Editorial: Cities face ugly budget choices --Public safety first; other services will be at risk

North County Times

January 21, 2010

EDITORIAL

By the North County Times Opinion staff

OUR VIEW: Public safety first; other services will be at risk

The news this week is hardly news: Escondido and Oceanside face massive and painful budget cuts as the cities' revenues plummet.

Escondido council members need to find $4 million to cut for the last third of the year alone. In Oceanside, it turns out that the city has been vastly outspending its revenue and also cutting deeply into its reserves. That city probably needs to find $5 million to save before July 2011.

While we have no silver bullet solutions to offer in either case, here is our sense of budget priorities:

-- The first and principal obligation of government is to protect its citizens.

For municipal government, that means providing adequate police and fire protection and safeguarding public health (e.g., fixing broken sewers and keeping drinking water safe).

But even with these core governmental duties, city leaders, including the leadership of the cities' employee unions, must recognize that a shrinking pie demands sacrifice. Hence, employee pay and benefits ---- including employee participation in covering pension premiums ---- must be on the negotiating table.

There is always a trade available between numbers of employees and levels of pay.

The public must recognize that longer response times are inevitable as staffing shrinks.

-- The second obligation, we believe, is to maintain infrastructure ---- that is, city officials have a duty to be good stewards of the property they oversee. This translates into adequately maintaining streets and public buildings to keep disrepair from rending them useless or nearly so.

-- From there, nonessential services must be prioritized to fit community needs. That means parks, community centers, libraries, public arts support, economic development and the rest of municipal activities ought to be ranked and cut from the bottom up.

From this list we would save programs that feed the cities' hungry and keep the homeless under a dry roof in the winter, and let other things fall away.

None of this is pleasant, but it is necessary.