Sunday, March 29, 2009
Government on the cheap
Christian Trejbal
Recent columns
- Baptists might leave downtown Blacksburg
- A theater rises between town and campus
- Making sense of local elections
- Voters have only themselves to blame
From the RoundTable blog
Spring is the hardest time of year to be a local elected official in Virginia. Supervisors and council members must hammer out budgets for the fiscal year that begins July 1, and that always draws complaints.
Woe befalls the elected official who suggests increasing taxes to pay for better services. Virginians, especially in this part of the commonwealth, do not take kindly to that sort of talk.
When Pulaski County and Radford officials suggested modest rate changes, the howls of protest soon sounded. We're in a recession. We live on a fixed income. Wasteful government spending diverts tax dollars into the void. You'll scare off businesses.
The responses from government officials go largely ignored. You oppose taxes in flush times, too; recession has nothing to do with it. We give tax breaks to seniors and handicapped people on fixed incomes. Our spending is lean. Businesses don't want to open in a community that doesn't provide basic services.
Residents of the New River Valley get the local services they pay for. Actually, they get more than they pay for, but even that is not enough.
The Virginia Auditor of Public Accounts collects annual finance reports from every locality and assembles them into a handy comparative report. Its findings paint a grim picture of the New River Valley compared to the rest of the commonwealth.
On average, counties in Virginia raise nearly twothirds of their revenue locally. Most comes from property taxes, but other taxes and fees play into it. The other third comes from state and federal sources.
Around these parts, communities are less self-sufficient.
Montgomery County raises only half of its money locally. Pulaski, Floyd and Giles counties all come up with even less. Instead, state and federal subsidies keep them afloat, and basic services remain strapped for cash.
It is not because they waste money on administrative overhead. Compared to the rest of Virginia, New River Valley communities operate tightly.
Floyd, Giles, Montgomery and Pulaski counties all spend considerably less per capita on government administration than the typical county. The same goes for Radford and Christiansburg compared to other cities and towns. Only Blacksburg does not come in low, but it falls right at the average.
Officials deserve credit for that success, even if they have little choice given how difficult it is to raise revenue. The problem is that government on the cheap goes beyond administration. We underfund services across the board.
Your thoughts
- Should local governments raise taxes to better fund services?
Post your comments at the RoundTable.
Spending per capita on public safety by our counties, for example, is half of the state average. Blacksburg, too, comes in way low despite all of the tragedies that have struck there in recent years. Only Christiansburg throws a bunch of money at public safety.
And so it goes. Education, parks and recreation, libraries and community development all come in low compared to the rest of the commonwealth.
And if you are wondering, we are below the median expenditures, too. A few Northern Virginia communities living large do not skew the numbers for everyone else, though they do tend to fund their services much better.
At least our communities aren't getting by on credit cards. Debt load per capita is low here.
Put all of it together and take a look from the outside. The picture is not pretty. The New River Valley has inadequate public safety, underfunded schools and a lack of basic amenities that make a community worth living in. Its citizens do not care and prefer the communal dole to investing their own money to improve things.
Anyone who lives here knows that shallow picture is not accurate. Many other things make this a great place to live.
We have a lower cost of living, so of course expenditures are lower. We have nearby rivers, mountains and forests that obviate the need to pay for parks.
Those excuses only go so far, though. The numbers are what they are, and potential employers and residents examine them before they come.
As local governments design their spending and revenue plans for next year, they can lay the groundwork to move the New River Valley away from its reliance on bare-bones services funded by Richmond and Washington or they can bow to those who reflexively oppose government spending.
When the recession ends, as it most surely will some day, business will look for new opportunities in places that offer more.
Trejbal is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times based in the New River Valley bureau in Christiansburg.
