My opponent has been throwing around the charge for some time that we have been "co-mingling" road funds and general fund monies, yet he has produced no documentation to back up this false claim. Our audits consistently arrive with a "clean" management letter--meaning no material deficiencies have been found. I am trying to focus on the positive in my campaign, but am growing frustrated with this baseless assault on the integrity of county officials and staff.

Employee Pay and the New Salary Plan

Lincoln County is an organization that delivers services to the public, One of my most important goals is to protect those services and enhance them when possible. Good people are absolutely vital to our ability to deliver those services to you. That's why it's important that we be able to compensate our employees at a level that allows us to recruit good people and then keep them once we've got them on board.

We have been able to do this while maintaining our overall fiscal health. Most of our employees receive an annual pay raise in line with the yearly cost-of-living increase for Social Security recipients. Recently, we completed our first comprehensive review of the county’s pay plan in more than 15 years, which resulted in additional pay adjustments for many workers. Many were maxed out under the old plan--meaning they had reached the top step under the old plan and had no opporunity for advancement other than their yearly cost-of-living increase. Under the new plan, they will move to higher ranges but lower steps, meaning they will again be eligible for step increases. Being able to offer competitive starting salaries and providing an opportunity for advancement is vital to our ability to recruit and maintain a quality workforce, especially for positions where there is a scarcity of qualified applicants.

My opponent is critical of the plan. He asks why we implemented it now, when the country is facing an economic crisis. He fails to point out that the plan was in the works for almost three years and the decision to implement it was made in the spring of this year, effective July First, before the crisis hit. He says we can't afford to pay department heads $120,000 a year. In fact, we aren't paying any department heads at that level. Three of our directors are now earning $91,000 a year--one with a law degree and 22 years' experience with the county, another with an engineering degree and 27 years' experience with the county, the third with more than a decade with the county and long experience before that in other counties. These men are in their fifties. They could end up earning close to $120,000 a year--if they stay with the county for another ten years. 

Recruiting people at the department head level to the county has been very challenging in recent years. We are competing regionally, and in some cases, nationally, for people with the right experience and training for these jobs. Lincoln County is a good place to work, but we have to be able to offer competitive benefits. If my opponent has another plan to recruit and retain quality people for these positions, I would like to hear it.

My opponent has been throwing around some other questionable numbers about the impact of the pay plan on individual salaries. His latest claim is that we are granting increases as high as $38,000 over four years. That claim is false. The highest increase any director will see over the four year period, based on the pay plan adjustments and yearly step increases, is $18,634. This represents an annual increase of 5.8 percent. The average yearly increase for directors is four percent.

Not only salaries, but health benefits also add significantly to our overall personnel costs, as they do for every public agency and many private businesses. We have been proactive in this area, including a strong worker safety program and the launching of an employee wellness program. These steps have helped to keep our workers’ compensation costs in check, and this year, we actually saw a decrease of more than five percent in our health insurance premiums--something almost unheard of in this day and age.

Energy Consumption

We have already taken steps to address our spending on energy, and this is going to be an increasing area of focus. Fuel costs have leveled out recently, but we’re hit by the same shock at the pump that everyone else is. Other costs, such as electricity, water, sewer and garbage service are rising as well. We’ve recently added conservation and sustainability to the responsibilities of our Solid Waste District Coordinator. We are going to look seriously at ways to contain and reduce our energy consumption. It’s good for our bottom line, as well as being good for the planet.

Property Taxes

My opponent is critical of the county taking the maximum yearly increase in property taxes allowed by law--something every county does. He claims we've benefited from a windfall in the growth of property values and new construction in recent years. We have seen some added income from new construction, but not as much as most people think, due in large part to the cut-and-cap measures Oregon voters passed in the early 1990s. Prior to Measures 5 and 50, counties were allowed to increase the property tax levy six percent each year. Assessed values were rolled back and capped by Measure 50, and yearly tax growth was limited to three percent. There is an exception for new construction, but that's only added slightly to the overall growth in our tax revenues. Much of the new development has been within cities, and a good share of the added revenue has been gobbled up by the cities' urban renewal districts. New construction, also, as my opponent fails to note, also brings new demands for services. Another important distrinction is that properties are actually taxed well below their market value--an average of almost 50 percent below market value in this county. And though my opponent described the property tax at one forum as our only revenue source, it produces one-third of our general fund budget revenues. Federal and state funds make up another 19 percent. The rest includes the beginning balance (30 percent), other taxes, fees, licenses and permits and state forest revenues.

County Timber Payments

The county has dealt with fiscal challenges in the past few years, the largest being the loss of the federal timber replacement dollars. The impact to our general fund was manageable, but that was not the case with our road fund. The end of these federal funds meant the loss of about 55 percent of the annual revenues for our Road Department—about $3.4 million a year.

Counties saw the timber payments as maintaining a nearly century-old promise between the federal government and the counties. With large portions of our land mass in public ownership, we (the counties) did not and do not have the same opportunity to generate tax revenues as counties where the land is mostly privately-owned. That’s why the feds guaranteed the counties a share of revenues from timber harvested on these lands. It worked well, until the Spotted Owl and Marbled Murrelet led to a drastic downturn in timber cutting. The replacement dollars helped counties maintain vital public services.

We have worked through the Oregon Association of Counties and the National Association of Counties to help persuade Congress and the President to restore the timber payments program. My opponent quotes a statement by President Bill Clinton from 1993 that the timber replacement dollars were meant to be temporary. That is a view not supported today by leaders of either major political party. The Oregon congressional delegation--two Repblicans and four Democrats--has consistently supported reuathorization. During the presidential primaries, both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama endorsed the program. In September, the Bush administration indicated it would support a resumption of the payments.

The push to pass the federal bailout bill finally provided the opportunity to bring back county payments, and President Bush signed the bill earlier this month. We will receive four years of phased-down payments, and it very clear that this will be the end of the program. The Board of Commissioners has not had an opportunity to formulate plans for use of these dollars, but I would expect to see some of it go for road projects through contractors and some of it go into our reserve. It makes no sense to me to build the department back up only to have to dismantle it again four years from now.

More than two years ago, our board decided that we needed to begin planning for a transition in case the timber payments disappeared. We consulted with our public works director and developed a plan to downsize the department from 50 employees to 30. Sixteen of those positions were eliminated through attrition or by transfer of the employees to open positions in other departments. Only four employees were laid off. We felt we had no other alternative—by law, the Road Fund is separate from the General Fund and we cannot transfer dollars from one fund to the other. The one other potential course of action would have been to deplete our road fund reserve, but we believe we must hold onto those dollars in case of a catastrophic emergency. We are able to qualify for partial reimbursement after a disaster if there's a presidential declaration, but those dollars can take months to arrive.

We have made a commitment to live within our reduced means if at all possible. Our road system is in good shape at the moment—in fact, its pothole free. I'm still trying to figure out why my opponent is critical of us for not finding a source to replace this money when he also contantly calls for us to live within our means. We will look at potential new revenues only if we find we are unable to maintain the roads in a safe condition for all of us who travel them.

The National Economy

The global economic crisis is at the forefront of voters' minds right now, and understandably so. Workers from coast to coast are worried about the stability of jobs. Homeowners are wondering if they will be able to stay in their homes. Retirees are watching their savings erode and wondering if they will have to return to the workforce. The solutions to this will play out at the national level, but the impact will be felt in all of our lives, and in your county government. We will likely be entering a period of belt tightening. But the decisions we've made while times were good will hold us in good stead for the more challenging days ahead.

My opponent wants to put the county “back on the track to fiscal responsibility.” We’ve never left it.
--Post updated 10/20/08