About 20 years ago, Martin County was in a deep depression. In previous downturns, Florida was usually the last in and the first out. But, the current economic crisis is much different. We all enjoyed the high real estate market of a few years ago, but we are now paying the price in the form of a county government that refuses to reduce its spending, The county’s budgetary process is a good example.

In 1992 the MCTA recommended the county adopt a budget based on what it had to spend - and not what it could take from the taxpayers. As an example of this process, we asked our members to take a hypothetical $1,000.00 and to allocate it on the basis of the services they wanted. For example, “how much would you allocate for the Sheriff, the Library system, etc.?" It was a fun exercise but it made the point of spending only what you have. In essence, when money is scarce, one tends to make more intelligent choices as opposed to satisfying a “wish list.” Families and businesses do it all the time - so why not our county government?

We recommend the county view its budget in these difficult times with a plan based on choices determined by a fixed amount of revenue. While it was easy to plan budgets back in 2007/2008 because rising property values provided significantly more discretionary funds to the county, today's economy requires a much different approach in spite of the fact that the perceived value of current or proposed services continues to rise. As such, we should all learn from the past and plan budgets that are more realistic. Accordingly, we recommend a “zero based budgeting" process that begins each year with a zero balance and no fixed costs and requires that each and every program be justified and not automatically carried over. This type of budget should be created on a 2 year cycle - and not during an election year for obvious reasons.

We commend the county staff on their knowledge and patience during this year's budgeting process when they literally saved the County Commissioners from great embarrassment by failing to work together in adopting a tentative budget and set the maximum mileage rate that would result in a default to the “roll back” rate. (This rate is the rate that must be charged in order to raise the same amount of money as last year’s budget). If unchecked, this action would have resulted in a huge tax increase. Now that the maximum millage has been set, it can be reduced, but not raised. We also hope that even more reductions will be adopted before the final budget is approved because we believe not all reductions that could have been made were made. Politicians tend to avoid tough budgetary decisions in an election year in order to avoid the backlash from union and taxpayers alike, thus, changing the budget cycle might solve the problem.

We wish to commend the Commission and the elected Constitutional Officers who have indeed cut their own budgets. We are currently spending about 30 million dollars less than we did just 2 years ago and we thank you all. But, how about looking for another 30 million? There are obvious places to look for further reductions such as eliminating step increases and COLAs in union contracts, increasing employee contributions to benefit plans, devising alternative retiree benefit programs, imposing tiered pay cuts for county staff and other similar actions.

In short - keep making cuts until we tell you it really hurts.