Government duplication must end

Irecently completed a budget consulting job for a suburb of Tulsa, Okla. The city had not increased fees for six years and was facing a deficit. After increasing a series of fees, the residents of the city would be facing total local expenditures for county and city government of some $1,950 per year. The figure for Santa Fe residents is closer to $3,450 per person.

This discrepancy bothered me. So I checked the outlays for Doña Ana County and Las Cruces. The Doña Ana County General Fund is something more than $52 million per year. Doña Ana County has over 50,000 more residents than does Santa Fe County.

We live in a community where we have access to significant information on government, but as we have seen in recent months, our state, our schools, our city and county all have needs and desires for more funding. One would have a hard time finding fault with the programs offered and for the funding desired. But at some point it’s good for government to reassess. Assessing government is what I’ve done for a living for four decades, and it’s rather apparent that we have duplication of efforts here, and that duplication is much the reason we spend beyond other jurisdictions.

I don’t point to any program that needs elimination, but we don’t need two governments with duplicated departments to provide local government services.

The typical county in the nation has few police, no full-time fire services and few building and zoning efforts. Our county is much more like a city government than a county government. Fine. If our county is to act like a city, why have a city and county? This is not to say our city government is superior to county government. In many ways, our county has been more visionary and more willing to take hard decisions than our city.

But we also have a county whose property revenue inclines every year, one that hikes gross receipts taxes even though those taxes have inclined consistently. On the other hand, I come from a state where 30 percent of the fees that run government come from utility sales, while people here scream at the idea and prefer higher taxes.

People here don’t like the idea of better Wi-Fi services, better broadband services, a public bank. In 2012, a study was commissioned to look at electric system ownership. Since the time of that study, Public Service Company of New Mexico stock has gone up more than 100 percent, and its rates have gone up constantly and are looking higher. But people in Santa Fe didn’t think they were smart enough to operate a system. Meanwhile, people in Texas and Oklahoma are seeing lower bills from cleaner power while our Public Regulation Commission and PNM dither on how much to gouge the consumer next year.

The timidity to take on new programs and services contrasts with the meekness of accepting constant new and higher taxation by people here.

So how are we going to get our medians patrolled, sidewalks built, streets paved and add patrolmen to the streets? It won’t happen in the current format. We will be lucky to keep up with inflation in those areas because there is no economy of scale in police patrols nor street paving. We need something new.

We need to combine our city and county governments. We need to eliminate overlapping boards, managers, elected officials and management levels. This is the one way to meet the demands we all have for services. Time to get started on the constitution for such a new government.

Shane Woolbright is a Santa Fe resident who worked in local government for 39 years in Arkansas and Oklahoma before moving to Santa Fe in 2012.