CHC 1979-02-20 - Laserfiche WebLink

Home

Maybe you ought to look at this thing with an idea towards trying to simplify wherever possible. Trying to cut back the growth. One of things that we used to do in budgeting, or we tried to do, because I worked for Chairman Kimura for roughly three and &half years so I had the chance to make three annual budgets. One of the things that you notice when you make budgets is that you tend to take last year ' s figure and say okay we are going to allow no more than a ten percent increase on this. But what you are really doing is compounding at a ten percent rate. There is a little rule we use in financial business that if you want to know how long it takes your money to double there is something called the rule of seventy-two. You simply take whatever rate you are working with, divide it into seventy-two and that is the number of years that it takes to double. So if you are compounding at a ten percent rate, you are going to double in 7.2 years. : it is not starting from a base. You hear a term zero base budgeting. That is what zero base budgeting does, it gets you back to the base so that you are not adding ten percent on last year' s figures, you are not compounding. You go back to a simple base. Maybe zero base budgeting is something that this Charter Commission can start thinking about a little bit. Whether this is a good thing to have in the county. All of us are concerned about increasing costs, increasing taxation. There has been almost a national revolt saying that we don ' t-want any more tax increases. Something has got to give obviously you can ' t have an increase in services and lower taxes at the same time. But maybe zero base budgeting is 'a good way to start from scratch every year. It takes a little longer to make the budget. It would take a good deal more thought and effort. But nevertheless it can be done. Maybe you ought to look at other basic forms. Maybe there are some of you who feel that county manager would be desirable. Maybe it would. In .a way a county manager form is a little bit of a compromise between a really weak mayor-!or commission system and a strong mayor system. It ' s got aspects of both so maybe you ought to look at that. Maybe you ought to look at some sunset clauses. This has become one of the things that bodies of this sort consider now, should we put in sunset clauses? The constitutional convention considered this. I don ' t mean just sunset clauses for boards and commissions. Councilman Garcia said today he thought the boards and commissions that existed ought to be continued and maybe they should and maybe they shouldn ' t. Maybe some sort of a sunset clause where it automatically would go out of existence after a period of time unless specifically _renewed? might not be a bad thing. If you want _.to"really keep__ from having the government continually burgeon in size on you. - Not only in commissions but in departments. Now, Councilman Garcia did mention the possibility of consolidating some departments. Perhaps that should be looked at. Is a department really necessary? What is it doing? Is it serving a valid purpose? These are some of the things. I think all of these are areas that you could look•, at. -21- 0