Montana Decides: The Long Green Mile

I’m going to combine two stories, one fictional and one real. In the 1999 fictional film, The Green Mile, the “green mile” referred to the stretch of green linoleum that death row inmates walked to Louisiana’s electric chair. When I was a kid, my father used to refer to cash as “long green.” What do you get when you combine the two stories? Like the prison inmates, perhaps what you get is the worthy dollars’ inevitable demise as a productive public resource at the end of that analogous linoleum path, or “the long green mile.”

According to a recent report titled “The 2023 Real Local Budgets” by the Frontier Institute, https://frontierinstitute.org/reports/2023-real-local-budgets/, Montana local governments have grown their budgets faster than population growth plus inflation, burdening taxpayers with millions in excess of this measuring stick for fiscal responsibility. However, this report only accounts for the six most populated counties in the state. Wondering how this data applied closer to home, I’ve borrowed from their work and did my own analysis for Jefferson County.

Frontier Institute’s report states, “The growth of the economy, as measured by Montana’s population growth plus inflation, provides a measuring stick for fiscal responsibility by accounting for potential changes in economic conditions indicating the demand for government services and the cost of providing them.” With that in mind, I used the grand total from Jefferson County’s expenditure budget reports from the years 2005 to 2021 and found two things of concern. First, the county’s budget grew by 192% when it should have grown by no more than 60% had it followed the criteria that total spending would be limited to inflation and population growth. Secondly, the county stayed in line with spending in the years 2005, 2006, and 2007 and then started growing beyond the “inflation and population growth” limitation. When you add up the additional appropriations beyond that limitation for years 2008 until 2021, the county’s taxpayers have picked up the tab for an additional $73 million.

What caused this excess growth is a rabbit hole for another day. For now, we might start by asking “why should we care?” Those who do public finance research for a living argue that a problem facing governments is massive waste in all public spending. Governments lack tools to discern good government expenditures from bad. As I pointed out in a previous article, “When You Find Yourself in a Hole Stop Digging,” while we might be able to find an incoherent and even dishonest accounting of public expenditures, benefits (or lack thereof) are rarely considered or challenged due to the assumption that all public expenditures are always worthy without question. May I suggest that for any government action to be worthwhile it should generate measurable benefits greater than its costs?

Unfortunately, public expenditures consistently fail to measure up to a certain standard of benefit, not for the government, but for those supplying the funds, or the “long green.” It’s the taxpaying residents of our county, and the aggregate value of our property, assets, and income, that make up the sources of revenue for public expenditures. Because of that, a measure of the benefits of public expenditures and an enforcement mechanism seems important. Without them, waste is likely to bring death to free societies, equivalent to that stretch of green linoleum or, “the long green mile.”

Fortunately, the Montana Code Annotated provides a logical option for a partial solution. Title 7, Chapter 4, Part 5 offers a Local Government Employee Incentive Award Program which states “A governing body may develop and administer an employee incentive award program to appropriately recognize and monetarily reward local government employees in a timely manner for (a) suggestions or inventions that contribute to the efficiency, economy, or other improvements of local government by reducing costs of governmental operations.” It further states that “an employee may be eligible for an incentive award if: (a) the employee’s suggestion or invention results in eliminating or reducing an agency’s expenditures or improving services to the public by permitting more work to be accomplished without increasing the cost of governmental operations.”

When it comes to proper and functional government, accountability, and incentives matter. These are adjustment valves that government sorely needs. Coincidently, when those valves are properly adjusted, life for us citizens might be even better. However, when they are misadjusted, as they are, propriety and functionality suffer.

Go to montanadecides.substack.com to leave a comment or to request a copy of the chart illustrating the county’s budget growth.