Where is Tonto when you really need him?
by James A. Bacon
To justify a proposed 4% meals tax, Henrico County officials have repeatedly invoked the fact that county government has cut $115 million from its budget (set at $785 million this fiscal year), and it just can’t cut no more.
The county’s meals-tax advocacy website, Henrico County Meals Tax, frames the issue this way:
Over the past four years, Henrico has cut $115 million and 646 positions from its budget – balancing it without raising the real estate tax rate, making significant service reductions or laying off employees.
Even though I oppose the meals tax, I’ve always been impressed by that fact — $115 million in spending cuts! Gosh, I thought, even if you don’t like the meals tax, you really do have to give county leadership credit for all those cuts. Henrico must be one lean, mean organization!
Of course, that’s precisely what the meals tax backers would like Henrico citizens to think. But foolish me. As I dug into the numbers, I found that the county has not cut “spending” by $115 million. It has cut $115 million “from its budget,” which is a very different thing. If the county budgeted a spending increase one year but rolled the increase back to zero, it’s counting that as a “cut from its budget.”
Actual county spending peaked at $790.7 million in Fiscal 2009, according to the 2012 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR). Actual spending in Fiscal 2012 fell to $768.9 million. According to my calculator, that’s a real-world spending cut of $21.8 million…. not exactly the $115 million the county website trumpets.
How about those 646 positions? County payroll stood at a 10,587 in 2009. In 2012 head count had fallen to 10,491. Again, my calculator tells me that’s a cut of 91 employees…. less than one percent of the county workforce, and only a fraction of the number county officials are citing.
(Important caveat: Spending for the FY 2013 just ended was originally budgeted for $765.7 million, about $3 million less than the year before, and it’s possible that actual expenditures came in below that figure due to board actions and administrative measures. Unfortunately, the 2013 CAFR has not been published yet so it is impossible to compare apples to apples. Still, while it is possible that marginal reductions in spending and head count occurred in FY 2013, those cuts would close only a tiny portion of the gap between the $115 million perception and $21 million reality.)
So, back to the question I’ve been raising the past couple of weeks. The Henrico County website purports to be “informational,” providing citizens the objective information they need to make an informed decision in this fall’s meals-tax referendum. Yet it paints a deceptive picture of the sacrifices that county government has endured since the recession. The website chooses numbers that put the meals tax in the best possible light and omits the numbers — actual spending levels — that citizens would deem most relevant.
The $20,250 website is a work of advocacy and, thus, it violates state law prohibiting the expenditure of public funds to sway voters. In a recent column, I noted that the website didn’t mention the surge in property values that will create a gusher of real-estate property values in coming years. The selective use of budget data is a second glaring example. What else is the county not telling us? Frankly, citizens need to ask themselves if county officials be trusted on this issue at all.
