ll never know for sure unless average citizens begin bringing such questions out in the open and insisting on answers to them.
Becoming a questioning and involved citizen, helping make democracy great again, is a New Year’s resolution we all would be well-advised to make and keep.
— Eric Meyer