For $7 per year more in taxes on an average-value home, the Salt Lake County Commission last week could have heeded its auditor's advice and balanced its budget through the next five years.
But instead of raising taxes by $52, commissioners voted last Thursday to raise them by $45, balancing their general fund only through the next two years.The average home in the county is worth $164,000. Residents of the unincorporated areas got an additional increase of $28 on an average-value home there, $179,000, to balance the municipal services fund through 2003.
The general fund action was a compromise between Commissioner Mary Callaghan, who wanted to balance the budget only through the next year, and her colleagues Brent Overson and Randy Horiuchi, who wanted to go the whole five.
Horiuchi expressed some disgust with the action ("If we go through the pain of going through truth-in-taxation we might as well ensure the future of the county"), but Commission Chairman Overson said he was happy that his primary goal, unanimity, was reached.
"It was tough, but we arrived at the end of the tunnel together," he said. "That was important to me."
Overson added that even though the county has touted its five-year budgeting plan to bond agencies and others, garnering it an AAA bond rating, it has rarely been followed with exactness. Through the past decade commissioners have opted to balance the budget by less than five years more often than not.
Reason: political pressure. It's hard to get up enough political courage to raise taxes or cut services sufficient to see your way clear five years into the future.
After the vote, auditor Craig Sorensen said he was resigned to the result.
"It's good and bad - mainly OK," he said.
He warned, however, that by avoiding biting the bullet now, commissioners are setting themselves up to repeat the whole painful process a year or two from now.
The tax hikes will raise $15 million in the general fund and $3 million in the municipal services fund. Before voting to raise taxes, commissioners had already cut requested department budgets by about $55 million, going far beyond cutting fat, as Callaghan's administrative assistant Sam Klemm put it, to cutting "muscle and bone."
"There will be layoffs," Horiuchi said.
Even after taking a meat ax to budget requests, the commissioners were still left with the choice of raising taxes or not opening the new $135 million jail, which will cost about $15 million. Given the money already invested in the jail (still under construction at 3300 South and 900 West) and promises made to Salt Lake City to vacate the current metro jail at 400 South and 200 East, not opening the jail was, realistically, never an option.
Even commissioner-elect Mark Shurtleff, a fiscal conservative who sat in on the budget meetings, was reconciled to the tax hike.
"I think it's necessary," he said. "It will open the jail."