Barnstable County has a fairly new spring tradition, a sad one. It’s when human service providers from across the Cape gather before the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates and sing in dirge-line harmony, Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
This is purely a symbolic dime; they’re really asking the county to spare several thousand dollars. The reply: no Oliver, you can’t have more. There is no more. The human services folks then shuffle away no richer for their efforts and wonder why the county is turning its back on the region’s needy.
The Assembly set the stage for this unpleasant no-win scenario during the Fat Times in the late nineties/early aughts, when people were still flocking to the Cape en masse to purchase oceanside lots upon which to build their mighty vacation fortresses/future retirement homes for themselves, maybe their pets – they need all that space, they claimed, for when their kids and grandkids when they come to visit (as long as it isn’t during the winter – that’s when they’re in Florida, mocking us poor freezing and occasionally snowbound sods from afar while their Cape Cod Starter Mansions sit empty).
During these years, the county’s Registry of Deeds was raking in considerable cashola. I think they may have even had a Scrooge McDuck-style money vault to hold it all.
And it was during these years that the Assembly expressed their largesse by doling out considerable sums to human service providers as grants (an important point). In 2002 the county was running a $1.85 million surplus thanks to Registry revenue, and tossed out more than $700,000 to various local and regional projects, including homelessness prevention programs.
Even at the height of this giddy spending spree, there were numerous Cassandras on the Assembly who warned that these good times would not roll on forever. The market will stabilize or, worse, stall out, and those precious Registry revenues would dry up. There were some rather pointed arguments about the need to define the county’s role in the Big Picture of human services on the Cape and whether the county would continue its somewhat aimless spending habits.
The county took a step in the right direction by forming in 2003 the Human Services Advisory Council, which was charged with examining the region’s needs and filing its recommendations for programs to receive county funding.
However, the county did not take the next necessary step and establish protocols for human services grant distribution, and thus the stage was set for the tense 2004 budget debate between the Assembly and the Barnstable County Board of County Commissioners.
In brief: the county commissioners nixed an Assembly proposal to return $300,000 to the towns, a refund of sorts on their annual assessment (again made possible by the Registry) and directed the cash toward human service programs.
In the end, after considerable conflict between the two county bodies (and within the Assembly), the money went back out to several human services agencies that dealt with homelessness issues.
And yet, the county did nothing afterwards to create a comprehensive grant distribution plan. We really should, they said, so we don’t go through this again, but it was not to be.
This led to another, nastier brouhaha in 2005. This time, county commissioners furiously butted heads over an Assembly plan to strip funding from the Cape Cod Commission and Cape Cod Economic Development Council and redirect the money toward human services. The commissioners vetoed that move.
(Interestingly, that blowup galvanized the Assembly to examine the county budget process and determine exactly which branch of government ultimately held all the cards. By June 2006, the questions were answered and a revised budget process was in place. Funny how quickly the Assembly moved to resolve that issue, isn’t it?)
In 2006, all those valuable lessons still not wholly learned, the Assembly skimmed $65,000 out of the commissioners’ recommended human services spending initiatives – totally denying one organization even the thinnest slice of the pie – and distributed the funding to its own selections.
In 2007, the Assembly dipped into county reserve accounts to provide $155,000 in human services grants, despite the fact every county department took a 15 percent budget cut. This happened over the county commissioners’ objections, though those objections were not as vigorous as in 2006 – this was perhaps due to the fact that the amount funded was a fraction of what had been requested: $520,000, so $155,000 was a tolerable concessionary bone.
Now we’re getting into the thick of the budget process for FY09, and boy is the déjà vu getting thick in here. On April 16, the Assembly’s standing committee on finance held its annual public hearing on the budget, and every member of the public who spoke had one thing on their minds: how much would the Assembly give them for human services?
The short answer: if they weren’t Elder Services of Cape Cod and the Islands, bupkiss; Elder Services is the only agency listed as a grant recipient in the proposed FY09 budget.
The people who spoke the other week threw out the usual arguments, which consist of:
A) But you gave us money last year
B) We need it, real bad
C) I’m sure there’s money somewhere in the budget, you’re just not looking hard enough
The usual responses are, in order:
A) That was last year
B) We understand
C) No, there’s not. Really
Point A: Grant programs expire, sometimes when things are good, frequently when things aren’t. Anyone who deals with grants knows they could vanish into the ether at a moment’s notice, a victim of a bad economy or political maneuvering. It happens. The argument “You gave us money last year” is toothless.
Point B: There is no disputing the need, especially nowadays. Between the generally cruddy economy and the domino effect skyrocketing gas prices are having on every aspect of life – have you noticed grocery prices are starting to creep upwards? – people are getting pinched if they’re lucky, crushed if they’re not. Whether they plummet to an unpleasant fate could depend on whether there is but one organization standing there beneath them with a safety net.
Point C: Okay, here’s where it gets ugly…
I’ll be among the first to agree that most, if not all government bodies are bloated with waste and inefficiency. Any given agency could scrape up a respectable sum of spare cash if they get creative and changed the way they did business. It just takes some imagination and a willingness to slough off pointless old habits. Random example: The local school district could save $200 a year right away if they stopped sending me paper school committee packages and e-mailed it to me as a big PDF instead (but that’s a rant for another time).
Nevertheless, as with any budget, there ultimately does come a point when you simply cannot cut back any further. Sure I could eat nothing but Ramen noodles for every meal and put the money toward other uses, but I’ve grown rather fond of real food; I’ll buy cheaper, generic brands instead of the pricier name brand groceries, but I have to draw the line somewhere, and for me noodles that taste like plastic shavings and have all the nutritional value of Styrofoam packing peanuts are on the other side of that line.
The county has drawn its line. By their estimation, they’ve pulled back as far as they can. Maybe they could indeed pull that belt one notch tighter, but who knows? Hell, chances are even they don’t know if every last penny is being put to its best use, but they believe they’re at that point where the next decision would have to be a drastic one: cutting back on their own services, firing staff, or raising revenue the only way they can, by increasing the burden on individual towns.
That would spark a trickle-down effect that, in all probability, ultimately results in someone somewhere taking one for the team (involuntarily, I’d add). Maybe it’s someone at the town or county level losing their job, so their salary can become a grant. Maybe it’s a homeowner socked with a property tax hike, the result of their town passing on the cost of an assessment increase or to compensate for the loss of a service previously provided by the county at a lower cost.
In economics as in physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; increase spending in one area, cut it in another. Spend money here, forcibly take it from there. I would ask of human service providers: is that what you want? To fund your own activities at the risk of increasing the very needs you are trying to address? To force suffering on one man that another might be relieved of his?
Like it or not, everyone has to make sacrifices sometimes, even the human services sector. Nobility of cause should not make one exempt from a sacrifice or two.
But I certainly do not blame anyone for trying their damnedest. And it’s not their fault they’ve had such a horrible no-win scenario foisted upon them; that weight rests firmly across the shoulders of a county government that talked the talk so long that, somewhere along the line, they forgot to walk the walk.
The views and opinions in the Enterprise blogs are those of the author and are not neccessarily shared by Falmouth Publishing.
