Much attention has been focused nationally on the breathtaking pace of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and his technical wizards who are examining all manner of federal spending and finding – who should be surprised – millions, perhaps billions, of dollars in misappropriated or at least highly questionable spending priorities.
Perhaps Musk would consider lending one of his assistants to spend a few days in Alamance County to put a microscope on some county government spending.
Misspending thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of tax dollars is not so uncommon, even locally.
This latest example: this week’s revelation that the county government has been overpaying some of its personnel for at least the past seven months.
The overpayment tab: a mere $470,000.
So what did the commissioners decide to do about it?
Absolutely nothing.
A resolution to let the employees keep the overpayment was the final consensus of the county’s five Republican commissioners. We’ll stop the overspending for the future, they decided, but do nothing about fixing the almost half million dollars in past overpayments.
Now, to be sure, EMS workers and other first responders who benefited from the overpayment provide vital government services, and we’re sure most of them do a good job. Keeping their ranks fully staffed has been a challenging county priority in recent years, so we’re guessing the commissioners didn’t want to be seen as “penny-pinching” these employees.
Still, holiday pay at 3½ times (!) what was supposed to have been allocated (and for a total of nine holidays) seems a mighty big error in our book. (And it certainly would be in every private sector business we know of.)
However, why is it that these same politicians don’t seem to have any difficulty in squeezing the taxpayers to the advantage of county staff?
They haven’t minded raising property taxes – part of which went to raises and bonuses for these and all other county employees.
Most surprising during the discussion this week is that the ringleader the scheme to let the taxpayers absorb the $470,000 loss was newly-elected commissioner Ed Priola. (Priola is not responsible for previous property tax increases, inasmuch as he was just elected on November 5, 2024.)
It was just a few months ago that Priola was campaigning as the tough, no-nonsense, ostensibly fiscally conservative champion of the taxpayer.
But those sentiments and principles seemed long forgotten this week.
Now, granted, $470,000 pales in comparison to the millions and billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse at the federal level. It was the late Republican U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois who famously observed, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
Well, “real money” comes in smaller denominations, as well, especially when the overall budget is less vast than the federal governments.
In this case, it amounts to almost a half-million in overspent county tax dollars – or one-fifth of a cent on the property tax rate. (Each penny assessed is worth $2.5 million.)
The commissioners’ collective decision not to try to get back or otherwise even out the overpayment to the county’s workers who inadvertently received the largesse will inevitably come at the expense of the county’s taxpayers – who, we strongly suspect, will be asked to bear yet another property tax increase (for the third year in a row) later this spring.
In fact, was it not the height of irony that the revelation of the overpayment came at the end of a daylong budget retreat where county administrators laid out their wish lists for a massive expansion of new expenditures.
At a minimum, the commissioners should insist that county bureaucrats who oversaw (or more accurately, failed to oversee or correct) this half-million dollar error find ways to cut the personnel expenses of county government by at least that amount in the coming year’s budget to offset the taxpayers’ loss.
Why is the county subsidizing certain non-profit groups?
We think another area that needs some more thought is whether the county should be making rent-free space available in county-funded facilities for certain ostensibly non-profit organizations.
To his credit on a different front, Priola recently raised some legitimate questions about the county’s Family Justice Center when it wanted the commissioners’ endorsement to apply for a state grant.
Kudos to Priola and the other commissioners that they opted not to do so.
The Family Justice Center bills itself as providing “one-stop services for victims of family violence and elder abuse.”
We were surprised after looking into the center’s operations a bit more after the commissioners’ discussion to learn that this center makes space available not only to some other local government agencies trying to address domestic violence and elder abuse, but also to private organizations, as well.
But we’re not at all sure why.
Why should Elon University’s law school (which isn’t even located in Alamance County) get free space in a county-owned building?
And Legal Aid of North Carolina has also set up shop in the taxpayer-financed building.
We’ve long questioned the propriety of expecting taxpayers to subsidize with their tax dollars any non-profit organizations, much less those whose goals and objectives are not nearly so magnanimous or neutral as other in-county groups (Alamance Arts Council, the Historical Museum, etc.) who also get direct subsidies in each year’s budget.
And, of course, we’re already heard bureaucrats talking about wanting more space for various county departments. It’s no wonder they’re running out of room if they’re allowing these non-governmental entities to have free roam of county facilities.
It seems to us, that at a minimum, the county should expect these groups to pay for utilities, building maintenance, and other operational expenses for which taxpayers are now footing the bill.
And the next time some county department wants some more space, the first place they should turn is the Family Justice Center.
