Marion’s budgeting
taxes our patience

Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me. Fool me three times, and maybe it’s time for a different adage, something like, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

When so much attention is being thrust on Marion for things that happened two years ago that we’d all like to put behind us, it’s a shame that our city council no longer seems to control the city and has been totally outmatched for three years running by a task like budgeting, which every other governmental body in the county seems to have figured out how to do.

Budgeting has nuances and challenges, to be sure. But at its core, the task is relatively simple. Employees create wish lists not unlike what children do for Santa, and elected officials are the adults in the room, deciding which things Santa should bring.

That’s not to criticize employees. Their job is to look out for their coworkers, who could always use more equipment, fancier technology, and heftier raises and benefits. Department managers are supposed to stick up for their staffs.

Elected officials, on the other hand, are supposed to represent someone else — you, me, and all the other people who end up paying for whatever gifts budgetary Santas lavish on government employees.

Yes, elected representatives have to ensure that employee morale remains high, just as parents of young kids might be well-advised to dive head-first into the Santa myth. But elected officials also have to think not just of themselves, their families, and their friends but also of the hundreds of people — especially retirees — living Social Security check to Social Security check.

Years ago, most of these people paid off their mortgages and thought they could live more or less rent-free in their homesteads for the rest of their lives. Wow, were they mistaken. Not only do houses need upkeep. Taxes continue to rise. And for people owning a house not for its investment value but for its value as shelter in retirement, increased valuation does nothing other than make it harder for financial ends to meet.

Marion already has among the highest property taxes in the county — nearly twice Hillsboro’s. And for several years running, it has increased taxes and spending by double-digit percentages, as it proposes to do again this year. Were Congress or the legislature to regularly increase taxes so sharply, we’d be seeing crowds of people with pitchforks in the streets.

Even more troubling is the role that employees seem to assert in relation to elected officials. They and their allies at places like the League of Municipalities seem to believe that it’s best to cut elected officials out of most decision-making and allow them only to occasionally cast thumbs up or thumbs down like Romans deciding the fate of gladiators in some coliseum.

Elected officials used to do far more studying and investigating instead of simple yea-ing and nay-ing. Some apparently still want to. When their wishes to take time to go over a budget in detail before presenting it to the public are largely ignored, even if there’s a promise that there still will be time to review things, it’s troubling.

To be sure, there’s probably nothing illegal about how the council’s plans were changed without consulting council members. But there may be something immoral about it. The key question is: Who works for whom? Do elected council members serve the interests of appointed officials, or is it the other way around?

Government employees hate being called bureaucrats. But when the people and their elected representatives rule, it’s called “democracy.” When government employees rule, it’s called “bureaucracy.”

We hope Marion’s elected council members will reassert the rule of democracy and thoroughly study and perhaps even pare some of the budget requests they will be seeing for the first time when you do in this week’s paper. But even the mayor seems to doubt that much will change. Bureaucracy seems quite entrenched when democracy doesn’t fight back. Now is the time to see whether we have true heroes of democracy on our city council or just a bunch of people whose main goal is to be popular, get along, and not make waves.

— ERIC MEYER