Lehigh County Commissioners Weigh Amendments To County's 2012 Budget

Editor's note: Dean Browning is chairman of the Lehigh County Board of Commissioners.

The Home Rule Charter for Lehigh County requires the county executive to submit a budget for the upcoming year to the Board of Commissioners on or before Sept. 1.  Following that submission, the commissioners are required to hold a series public hearings on the specifics of that budget. 

Those hearings culminate in a meeting to consider commissioner-generated amendments to the budget. That meeting took place Oct. 4, as we met to consider five proposed changes to the county’s budget of 2012.  The most interesting were three submitted by Commissioner Glenn Eckhart.

The net effect of Eckhart’s amendments would have been to reduce the county’s millage rate for 2012 from 11.9 mils to 10.64 mils.  I thanked Eckhart for his work in putting together the amendments and for bringing them forth within a time frame that they could be fully debated.  And along with everyone else, I commented that I was 100 percent in favor of reducing taxes. Who wouldn’t be?

However, I was concerned about the ability to sustain the proposed cuts and the course this would put the county on in an effort to do that.

Fact: If Eckhart’s amendments were enacted, Lehigh County would have at least a $15 million hole in the budget for 2013.  That deficit would have to be considered by those in office this time next year.

• Some of those could be candidates who have said they would say "no" to any and all tax increases and they would be working with an Administration that has said there won’t be a tax increase proposed for 2013 or 2104.

• Given those two positions the only alternatives next year would be to cut spending by about 17 percent or continue to spend down our reserves and savings just as was proposed to in the amendments submitted by Eckhart.

This would create the same dynamic of gridlock that we’ve watched take place in Washington over the past few months, whether it was gridlock over raising debt limit or gridlock over continuing to fund the government.  

There was a great quote from Congressman Charlie Dent recently about the last item:

“I think it's ill advised to bring the government to the brink of closure every three months. We have a fundamental basic responsibility to affirmatively govern the country. And the public loses confidence in everyone working here in Washington when we fail to meet our most basic responsibilities.”

I agreed with Dent and said that while I thought it is a great idea to cut taxes, that it was ill advised to do so without a basic plan to make the necessary cuts in spending needed to sustain that reduction for more than just one year.  By the same token, I relayed that I thought it was equally ill advised to say the lower tax rate would be sustained by the further reductions in our reserves.  But that was the standoff confronting the County – my view was that it hasn’t worked out very well in Washington, and I didn’t think it will work any better here.

If Eckhart’s public comments were quoted correctly then his approach seemed to be:

“If all these [amendments] are enacted, there will be less revenue in the future so we'll have to sit down in the future and hash all this out.”

That is not the way any business or any family would approach the situation.  I expressed to Eckhart that I found it hard to believe that anyone who has actually run a business, like he has with his small business, would think that way.  If any business person lost 10 percent of their customers, they wouldn’t say that they have enough saved up that they could make it through this year so they wouldn’t need to worry about finding new customers or cutting overhead until sometime next year.  Of course they wouldn’t wait until next year – they would immediately look to add new customers or to cut costs. 

While I understand Eckhart’s passion about reducing taxes, I felt this approach ignored the fact that commissioners are co-equal partners in county government and what he was proposing did not meet our responsibility as described by Dent to affirmatively govern. 

As a result, I requested that Eckhart withdraw his amendments for the moment and work with the administration before our next meeting on Wednesday, Oct. 12 and develop a plan whereby the tax cut he wanted, and I’m sure that everyone would like to give, could be paid for and sustained.

I did not believe we should go forward until we have some concrete idea how that can be accomplished.  Eckhart declined to do this and each of his amendments were voted on and defeated with varying numbers of commissioners being opposed, depending on the particular amendment being brought forward.  The meeting is online and available for viewing.