Handshakes, welcoming smiles, and well wishes are fine, but now it’s time for Island County’s two new commissioners, John Dean and Phil Bakke, to start making some hard decisions.
Dean was elected just last year and could largely sit back and watch as the two veteran commissioners, Mac McDowell and Mike Shelton, supervised the budget process. In fact, that process was well underway when Dean took office after the November 2006 election. So this is Dean’s first full year of being involved in budget-making.
Phil Bakke is even newer to the job. He took over earlier this month, appointed to fill the seat vacated by Mike Shelton. Bakke barely had any time to read all his cards of congratulations before the first budget requests for 2008 started rolling in.
Sheriff Mark Brown has already made his public pitch for more money next year, asking for three additional deputies, two corrections officers and a part-time clerk. He offered sound reasons for all his requests, but the fact is the county won’t have nearly enough money to fulfill the wishes of all the department heads.
Commissioner McDowell professed to being “taken aback” by the sheriff’s rather expensive proposals which, if granted, would eat up all of the county’s $300,000 in “new money” it has to spend next year — and then some. He seemed a little lost without the familiar face of Mike Shelton backing him up. The two tight-fisted commissioners kept the budget well in hand over the past dozen years.
Requests from department heads total $1.2 million in new spending for 2008, according to McDowell’s figures. Simple math shows that three-fourths of those requests will have to be denied if the county is to spend within its means next year.
It’s not easy cutting the sincere proposals made by department heads, and often it leads to anything but handshakes and smiles when the messy budgeting job is over with. Dean and Bakke are about to discover what the public is paying them for: Making the tough decisions necessary to provide adequate police protection and good government, without taxing the people even more.
