Dum-da-dum-dum
It’s Tuesday, September 4th, 12:03 p.m. I’m Sergeant Joe Friday. Speck’s driveway trailed away in my rear-view mirror as I headed back to town. I couldn’t help thinking, “Some puzzles are easier to put together than others.” Aside from the possibility that pieces are missing from the box, I’ve found the most difficult puzzles are those with pieces that look like they should fit but they don’t . . . and you can’t force them.
Let’s take it back a year to December 9, 2017, when Brady Slater of the Duluth News Tribune interviewed County Administrator Jeff Cadwell. Cadwell claimed, “Cook County will own a balanced budget and normalize around the 4 percent neighborhood for future tax levy increases beginning in 2019.”
Earlier, in 2017, when Cadwell was asked on the radio, “When do we get back to 3-4 percent increases in our levy?” he said, “I don’t know that we ever can.”
“And why not?” I wondered.
Cadwell: “The problem is that we pay about 50 percent of our way through levy and charges for services and other miscellaneous things. The other 50 percent is coming from agencies that we can’t control. So we have our costs on the whole budget go up 3 percent and the state and federal freeze theirs, right? Our share of 3 percent is now 6 percent because we’ve gotta pick up the whole 3 percent, based on the amount of control by levy . . . the levy is the one thing that we really have control over and here’s what the numbers gonna take to solve the puzzle.”
Sgt. Joe Friday: “That word puzzle keeps croppin’ up.”
Cadwell: “When I was budgeting for cities, I simply laid out the revenues, the expenditures, our debt service, our enterprise funds and I took out the levy number completely and I got down to the bottom and basically, you got down to the bottom, you had a negative number and that’s the number you had to turnaround and put up here in your levy to solve for zero. And that’s how you solve for zero.”
Sgt. Joe Friday: “The Cook County Board ‘solved for zero’ by setting the 2019 levy at 5.99 percent.
“So what about those state and federal dollars the county receives, how important are they to the county’s budget?”
Cadwell: “The Cook County financial position is unique in that we have a significant reliance on state and federal funds.”
In the next breath, however, Cadwell asserts,“So we get 17 percent of our revenues from federal grants. So in all honesty, when people say we’ve only got 9 percent of the county that’s privately owned that’s paying taxes, it’s really, really, really misleading ’cause the federal government is paying their share. That conversation doesn’t have any bearing on the situation.”
Sgt. Joe Friday: “Mind if I don’t believe you, because I don’t?”
Then County Auditor- Treasurer, Braidy Powers seemingly contradicts Cadwell’s statement, “We are so dependent on those other sources of revenue. We can have wild swings. That’s where we need more protection.”
Choosing to ignore this fact–that can be historically substantiated– Commissioner Heidi Doo-Kirk brazenly suggests, “We actually have enough room in our levy to no longer take state and federal money and do what we want.”
Sgt. Joe Friday: “In other words, the taxpayer can pick up the tab for those lost intergovernmental dollars.”
And then you have commissioner Myron Bursheim chiming in, “When we want to start blaming the state and feds, that’s irresponsibility.”
Sgt. Joe Friday: In other words, “Don’t confuse me with the facts–my mind’s made up.”
What about Cadwell blaming previous county boards for the county’s “current predicament,” which Cadwell inherited when he took over as county administrator halfway through 2016; a predicament, he claims, that is due to previous boards using money from the county’s reserve fund?
Cadwell: “The question I would ask if I were a taxpayer is, ‘What the hell did you do with that money? Because that was my money sitting in the bank and now it’s not there anymore and what did you do with it?’ ”
Sgt. Joe Friday: “Don’t you ever sing a new song or is that the only one you know? Didn’t you and the board take money out of reserves this year in an effort to lower the 2019 levy?”
Cadwell: “In all due respect to the fact that expenses have ‘not risen’ in the last couple of years, we felt that we were okay carrying the same fund balance in 2018 as we had in 2017. So we cut $217,000 out of the Highway Department fund balance. That was the ‘proper’ use of fund balance.”
Sgt. Joe Friday: “Listening to at all this mumbo jumbo makes your head spin. Unfortunately, logic runs off some people like water off a duck. They turn a deaf ear to reason.
“It’s evident this guy talks out of both sides of his mouth. I’ve head it before, doublespeak: language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words.
“Citizens are at a huge disadvantage and it is extremely difficult–even impossible–for them to dig out the data they need to thoroughly understand their county’s budgeting practices.”
On September 7, although there was no trial held in a court of law in Cook County, Minnesota, the evidence certainly proved incriminating in the first degree. The lady was right: “Cook County commissioners are out of control on spending and they are not listening to the people who voted them into office in the first place.”
Dum-da-dum-dum . . . Dum-dadum dum-dum!
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics.
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