Cut the Waste 4

Reducing Ada County’s insanely excessive spending

• Get rid of the $80,000 per year contract lobbyist. Ada County Commissioners have plenty of clout to do their own lobbying, and work with the Idaho Association of Counties that also lobbies the Idaho Legislature on their behalf on issues of concern to counties statewide.

• The three commissioners are the county’s Chief Operating Officer. Eliminate the redundant $157,000 per year COO position. This cut would save $200,000 a year when you add in the cost of employee benefits.

• Stop going on vacations at taxpayer expense, like the one to Sun Valley in April for the Boise Chamber of Commerce’s Leadership Conference. Two commissioners attended in 2023 at a cost of $2228 to taxpayers. They both took personal vehicles and were reimbursed for their mileage. Add in the cost of hotel rooms, conference registration fees and per diem for meals, and it got expensive quickly. Why go to Sun Valley to meet with other folks from the Treasure Valley? I never attended this event. It just seems wrong in so many ways.

• Get out from under the lease for the Meridian Driver’s License facility. We are paying over $225k a year for the first five years, and the cost escalates from there. The 20-year annually renewable lease will cost taxpayers over $5 million, and we won’t own the facility at the end of that term. (We are also obligated to pay all taxes on the facility.)
  
  Let’s either buy the property outright or walk away from the lease and move satellite driver’s license operations in with existing assessor’s DMV locations that are spread throughout the county. Surely the sheriff, who provides driver’s licenses, can work with the assessor, who does vehicle registration and titles.
  
  
• Ada County has many employees in various public relations positions. Let’s try to consolidate some of these positions and grow the skillsets of the individuals in them to become more valuable county employees. (I’m not suggesting firing employees. There is always natural turnover at the county when people quit or retire that can be utilized to reduce the number of county employees.) Getting the right people into highly useful positions that add value for taxpayers is paramount.

• Sell the 220 county-owned parking spaces in a private downtown Boise building for which commissioners in 2018 paid $15 million – or more than $68,000 per space. When the facility was completed and the spaces finally became available for day use by county employees and nighttime use by apartment renters, that $15 million expense did start to provide a return to Ada County taxpayers, but it is a mere 2.17 percent. If we can get someone to buy those parking spaces and retrieve our $15 million, we can provide parking for employees at Expo Idaho and shuttle them to the courthouse, cutting down on downtown traffic and pollution. We can shuttle a lot of employees for a lot of years before ever spending anything close to $15 million!

• Do away with the county’s $27 million “forgone” balance. When commissioners do not use the full three percent allowable annual property tax increase, they can “bank” the “unused” taxing authority to do so in later years. This past year, commissioners added another $1 million to that balance, because being able to increase the property tax budget by 26 million additional dollars was apparently not enough. They can’t add it all in one year, but over the next four years, this “forgone balance” allows commissioners to increase the budget by not just three percent a year, plus a factor for new construction, but another four percent a year on top of that as well. Those huge annual budget increases would mean even higher property taxes in Ada County.

• Pay off the new coroner’s facility in Meridian as soon as possible. Yes, it will cost money we shouldn’t have to spend, but we are too far into the situation now to get out from under this $30 million debt other than by paying it off. Let’s at least stop incurring interest on it.
  
  We’re paying over a million dollars in interest this year alone for the debt on the coroner’s facility despite not having gotten to vote on it, as required by the Idaho Constitution, Article VIII, Section 3. Instead of incurring the more than $46 million cost for this property, the county could have bought an existing building that was next door to the old coroner’s facility for $8 million and remodeled it. It had been used for manufacturing fire engines so had all the appropriate high ceilings and rollup doors needed for ambulance or hearse access.
  
  To add insult to injury, electric bills at the new facility are three times as high as at the old facility, likely because of its opulent glass exterior.

I find it troubling that our elected officials don’t think these things through before committing tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money on unnecessary brand new buildings. Why build new when remodeling existing buildings can be done far more economically?

This is government. It should be functional and efficient, not extravagant.