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County Government: Much Bigger is Better!
Published Saturday, June 8, 1996

Listen to the austerity junkies!   “Reduce the size of government!”  “Down with the Government Monster!”  “Away with the Evil Civil Servants!”  “I was kidnapped by Unidentified Flying Bureaucrats from outer space!”  Government has now replaced the former Soviet Union as the Evil Empire.
 
Reduce the size of government?  Nonsense!  Not if we’re talking about Nevada County government.  We need more government -- lots more.  And we need it now.
 
County government touches us more directly and more often than the State or Fed.  It’s the entity that manages law enforcement, sanitation, public health, public records, restaurant inspections, elections, building inspections, courts, animal control, the county fair, and lots more.  It’s also the biggest bargain in our personal budgets, and we’ve been getting off cheap for years.
 
Bargain, you say?  Cheap, you say?  Yes.  Ignore sales and gas taxes for a moment.  The property tax on your home assessed at $150,000 should be about $1875 a year.  That’s the equivalent of one greasy pizza, one bad hamburger dinner, and one video rental per week.  For that paltry amount, you get cops and a chance to vote, to say nothing of dozens of other services.  Sounds like a bargain to me, and I’d be happy to pay twice as much.
 
It’s amazing that the county has been delivering steak at hamburger prices for years.  I would imagine department heads are a little stressed, as they are understaffed, underpaid, and underappreciated.  And somehow, we’re still well served by our 947 underpaid county employees, who are, incidentally, our friends, neighbors, and spouses.
 
Well, austere wasn’t good enough for us, so we passed Measure F.  Measure F is proof that you can lose weight by cutting off your leg.  Statistically sound, but it’s harder to dance.  Well, I welcome its passage, because this will show us how impoverished government, based on impoverished thinking, works.  Then later, we can get back to fattening government up.
 
Fat government?  Yes!  Ask any businessperson if people demand and pay for outstanding customer service.  Of course they do!  We demand an impeccably high level of service, with bright, motivated employees, short lines, and abundant choices.  Americans do not like austerity.  We love pampering, and we’ll get that when we fatten things up by providing better pay for county workers, more of them, and the new tools they need.
 
Here are some great places to spend:
 
The Sheriff’s Department obviously needs more sworn officers, more modern equipment, more cars, and a competitive wage for its dedicated employees.  Many Sheriff’s deputies are at the top of their not-too-great pay scales.  This department needs a bigger budget, not a smaller one.
 
Elections and the Recorder’s Office.  The State, and not our whim, dictates much of this department’s activity.  The County Clerk cannot say, “Oh, la.  I don’t think we can afford a general election this year.”  Each cut in this department slows things down and diminishes your level of service.
 
The Library.  Books, not Nintendo games, are the font of knowledge.  Reverse that proposed $300,000 cut now.  Buy some computers, like they have in civilized countries.  Kids, retired moms, and all kinds of taxpayers will able to log on to the world by going to the library instead of an internet cafe.  Heck, they may even want to send e-mail to the two county supervisors who know what it is.
 
Data Processing is the one department that can help all the other departments run better.  Automation is a tremendous tool for getting us better service in the future.  And in that future, the county computers can give us instant access to all public information, handle our communications with government, pay us our refunds, and collect our tax payments (grrr) electronically.  I’d say our DP department needs more people, more money and more tools.  That’s smart business.
 
Now some of you might say, “You can’t fix a problem by throwing money at it!”  Wrongo.  We fix most problems in modern life, like dental work and broken cars, by doing exactly that.  Works great.  And you don’t improve a service organization, like county government, by withholding money.
 
The government we want is the government that fully meets our needs.  And our needs are as elaborate as want them to be.  To fill them, we need only to get mature and be willing to pay the bills.
 
Barry Schoenborn is a technical writer, and a nine-year resident of Nevada County. You can write to him at barry@wvswrite.com. The opinions of columnists are not necessarily those of The Union.

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