State funding cuts demand creativity by elected officials

Just days after Trumbull County commissioners decided against creating one convention and visitors bureau to serve Trumbull and Mahoning counties, The Vindicator published a front-page story with the following headline: "State cuts' pinch to go on." The story dealt with the 8 percent cut in state funding for cities, townships and counties and stated that next year, the second of the two-year state budget, the hit to local governments will be twice as hard as this year.
In other words, times are tough today and will get tougher tomorrow. Indeed, there is no guarantee that the governor and General Assembly will not eliminate the Local Government Fund, as had been suggested by some legislators when the state's current spending plan was being developed. The red ink gushing from the budget forced deep cuts in spending.
With the national economy sputtering and a full recovery in the short term no longer a realistic proposition, Ohio's fiscal crisis will continue. That means further belt-tightening by state government.
Given those realities, we believe commissioners Michael O'Brien, Joseph Angelo and James Tsagaris missed a golden opportunity in not exploring the merger of the convention and visitors bureaus with their counterparts in Mahoning County, commissioners Edward Reese, Vicki Allen Sherlock and David Ludt. Such a meeting would have opened to door to a general discussion about other cooperative endeavors to cut each government's operating costs.
Airport funding
The one-bureau idea came from Sherlock and her colleagues as they sought to establish a permanent funding source for Mahoning County's share of the cost of operating and maintaining the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport in Vienna Township in Trumbull County.
Sherlock explained that money would be saved by merging the two visitors bureaus and that the savings could be directed to the airport. Each county charges a bed tax imposed by the commissioners, the proceeds of which fund the visitors bureaus.
We weren't surprised that there was little support among the directors of the respective entities for the merger. Protecting turf (jobs) has been the main role of local governments and other public entities in the Mahoning Valley. That is why talk of regionalization has remained just that, talk.
"Doing more with less" makes for a great soundbite, but in reality, it has been business as usual in the public sector. Concessions, givebacks, consolidations and even layoffs have become the rule rather than the exception in the private sector, but public employees, including elected officials, seem to believe that they're entitled to all they can get in terms of salaries, benefits and pensions.
But as a Vindicator story last Sunday indicated, there isn't an unending source of money, at least not from the state. In the current biennium, local governments in Mahoning and Trumbull counties received almost $2 million less this year than expected; in 2004, the loss could top $4 million.
County commissioners, mayors and township trustees will be forced to face the reality that there aren't other sources of revenue to make up the shortfall. The only alternative is to reduce the size of government -- which is what Mahoning County commissioners Sherlock, Reese and Ludt were attempting to do, in some small way, in proposing a merger of the visitors and convention bureaus.
Blame game
As for pointing the finger of blame at state government, Republican Gov. Bob Taft and the GOP-controlled General Assembly can be expected to challenge local governments to do what they have done with the state budget: slash nonmandatory spending.
It isn't too late for O'Brien, Angelo and Tsagaris to seek a meeting with the folks in Mahoning County to discuss initiatives for regional governance. After all, they want Mahoning County's financial participation in the airport.