County budget’s in need of a slicer

March 6th, 2009 at 03:08pm Linda Grist Cunningham

Unfortunately, Winnebago County put its final budget together weeks before the financial markets imploded in late September and the global economy careened over the water fall. Since the county’s fiscal year is October through September, there’s no way they could have seen the shocking meltdown coming.

Or maybe they should have. Back in the fall of 2008, board chair Scott Christiansen and administrator Steve Chapman met with the Register Star’s editorial board to explain the spreadsheets behind the rather austere upcoming budget.

The budget called for some minor expense cuts that included voluntary buyouts, some freezing of positions and a handful of other painless options. Revenue projections were — for government — somewhat restrained, projecting 2-4 percent increases, which in normal bad times might be considered reasonable.

We told Chapman and Christiansen then that we thought it was surprisingly lean considering what we have come to expect from government, but that was before we dug into the spreadsheets — and before we started questioning them about budget numbers versus actual numbers.

The problem was two-fold: (1) Those expense cuts underestimated the tenacity with which county employees would hold on to their jobs and the refusals of some departments to do more than pay lip service to expense controls and reductions. And, (2) the revenue projections were based on the idea that 2009 revenue would exceed 2008 actual revenue even though the trend lines clearly showed that was not going to happen.

We asked — actually, I pushed obnoxiously hard — why the county thought revenues would increase from sales and property taxes when nothing was on the horizon to warrant such optimism. The answers were hopefully vague. It was clear the county folks had their fingers crossed, were hoping for the best — and trying mightily to wish that big black revenue cloud wouldn’t burst anytime soon.

The city of Rockford has been a tad luckier, if one can call it that, because the city gets to craft its budget right smack in the middle of the recession. Difficult though that is, the city can make its cuts now with some prayer it can maintain the balance between revenue and expenses.

The county is going to have to retro-fit and retro-fit fast or risk going even deeper in the hole. What was to have been a million dollar or so hole, is now $5.6 million deep. That’s going to mean far deeper cuts now than they would have had to make had they not been so optimistic-against-all-indicators when they passed that budget last fall.

We’ll eventually get back on an even keel, but for now taxpayers expect their governments to plan for the worst and hope for the best. Not plan for the best and hope to heck the worst doesn’t happen. The county’s ax is going to fall hard.

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