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In Our View: Inventory a Good Idea

County plan to assess its property shows government can be fiscally prudent

The Columbian
Published: February 2, 2015, 4:00pm

For Clark County officials, it will be the governmental equivalent of a good spring cleaning. Of sprucing up the yard. Of holding a big garage sale.

Acting County Manager Mark McCauley has announced plans to inventory the properties owned by the county and to determine whether those sites are serving any purpose for taxpayers. “Essentially, we’ve just got to validate, ‘Why do we have it? What purpose do we have for it?’ ” McCauley said, bringing up questions that probably should have been asked long ago by previous county leaders. As County Councilor David Madore suggested during a meeting a few weeks ago, leaders must address whether the county is “sitting on property that’s doing nobody any good, that we don’t know about or that could be sold. We all have the fiduciary responsibility to make sure that we’re financially smart.”

Indeed. Although it should be pointed out that Madore would be wise to apply some financial smarts and eliminate his fee waivers for developers. But we digress.

It is because of that fiduciary responsibility that officials will begin assessing the 1,278 properties owned by the county — an average of two for every square mile. Among those parcels are parks and public buildings and conservation areas — the types of things that are best left to government. For example, it would be unreasonable to expect private landowners to be responsible for providing and maintaining parks for public use. Yet there are certain to be many properties that county officials are unaware of, or that are serving no purpose, or that would be more useful if they were bought by private owners and generated some tax revenue. McCauley said: “We’re stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars. If we’re holding property that we shouldn’t be holding, we ought to get rid of it.”

While county officials are wise to undertake this project, the need for it points out the unwieldy expansiveness these days of government at all levels. While Clark County’s leadership is not as burdened by bureaucracy as, say, the federal government, all manner of tax-supported endeavors should be subject to the question of “what purpose does this serve.” The county, along with other governmental entities, was forced to ask that during the Great Recession, and a series of cuts resulted in a 2013-14 budget of $848 million — well below the 2007-08 expenditure of $968 million, and roughly the same as the 2005-06 biennium.

Now, with the nation lurching out of the recession, leaders should continue to ask that question rather than view an expanding economy as a license for an expanding government. As the Orange County (Calif.) Register wrote editorially last year: “Too often, the founders’ preference for limited, decentralized government is dismissed as a mere ideological conceit. It is, in truth, eminently practical. As government grows, it inevitably becomes less accountable and thus more likely to fail.”

All of this extends beyond the scope of a project by Clark County leaders to determine exactly what they own. The philosophical problems that come with modern United States government cannot be solved by a fiscally prudent project in Southwest Washington, but we’ll consider this to be a good start. Examining the properties owned by the county might yield some surprises and might deliver a bit of a financial windfall.

Most important, it’s simply smart business, which is what taxpayers should be expecting from their governments all along.

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