County Commission is on track to responsible budgeting

We are only two and a half months into this fiscal year and the County Commission is already planning for the next budget year.

In the first planning meeting, several organizations came together to ask the county to make water quality a priority again. The Argus Foundation, the Conservation Foundation, the Gulf Coast Community Foundation and North Port City Commissioner Jill Luke, there as an individual, all came to a retreat to ask the county to refocus on this important issue. The Sarasota Chamber sent word of its support for this initiative as well.

The Argus Foundation came to its position when we hosted our Meet the Minds last August on red tide and subsequently started researching water quality projects in the county. We began sharing our information with these organizations and others.

After my Business Weekly column on Labor Day about county water-quality projects, individuals began to reach out to us, from concerned citizens, to a volunteer board member of a municipality, to elected municipal officials. We discovered that people were starving for information. Soon, we were sharing government information and maps, connecting sustainability experts with elected officials and forming partnerships and collaborations.

We were received well by county officials when we let them know of our concerns and our request. We had shared our information with commissioners ahead of time and spoke at the retreat concisely and briefly to allow the commission to quickly get to the task at hand.

The response has been positive and we are hopeful. The Argus Foundation has requested long- and short-term funding of the Phillippi Creek Septic System Replacement Program, consideration of expanding the program to other areas, monitoring of stormwater outfalls, new and replaced infrastructure for stormwater and, finally, a county-wide nitrate-reduction plan.

The Argus Foundation also asked the county to prioritize its expenditures, with health, safety, and welfare being first, infrastructure second and amenities last, balancing amenities with putting money away in the economic uncertainty fund to be ready for any future downturns.

Finally, we asked the commission to look at its various existing books of plans when making budgetary decisions and require staff to do the same in order to maintain a long-term vision. If the plan is not what you like, amend it. But make sure we have these documents guiding us because we are in a world of term limits and turnover in the public sector.

The county is in very, very healthy shape. When you look at the projections five years out, no shortfalls are projected if our economy remains healthy and all variables remain the same. Let that sink in: The county has no predicted shortfalls in the years ahead. In addition, the five-year plan shows a slow build-up of the economic uncertainty fund, which is in addition to the county’s fully funded 75-day emergency reserves.

This is promising, healthy and responsible. This sort of budgeting is an economic driver on its own and both the County Commission and county administration should be congratulated.

The trick will be to maintain this course. The county has a lot of “shiny new objects” it could consider investing in. These amenities are the fun things, the projects with constituencies that are loud, and the sorts of things we would market to visitors. But if we don’t have clean water, and roads to get to these amenities, their shine will be tarnished quickly and become symbols of government failure.

No one claps when a sewer pipe is replaced or repaired; a few even become annoyed at the traffic detours the work causes. But if these projects lead to cleaner water with fewer pipe breaks, the commissioners should wear that accomplishment like a badge of honor.

Ultimately, the legacy of cleaner water will last much longer than the glow from any amenity.

We are grateful to see this County Commission build upon the steps of previous members and take our infrastructure and water quality seriously.

Christine Robinson is executive director of the Argus Foundation and was on the Sarasota County Commission from 2010 to 2016. Contact her at christine@argusfoundation.org.