Snohomish County government is moving on — to 2002. With County Executive Bob Drewel’s budget proposal on Friday, the county began to make plans for a year that will be filled with uncertainties.
Drewel’s budget proposal reflects a disciplined, intelligent effort to maintain key services affordably in a year when resources are tightening. There’s little growth in any services and most of the modest improvements come at the expense of cuts elsewhere in the budget.
The proposal calls for holding the general property tax increase to 1.89 percent. If the county council agrees, the smaller road tax will again go up by the maximum of 6 percent.
Drewel can justifiably point to some innovations, including investments in technology that will reduce workloads in the future. Those advances in efficiency for the future could only be financed because of the willingness of county department heads and elected officials to find other reductions now.
Despite the fiscal strains, Drewel’s budget manages to continue, very modestly, the longstanding process of increasing the number of sheriff’s deputies. There will be four additional deputies (five by the executive staff’s count, but that includes a position being transferred from the corrections department along with its duties). That’s well short of the 47 positions that would be needed to match one respected national standard for staffing.
Although the county council will hear arguments to expand significantly on Drewel’s request this year, the bigger question is about maintaining growth within the sheriff’s department in the future. Drewel’s budget message gave clear warnings that even current staffing levels in the sheriff’s department could be imperiled in future years by initiatives — particularly this fall’s I-747 — and the state’s inability to maintain law enforcement help to counties. In any case, Drewel’s plan represents progress in spite of big challenges.
The Boeing layoffs compound the questions about state support and initiative restrictions. But the darkening economic picture also points to the wisdom of the solid, steady approach Drewel advocates for the budget. Arguably, the county may have foregone some possible reductions in its human services, such as support for state Basic Health Plan enrollments. But whatever Snohomish County can preserve in the way of such services will be called upon even more heavily in the days ahead.
Drewel calls the 2002 spending plan "a back-to-basics budget." That’s a fair description of a budget built on tight management and reasonable service levels. Let’s just hope economic conditions don’t force a genuinely grim definition of basics on the county — on all of us — a year from now.
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