Road to ruin

County CAO Paul McIntosh has recast his role at Board of Supervisors’ meetings lately, morphing from an amiable and detail-oriented county manager into a bleak prophet of budgetary doom. At this week’s meeting, he foretold a scenario in which Butte County would be forced to cut a number of unspecified services, drain the entire budget for new police and fire equipment and force every county employee into taking as many as 26 days of unpaid time off per year. Even with these measures, McIntosh said, there are still likely to be at least 150 layoffs of county personnel this year.

McIntosh placed the blame for his gloomy prognostications on Sacramento lawmakers, saying that last year’s state budget had already blown a $10 million hole in Butte County’s general fund. If Gov. Schwarzenegger’s new budget proposal were adopted today, McIntosh said, the loss to the county would be more like $15 million. With almost 90 percent of the fund locked into state and federal mandates and costs for those mandates increasing, there are few options available to the board.

“There will be a reduction in services; there’s just no way around it,” McIntosh said. “Our community is going to feel pain.”

The board accepted McIntosh’s predictions with an air of somber resignation. Supervisors Curt Josiassen and Mary Anne Houx both lamented the loss of the equipment replacement fund without completely rejecting it, although Houx said she hoped the county wouldn’t return to the days of the past, “when sheriff’s patrol cars had 300,000 miles on them and they just weren’t moving at all.”

None of the supes offered any immediate suggestions as to how to mitigate the crisis. When public comment was offered, Rudy Jenkins, who represents county workers in the Butte County Employees Association, pleaded with the board to look for ways to enhance county revenue—often a code term for “raise taxes.”

“You’re being ripped off to balance the state budget, and you’ll never see that money again,” he said. “But you were elected to provide services to the people of this county, and you have to consider raising revenues,” he said.

Jenkins was met with blank stares and dead silence by the board members, three of whom are up for reelection in highly conservative districts, where the mere mention of raising taxes or fees often inspires furious cries for revolt. Any future raise in sales or utility taxes would have to be approved by voters in a general election.

When District Attorney Mike Ramsey addressed the board, he asked them to spare law enforcement from drastic cuts and also obliquely referred to “enhancing revenues,” although he later said he was not referring specifically to taxes.

“There are creative ways of finding money,” Ramsey said. “You always hear the argument that businesses won’t want to come here if the taxes are too high, and maybe there’s something to that. But as a business owner, do you want to have a business in a place where there’s no law enforcement?”

Only Chico Supervisor Jane Dolan was willing to go out on a limb for county workers and needy residents by saying (during a break in the meeting) that she, for one, would support raising fees or taxes if it meant keeping the current level of county services in place.

"We all know that the rich in this country get the biggest tax breaks, and I would like them to help us out." she said. "I may be the only one, but I would rather have the firefighters."