On “Pensacola Speaks” on Monday, Escambia County Commissioner Doug Underhill talked about budgeting and his definition of a fiscal conservative. We touched on the local option gas tax and his frustration that Mayor Ashton Hayward and CFO Dick Barker didn’t correctly rely the Board of County Commissioners’ proposal for the distribution of the tax.
Underhill believed that if the commission and Pensacola City Council were allowed to talk directly with each other a settlement would have been reached.
“Probably had all the elected officials been able to talk to each other directly instead of going through staff, we would have come to a better resolution,” he said. “When I watched the City Council meeting and I watched the City Council was being told about what we said, and that did not accurately reflect the meeting that I participated in.”
He added, “If the county’s administrator was to modify something before bringing it to our board that would be –I mean, I couldn’t imagine Jack Brown doing such a thing–tt would be considered a pretty serious breach of trust.”
Underhill talked in length about how he defined fiscal conservatism.
“A fiscal conservative is somebody who takes every single dollar, and uses it on a zero based basis,” said Underhill. “First thing you have to ask yourself is: is this even the government’s job? If the answer’s no, or even a mushy yes, they should probably stop right there. If we spent that dollar last year, and the year before, and the last 15 years before that doesn’t matter. If the person were spending that dollar on is a good person, or a bad person, or whatever that doesn’t matter either. Is it the government’s job to do it? Is there a cheaper, better way to do it outside of the government using a public-private partnership?”
He believes in zero-based budgeting.
“If we had a zero-based mentality every single year with our budget, our budget would decrease because everybody would have to answer how did you serve the people of Escambia County with the money we gave you last year? That would be a game changer,” he said.
Underhill is in his second budget process since being elected in 2014. He admitted last year was a difficult learning process.
“You are taking a sip of water through a fire hose,” he said. “There’s so much to learn not as in how things are done but trying to figure out why things are done the way that they are done. There’s a lot of funds, and things that are like sacred cows that when it comes right down to it, we only negotiate and argue out over about, maybe 10 percent of the budget. All the rest of it is kind of fixed, and I don’t think that’s appropriate.”
Underhill said, “I think every department head should have to take the time in the budget cycle to stand before the people of Escambia County and say, here’s what I did. Here how I saved. I saved $100,000 here. I saved $5,000 off here. I did away with a full time employee here, and we should be expecting to see that every single year as we right size the government. I personally believe that our local government is actually too large.”
The District 2 commissioner still questions the wisdom of the county investing $8 million in the VT-MAE facility at the Pensacola International Airport.
“My father told me this– if you want to know what’s important to a man. See where he spends his time and money.” he said. “We are spending eight million dollars on VT-MAE, and I would think there are very few citizens around the county that if you ask them, ‘Hey, if you had eight million dollars to spend on anything in the county, what would you spend it on?’ Very few people would say that they’d spend eight million dollars to get 100 jobs, 100 fairly low paying jobs. Our total cost of acquisition per job is almost twice the salary of that job.”
He added, “You could take that money, and invest it in companies that are already here, invest it in your work force, invest it in your infrastructure but these things that come up that are favorites for somebody they tend to move forward very quickly, whereas other people are yelling, and screaming saying, ‘Hey, how come I can’t get some attention for this project or this idea?’ Because they don’t know to walk the halls they don’t get it done, and I think if we got to zero based budgeting each issue, each entity, each idea would have to stand on its own merit not on the merit of, well, you know he’s a good guy. He’s been around. He’s a seventh Escambian or whatever.”
