Note where the C-1 Board increased the cost estimates used to justify the Bond.
More importantly, note how the ballot language – which will become the controlling law in this deal – clouds the source & use control of funding. The Board combined project estimates into ballot groupings, and then put everything under the funds flow from the BEST grants. Since the C-1 Board had analyzed the ballot language for some time before tonight -video- one could conclude that rigid internal control of Bond funds flow wasn’t an objective.
Also, the repayment cost of the debt of $3.8M is the real cost to the taxpayers. Focusing on the bond value as the measure of the impact of the debt, disguises the real cost of all the chosen projects. You need to add 40% to each project to estimate its indebted real cost.
From grant, to committee, to board, to ballot, things just keep grossing up. Every time a subject enters a new phase in government processing, the cost jumps.
Why? Two reasons:
Because of scarcity – the basic economic proposition of unlimited wants and limited means or resources.
And because government operatives have no personal constraints in the pursuit of the unlimited objectives of the public agencies they serve.
Other things being equal, the private sector operates within the constraints of the basic economic problem of scarcity. Operators in the private sector can only satisfy their wants to the degree they satisfy market demands from a voluntary public to earn the resources necessary to satisfy their wants.
Public agency operators, be they elected, appointed, or hired, seek the growth of their public enterprises too. Their public agencies have unlimited wants too. But those operators, acting through their enterprises, wield powers over the voluntary choices of the public.
Elected politicians like to sell their public enterprises with borrowed terms from the market, but public agencies are not market entities. They wield forces despite the consent of the public. Public agency operators, depending on position, not only enjoy various degrees of personal immunity from their public actions, but in most cases keep getting paid regardless of how well their government entity performs.
A life saved or a drip prevented, at the margin, might be the most important thing in the world to that life lost, or that person dripped on, but everything comes with a cost, and the fact is that not all solutions are worth it. Our reality is full of risks to health, safety and welfare that are simply too costly to mitigate. And legislators who write laws making it the mission of our public agences to promote the health, safey and welfare of the public, have no control over the economics and real costs it takes to do so.
All of these things ran through my mind as I observed the C-1 debt scenario play out last night, and as I observed the procession of Elbert County department heads before the BOCC today, without exception, express their unconstrained desires for more of the public’s money.
B_Imperial
ref:
– – – – – – – BRP/IAC Estimated Costs – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – C-1 Board Costs – – – – – –
