Tucson Weekly: Budget Blow-Up (February 18

The Pima County Supervisors Can't Stick Their Heads In The Sand Forever.
By Chris Limberis
ON THE DAY the Board of Supervisors was to fix Pima County's thoroughly busted budget, it did nothing.
Unless, of course, you count scheduling another discussion on the $1.5-million-to-$6 million deficit as 'something.' Supervisors continued to hope this year's very real fiscal crisis, still a minor prelude to the one looming for the 1999-2000 fiscal year that begins July 1, will simply go away.
It won't.
Currents Not even before they take up the issue again next month. By then, the county's debt-ridden healthcare system will sink further into the red. And someone from Pima County's sleepy school districts may wake up finally to realize that Pima County, without approval of voters or the Board of Supervisors, has borrowed a whopping $35.8 million from restricted funds that school and other special districts pool in an investment trust managed by the county treasurer.
With limited exception, the Board of Supervisors was paralyzed. Democrat Dan Eckstrom, in office since 1988 and regarded as having the keenest mind on budget and taxation, barely spoke. That was understandable. He's smart enough to let the game come to him. Plus, he was concentrating on the final touches to South Tucson's triumphant press conference later that day when a sharp decrease in crimes was reported.
Republican Ray Carroll attempted to break through. His candid comments blew the cover off some bitterness his fellow Republican Mike Boyd has harbored in recent weeks. Boyd, a former television reporter and one-term county reorder who is in his second term on the Board, has privately complained that Carroll had been embarrassing him by basically out-Republicaning him with opposition the half-cent sales tax.
Boyd finally let it boil over when Carroll said the previous Republican-controlled Board, on which Boyd joined Ed Moore and Paul Marsh, did a lot to put the county in its current mess. That Moore-led majority drained a $20-million surplus left by the previous administration in 1993. They used that money to prop up the budget after they shaved property taxes slightly--$2 a month for the owner of a $100,000 home. Left unsaid was that about $5 million was used to correct the damage--settling lawsuits and paying Moore's handpicked lawyer--that Republican majority created after it fired or demoted 13 county executives and aides in what it blithely called a 'restructuring.'
'It wasn't very smart,' Carroll said. 'We spent our reserves--I just want to straighten one thing out. We got here because property taxes were called to be reduced by a Board that took us from $20 million to zilch.'
'You mean,' Boyd asked Carroll, 'you would rather government had that $20 million than the taxpayers?'
Carroll told Boyd it would have been better to keep that surplus for just the type of rainy day in which Pima County finds itself.
DEMOCRAT RAUL Grijalva, now in his third term but yearning to be Tucson's mayor, skipped the current crisis and said the focus should be on next year's budget. He won approval to direct County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry to prepare three budgets for next year: one with sales tax revenues (projected at $48 million for the first year and growing to $57 million for the fifth year), one with continued service levels and necessary property tax increase, and one with no tax increase.
'The issue we as a Board and a community needs [sic], to look at the choices and consequences that this Board's going to face next year as it adopts its budget,' Grijalva said. 'If we are going to be pressured and required to raise the property tax, we need to know that that's a choice and the consequences. If we're not gonna do nothing [sic] if we're gonna talk about tax reductions, we're gonna talk about keeping the tax rate the same, no sales tax, anything, then we need to know the consequences of a balanced budget under that scenario is going to look at. And what services is this Board going to be required to cut.'
The county budget is a paradox. In a robust economy, county voters in 1997 approved a record $712 million in bond debt. In two ways the county's fiscal troubles threaten those projects, ranging from Juvenile Justice Center expansion and new jails to new parks, roads and sewers. One, the county lacks the money to open, operate and maintain many of the projects. And two, the lack of sufficient reserve funds is making it more expensive for the county to borrow money. Interest rates are higher for the county because the county's bond rating slipped a point in one investor service's rating last year and is likely to take another slip this year.
A VICTIM OF ITS own inertia, the Board was left to take a clobbering from the usual suspects: county government watchdogs Mary Schuh, Merrill Lemnah and Ken Marcus, all of the Pima Association of Taxpayers, as well as another regular, Citizen Samuel Winchester Morey.
Schuh, who monitors the county from a front-row seat or from her Roller Coaster Road home, delivered a clock-cleaning not heard since the late Joseph Ignatius Brown blistered the city (telling City Manager Tom Wilson to wipe the smirk off his face) in 1991.
Schuh spared no one, not even popular Democratic Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who watched the show on cable television from his office. She ripped him for handing out raises and promotions. And she was not impressed by the cries to restore the anti-drug D.A.R.E. program that Dupnik sacrificed as a way to cut a quarter of a million dollars this year.
'It frees up 10 deputies, one sergeant and you don't forget vehicles which have beautiful D-A-R-E on all those doors,' Schuh said. 'Who paid for them? I did. I want them on the street. I don't want them in the school parking lot.'
Schuh said reserve officers or volunteers or new graduates from the academy should provide the D.A.R.E. instruction.
'People are stealing the budgets and using them for certain things,' Schuh said. 'It's like the sweeps in TV. We suddenly hear all these programs are so good. In June, do you realize they're going to be the worst disasters that ever happened?'
Schuh said the courts should be forced to collect attorney fees from defendants who could pay.
'You need to freeze all the books, the dues, the travel, etc. The next time you deal with that (U.S.) Forest Service up on Mount Lemmon, would you remember they have a $3.3 billion budget. They lost a billion dollars on some logs a while back and they lost $215 million in a little accounting glitch. We're hauling their garbage off Mount Lemmon for free. Bill 'em! We're getting (only) $10,000 for sheriff's deputies to patrol there? Bill 'em!
'What are ya doing here? Cowtowing down to them,' Schuh said.
She had more.
'That (U.S.) Congress. That Congress has been so busy with being titilated and fixated that they haven't needed our lobbyists,' Schuh told the Board. 'You cut that $210,000. They can stay home. We can use the money.'
She said money for Job Path could be cut. 'I don't think $255,000 to get 14 people entry-level telemarketing jobs and two full-time jobs is exactly what I'd call a winning situation.'
More than $160,000 could be trimmed from the county's law library, Schuh said while looking at the Board's counsel, David Dingeldine, chief of the County Attorney's civil division.
'Superior Court, $97,000 in its own budget so they can get law books. Who walks down the hall to that law library? Mr. Dingeldine doesn't. He's got his own law books. Pull the money back. They don't need it this year. We do.'
There was more, in Schuh's rapid-fire granny delivery that, despite her nearly weekly attendance and comment, put this Board on its heels, if only for a short time.
The clincher?
A $425,000 savings that Schuh said would come this way: 'I thought each one of the five of you would give us back $85,000 of your each office's $250,000. Wanna give it back? It's not your money. We can use it.'
'It doesn't take that much,' Schuh said of the pruning she administered to the county's record $747 million budget. 'I've got almost $2.5 million just doing that.'
Schuh was followed by another regular, Merrill Lemnah, a gentlemanly former county official from the Tanque Verde Valley.
'Mary Schuh,' Lemnah deadpanned, 'is a hard act to follow.'

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