{"id":12312,"date":"2020-03-16T16:38:25","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T20:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=12312"},"modified":"2020-03-16T16:38:32","modified_gmt":"2020-03-16T20:38:32","slug":"is-this-the-worst-communications-debacle-in-county-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/?p=12312","title":{"rendered":"Is This the Worst Communications Debacle in County History?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Adam Pagnucco.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As MoCo residents are just now starting to find out, County Executive Marc Elrich has recommended a property tax hike as part of his Fiscal Year 2021 budget<\/a>.\u00a0 And how did they find this out?\u00a0 The first mention of it came from a county council statement released at 1:05 PM today opposing the tax hike.\u00a0 As of this writing, the public knows little about the budget other than the fact that it contains a tax increase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the coronavirus spreading and the local economy on\nits knees, how do you think folks are going to feel about that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s set aside for the moment any analysis of the merits of the tax hike.\u00a0 (That will come.)\u00a0 Instead, let\u2019s consider how a competent administration would try to roll this out.\u00a0 In the past, administrations held press events with the council on the mornings of their recommended budget releases.\u00a0 Right after those events, press releases went out containing loooooooong lists of all the goodies in the budgets.\u00a0 More money for schools?\u00a0 Check.\u00a0 More social workers?\u00a0 Check.\u00a0 Increased numbers of police officers?\u00a0 Check.\u00a0 Big Macs for every girl and boy (or quinoa for the healthy eaters)?\u00a0 Check.\u00a0 Doug Duncan, Ike Leggett \u2013 it didn\u2019t matter who it was, they all put on a Santa cap and handed out cookies from the chimney, at least when there wasn\u2019t a recession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this budget contains a tax hike.\u00a0 No problem, plenty of budgets in the past contained tax hikes.\u00a0 You sell those tax hikes based on what they buy and other factors making them necessary.\u00a0 Leggett, for example, sold his FY11 doubling of the energy tax hike as being the only way that he could preserve the bond rating<\/a>.\u00a0 In FY17, the county council sold its 8.7% property tax increase as an \u201cEducation First\u201d budget<\/a>.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t matter so much whether they were right.\u00a0 The point is that they had an argument to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now to today.\u00a0 The administration was always going to face hurdles in selling a tax hike.\u00a0 After all, the council just two weeks ago said that they didn\u2019t want more taxing authority from the state<\/a> because they weren\u2019t interested in raising taxes.\u00a0 So what do you do?\u00a0 First, you line up advocates who benefit from the tax hike and forge them into an army.\u00a0 That shouldn\u2019t be so hard since the teachers, the service employees, MCGEO, the non-profits, the enviros and lots of other stakeholders are getting a piece of the new money either directly or indirectly.\u00a0 Invite them to your presser.\u00a0 If the coronavirus prevents that, get them in writing.\u00a0 Have them make videos.\u00a0 Include supportive quotes from them in your own communications.\u00a0 Have them all up team up on an online petition.\u00a0 (MCGEO already has one<\/a> that they promoted through a mailer.)\u00a0 Have them send out supportive blast emails and social media posts the very morning on which the budget is released.\u00a0 And so on.\u00a0 The point here is that this isn\u2019t just the executive\u2019s budget.\u00a0 It belongs to all of these other groups too.\u00a0 This makes the council members understand that they would pay a price by voting no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The budget isn\u2019t drafted overnight; it takes weeks to prepare.\u00a0 That means the executive branch had time to get ready.\u00a0 They should have lined everything up and beat the council (and everyone else) to the punch.\u00a0 Yeah, the critics are going to cry about it, but let them go last so YOU can define this budget first.\u00a0 Instead, the administration did\u2026 apparently nothing.\u00a0 There was no morning press event, even a livestreamed one, and there were no preemptive communications \u2013 at least none that I saw.\u00a0 The very first communication released from the county came from eight council members who opposed the tax increase.\u00a0 As of this writing, other than a brief statement from Elrich defending the tax hike<\/a>, there is STILL no comprehensive communication from the county listing all the benefits of the budget.\u00a0 Is anyone other than Elrich out there defending it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What a disaster!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So who should be upset about this?  It shouldn\u2019t be the tax opponents.  The administration\u2019s incompetence allowed\nthem to define the budget around the tax increase.  Robin Ficker has to be bellowing in joy right\nnow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The folks who should be really upset are the ones who might benefit from the tax hike.\u00a0 A proper communications effort should have been designed to get the council to hold off on expressing opinions about the increase, thereby buying time for the advocates to lobby them and start shifting some votes around.\u00a0 Instead, eight council members said no immediately<\/a> in the most public way possible.\u00a0 (Council Member Nancy Navarro, who has chaired the council\u2019s tax-writing committee for ten years, followed up with a hell no<\/a>.)\u00a0 It would be very hard for the council to move off that now.\u00a0 As for the advocates, instead of waging a common battle for a bigger pie, they might have to fight each other for scraps as the council figures out how to reduce the executive\u2019s increase in county expenditures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so, because of an epic communications debacle, a\ntough sell has become damn near impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Congrats to the administration.  Or something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Adam Pagnucco. As MoCo residents are just now starting to find out, County Executive Marc Elrich has recommended a property tax hike as part of his Fiscal Year 2021 budget.\u00a0 And how did they find this out?\u00a0 The first mention of it came from a county council statement released at 1:05 PM today opposing … Continue reading Is This the Worst Communications Debacle in County History?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[151,84,132,134],"tags":[1545,1508,1539],"class_list":["post-12312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adam-pagnucco","category-marc-elrich","category-property-taxes","category-taxes","tag-adam-pagnucco","tag-marc-elrich","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4mKJE-3cA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12312"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12316,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12312\/revisions\/12316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theseventhstate.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}