Roanoke County: land of entitlement

MIT Professor Lester Thurow is my favorite economist. I don’t always agree with his economic analysis but his writings always reinforce three basis truisms:

• The rules of American capitalism reflect a short-term, political game.

• The average citizen has to understand the rules of the political economy in order to avoid getting steamrolled by powerful and influential interests.

• The proper role of government is to link the interests of the future to the present.

I’ve thought a lot about Thurow’s ideas as Roanoke County searches for land to build a new jail. Of course, no body wants a jail in their community and county residents are experts at playing the NIMBY game. Their response to necessary, but socially distasteful projects like a jail, follows a predictable pattern:

• Residents express righteous indignation at the mere idea of some undesirable facility being located in their county.

• They express their moral outrage to the Board of Supervisors and argue that their neighborhoods should not have to suffer such a miscarriage of administrative justice.

• County supervisors then look dumfounded as to how such an idea ever even got on the political agenda in the first place.

• The elected officials, having been threatened with their jobs unless they reverse course, seek to find a way to appease outraged citizen voters.

Consequently, Roanoke County residents have developed a collective “entitlement psychology” when it comes any undesirable facility being located in their jurisdiction. These citizens simply don’t want to bear any of the social costs involved in 21st century public administration.

Of course, jails are needed in every community because criminals commit crimes in every community. Even Roanoke County. The present jail, located in downtown Salem, is inadequate and will become increasingly more so in the coming years as plans call for this jail to house inmates from Salem, Montgomery, Roanoke and Franklin counties. By all projections, the region needs a 600-bed facility to handle its inmate population over the next 20 years. Failure to provide this facility would constitute a public safety violation.

Thurow has pointed out that because politicians face elections every two, four, or six years, they prefer short-term projects wherein they earn votes rather than long-term, intelligent policies to solutions where another politician will receive credit for a successful project. The prevailing thought among county supervisors -- adding additional floors to the current jail instead of building a new facility -- is a graphic illustration of the short-term thinking that Thurow described. The supervisors know this is not the best economic or social answer to the jail problem but they also know that such a policy will appease angry voters.

Historically, the county has sought to shift undesirable social projects (and people) to its less affluent neighbors. Yet, taxpayers in surrounding areas are painfully aware of the NIMBY attitude of our friends in Roanoke County. Talk of a regional jail spread quickly when it became apparent that no community in the county wanted the jail. However, that talk soon evaporated when it became equally apparent that surrounding counties are tired of being “dumped on” by their more affluent neighbor. It appears the days of politicians in adjacent areas inheriting Roanoke County’s social costs and calling the policy a “jobs program” are over.

What the Board of Supervisors are not emphasizing to citizens is that it is more cost effective to build the jail now than now than in 10 or 15 years. Moreover, they are not telling the citizens that a high-rise addition to the current facility is “foolhardy and pound foolish”-- it is only a temporary solution (albeit a costly one) to a problem that will only be corrected by building a new jail. Both politicians and citizens believe that an adjoining jurisdiction is going to bail them out over the next several years with a regional jail. They may as well believe in the tooth fairy.

Status quo partisans in zero-sum games (the belief that the only way to get ahead is that someone else has to lose) don’t have to win an argument. They only need to delay approval long enough for the window of opportunity to pass. That is what has happened to the jail issue. The window of opportunity for building a new jail has passed. An addition to the new jail maintains the status quo, at least in the short-term.

The zero-sum game that Roanoke County politicians and residents have played with surrounding communities is now over. Other valley residents clearly understand that the rules of the game have been pegged to maintain the county’s status quo at the expense of everyone else’s. The want to make Roanoke County incur the costs and inconvenience to incarcerate criminals.

Roanoke County’s quality-of-life can no longer be enhanced by lowering the quality-of-life of its neighbors. There are certain undesirable social costs that every locality has to absorb. The culture of entitlement created by the Board of Supervisors has disconnected county residents from this fact. These supervisors have to let their constituents know that the old dumping strategies no longer work.

They created this “entitlement monster” -- they now have to tame it. They should forge ahead, decide on one of the sites for the jail, build it, save taxpayers millions in the present and future value of money, and claim victory. That would be true statesmanship instead of the Wizard of Oz “Tin Man” type of political decisions that are now being made by the supervisors.

All of this would make Roanoke County a better managed, and more responsible, neighbor to live beside.