Chuck Hage: Measure Revenues AND Costs

Editor’s Note:  This is the first of four columns Chuck Hage is writing on his experience as a Cooperstown village trustee.  His first topic:  Money.

COOPERSTOWN

Living in a village is about the people.  Governing a village is about the money.  Where does it come from, where does it go, and at what velocity?  When people have the answers, accountability is at work.  But village taxpayers must be informed enough and must care enough to ask the right questions, and even if they are and they do, they are up against it.  By “it” I mean the apparatus of public service that finds accountability too heavy a burden to be carried on with discipline.
To be realistic about public accountability, understand that the moment you pay a dollar in taxes, it is instantly converted into a non-dollar because you no longer own it and neither does anyone else.  Public officials who allocate non-dollars do not feel any personal monetary loss.  The only persons who will value non-dollars are those who receive payment as employees, suppliers, and service providers. 
At the moment they’re paid, the public non-dollar becomes their private dollar, restored to value.  So under penalty of law you give your valued dollars to people you have voted to trust and they dispose of your money through a system of devaluation.  It’s the nature of the beast and a reason the beast is difficult to tame, even by people who have earned your trust.  Accountability takes homework and teamwork by many knowledgeable, caring people.
Gertrude Stein phrased it well in 1936 when she wrote: “Everybody now just has to make up their mind. Is money money or isn’t money money. Everybody who earns it and spends it every day in order to live knows that money is money; anybody who votes it to be gathered in as taxes knows money is not money. That is what makes everybody go crazy.”
Here in the village, much has been made over the last three years about the revenues derived from paid parking and how they offset property taxes.  But note that you’ve heard no accounting of the costs incurred to run paid parking or how much those costs subtract from revenues even in aggregate. 
Such costs include purchase, installation, maintenance, repair and upgrade of machines, as well as labor to collect parking fees, issue tickets, train employees, assist customers and do accounting. 
The proponents of paid parking avoid cost accounting and claim that your property taxes are reduced dollar-for-dollar not by a net amount but by a gross amount. This is part of covering up the non-dollar reality of waste on the inside by calling for more real-dollar revenue from the outside. 
Now look at the indirect effects of paid parking.  Marginal sales can be lost by  retailers due to paid parking, less business can be a tipping point for store closures, fewer stores can reduce commercial property values, and the property tax burden can be shifted more toward residents. 
Since these effects are not measured, we don’t know their magnitude, so we can’t claim that paid parking has been a success.  For all we know, the net effect may be harmful.
Governing a village is not all about the money; money is the medium.  The value proposition is really what we’re after, with the first rule being, Do No Harm.  Unfortunately, the petty ambitions of some, aided by the weakness of others, have harmed the village, and for the past year the mayor has been occupied with overdue corrective action. 
His challenge is to overcome the source of harm and address the constructive aspects of the value proposition:  Are operations efficient, are the important things getting done, are budget levels appropriate?  In governing a village, waste is a terrible thing.  Until it’s attacked and limited, no one should try to justify a larger public role.  Unless we recognize that everything competes for limited resources and put priority on the important things, progress will not be made on any broad front. 
Only by stopping the harm, eliminating the waste, and focusing on what’s important, can village government justify its budget and gain the strength to take initiatives.



We each want the best bang for our buck.  We don’t start with a fixed ratio between public spending for the common good and private spending for our individual good.  We willingly allocate dollars to public spending if, and only if, we are confident that we will receive good value in return.  Cooperstown has some distance to travel in this direction.  It’s about the money and it’s also about the value.  As Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”