Commissioners Main and Parry’s public apology for engaging in closed session deliberations is provided in the approximately twenty minute video above. The audio of the closed session, approximately fifty minutes, is available below to enable everyone to make their own assessment regarding the virtue of the commissioners’ statements.
[audio:http://mgx.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/execsessionaudio.mp3|titles=execsessionaudio]

During the apology Parry talks about running the government like a business and once he was sworn in Messerle addresses the audience with remarks that mirror that concept.

I really think that we are in a position here with our county government our county organization that we have to have a conversation about the level of service that we can effectively and efficiently provide. We’ve got to get ourselves to a position where we are sustainable…

Unfortunately, instead of a diverse commission we now have three Republicans who appear to believe government should be run like a private business. Running government like a business makes for some catchy bromides but in practice it simply doesn’t work. Frankly, as we have learned these few years, businesses aren’t always run well and all too frequently require bailouts from the same public being denied services now. The public will be picking up the tab for BP for generations to come in the form of health costs and lost revenue from industries damaged by the oil spill

With a private corporation a maximum economic return must be offered to small number of shareholders or owners. Government, however, is owned by everyone and in order to maximize the benefit to the entire county requires improving services not reducing them and therefore not laying off workers. Reducing services to avoid raising taxes, for example, comes at a tremendous cost to the taxpayer because they have to pay a higher price to replace those lost services.

Failure to maintain roads adequately leads to higher auto maintenance bills and even accidents and may even reduce property values further reducing tax revenue as just one example. Inadequately funding our schools and investing in our children can cost the taxpayer millions of dollars over the lifetime of that child.

To run a government efficiently and bring in the necessary revenue requires an entirely different type of decision-making calculus than what is required to run a business. At this moment, the current Coos County commission is neither possessed of these skills or, it seems, even interested in acquiring them. This is dangerous and worthy of a much more in depth look at the policies I believe this commission plans to aim toward.

In a later post I will provide several examples from across the country of costly attempts to reduce services while at the same time offering tax incentives to businesses in a false belief it will create more jobs. Again and again this strategy does not work.

This commission appears to be embarking on a policy entirely devoid of supporting empirical evidence.