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Building a New County Government
Posted 3-06-2000
The new board of Westmoreland County Commissioners passed a revised budget
earlier this month.
When the new board was seated
in January, it had the opportunity to reopen the budget passed by the
previous board. That budget, though it didn't include a tax increase or
anything bad, didn't go far enough in reducing spending.
We used the month of January
to study the budget and look at potential areas of savings. Then by
combining spending reductions and finding a few one time sources of revenue,
we changed the previous budget by about $4.5 million to the public's
benefit.
The most important fact is
that this board's effort took what appeared to be a $27 million deficit in
four years, down to about $17 million.
That is still not an
attractive number and a tremendous amount of work still needs to be done,
but it's a start! We must continue to work at ways of reducing spending
while still delivering quality services.
That goal cannot be the
mission of the commissioners alone, but the goal of every elected official,
management, and union employee in county government. Through a strategic
effort to better utilize technology, re-examine all operations, buying
practices, and contractual arrangements, we must do more with less.
From the commissioners'
office, we must first demonstrate an ability to stay focused on reducing the
payroll. That doesn't mean we carry out some cold, irrational effort to
downsize, but a disciplined effort to not fill vacancies and get other
elected officials to do the same.
In the first two months we've
saved nearly $100,000 in salary and benefits by abolishing a vacancy when
one department head left and by promoting an associate director of Human
Resources to director.
We also must examine the
issue of health insurance. While we want to make sure our employees have
quality coverage, the cost of ensuring over 2,000 employees plus dependents
is costing us in the neighborhood of $9 million a year.
Our price quote from Blue
Cross this year was a 15% increase over last year for health insurance and
22% higher for prescription coverage. Those quotes are outrageous
considering inflation in the economy is still under 3%.
We will continue to look at
areas such as purchasing goods and materials and look for saving there too.
After years of one vendor having exclusive access to our copying needs, we
replaced nine copiers (we use over 100) with a new vendor's product and will
save $30,000 per year from those few machines alone. This effort is the type
of action we can take that will save taxpayer dollars and not sacrifice the
quality of service delivery.
In the first two months, the
new board of commissioners has been working to change how we look at our
mission in county government.
Leadership must come from the
top and we must build a new level of appreciation with all county employees
that we share the responsibility to seek improvement.
Governments at all levels,
but particularly us at the county level, have so many challenges ahead.
Improving an organization as big as Westmoreland County government is not
impossible, it will just take a consistent, diligent effort. |
