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Government and stewardship

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Staff

By Dan Coleman
It is not often that a North Carolina city finds itself featured on the front page of the New York Times. But, given theIt topic, the city leaders of Wilmington could not have been very happy to find a story on their town so prominently placed in the July 5 edition.
The story, if you missed it, concerned the city’s failure to replace an aging fire truck that was due for retirement five years ago and that spent more than 800 hours in the repair shop in 2010. Predictably, the engine failed during a serious fire and tragedy was barely averted.
The Times article is worth reading for anyone interested in the challenges faced by local government. It delineates the problems the Wilmington mayor and council faced in trying to address declining employee morale, neglected infrastructure and the tax burden on property owners. It raises issues like the need to balance the economic realities of the present against the importance of preserving assets for the future and to balance citizens’ need for government services with their ability to pay for them.
As well as providing a primer on managing municipalities, the Times story speaks to a major issue unfolding at every level of American government: How, and to what extent, is government best used as a vehicle for promoting human well-being, or what the Constitution calls “the general welfare”?
On July 6, a Times editorial laid the problem squarely at the feet of the reactionaries who have been so prominent politically this year. “Their anti-tax radicalism, maintained at any cost, is doing enormous damage at all levels. It is preventing Wilmington, N.C., from buying a new fire truck, preventing the most vulnerable in dozens of states from receiving subsistence benefits, and may soon engulf the economy if the standoff in Washington does not end.” As with most matters, the burden falls hardest on the poor. The right defends tax breaks for jet owners while taking the budget ax to basic programs for health care, housing and nutrition.
Government has a responsibility for stewardship of fundamental factors of public well-being, factors that, if neglected, can put lives at risk and undermine the general welfare. Recent state and federal budget decisions may yield short-term savings, but in the long term we will all have to pay the piper. For local government, as the Wilmington case indicates, the threat falls on those public services that most of us take for granted, services like police and fire protection, trash collection and road maintenance.
A key asset of North Carolina, one for which the government is constitutionally responsible, is the education of our citizens. The state legislature’s budget cuts to all levels of education are astounding, particularly the 18 percent cut faced by UNC. What sort of future will we have if our young people are not properly educated?
We will become a society of declining skills and diminished innovation, with scant ability to solve ever-more intractable social and ecological problems.
This year, the anti-tax, anti-government crowd has wrought havoc with its draconian budget cuts. In 2012, redistricting will make it harder for responsible candidates to be elected. It will be essential for citizens to be vigilant, not just on the presidential race but on state house races that impact our lives so directly.
Meanwhile, here in 2011, local governments in Carrboro, Chapel Hill and Orange County thanked their managers for avoiding tax increases. However, in a year or two we may be facing the same sort of dilemmas as Wilmington. Then, our ability to value government as a tool for the public good may be tested, as will our readiness to pay for the benefits it provides us.
Dan Coleman is a member of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen.

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