Frightened

Our budget problems go deeper than a lack of funds. That’s bad enough. But exacerbating that difficulty, especially at the county and city level, is a lack of foresight and wisdom in allocating limited funds.

Recently, we had an all-too-concrete example of this: Dr. Glennah Trochet, who had served Sacramento County in the public-health department for 22 years—the last 13 as the top public-health official—resigned. She was clear about her reasons: The funds allocated to protect public health in Sacramento are not sufficient to do the job.

This should frighten us all.

Protecting public health is a core service of government. Infectious disease won’t hold off until we have adequate funds to deal with it. But the budget has been cut so drastically in recent years, that it’s no longer possible to take care of routine public-health needs, let alone maintain the programs needed to face an emergency.

This is true in other aspects of local government as well. For example, budgets for state, county and local parks have been slashed. That doesn’t mean the parks just disappear. It means that they will not be maintained and monitored; they’ll suffer from lack of maintenance. The closed parks will become nuisances.

The same is true of our roads, bridges, sidewalks and sewers. Failure to fund maintenance and repairs to those systems—and laying off the workers who keep them running—doesn’t mean we’ll stop driving, walking and flushing. It does, however, mean that our odds of minor failures increase dramatically, and the possibility of catastrophic failure also increases.

The same principle holds for our mental-health, child-abuse prevention and protection, and domestic-violence programs. As we should know by now, the worse the economy gets, the more people will need these crucial services.

Finally, there are the twin pillars of public safety: police and firefighters. Their jobs are so critical, that a five-minute delay in response can mean the difference between damage and disaster, between life and death. But we’re cutting back there, too.

The current course of our local government is penny-wise and pound-foolish. Allowing carefully built and maintained systems to wither away—aside from the danger of being unprepared for a minor crisis, let alone a full-blown disaster—means that when the economy turns around, these programs and structures will need to be rebuilt from scratch.

There are, no doubt, some places in local budgets that can be cut. But drastic cutting in fundamental public-health and safety services is a guarantee that Sacramento will slip into decay. Even if it means more revenue—taxes, fees, assessments—these programs and services must be maintained, lest we find that the “recovery” happens without a city worth living in.

Remember that the fall of a city is a slow process; so slow that most people don’t notice it. The truth is that the gates are almost always rusty and falling apart long before the barbarians have arrived. Now is the time to reinforce those services that make our city and county livable; now while we still can.