Georgia city shows Florida how to save
Geoffrey F. Segal

With the Florida Legislature now seemingly intent on mandating lower property taxes, some local officials are gazing north toward Tallahassee and warning of severe service cuts. They want you to imagine libraries shutting down, your 911 call going unanswered, or your local jail turning inmates loose.

Yet if those same officials would only turn their gaze a bit farther north, they could observe a Georgia city that demonstrates how Florida's local governments not only could survive but could thrive, with big savings for taxpayers.

Indeed, the experiment in Sandy Springs, Georgia, has proved that local governments don't need hundreds of public employees to function. Sandy Springs, a fastgrowing town of more than 80,000 residents, has only four non-public safety employees. Except for police and fire, virtually every government function has been contracted-out.

In its two years under private management, Sandy Springs hasn't needed a tax hike or a fee increase, the government has become more responsive, the service quality has improved, and so has customer satisfaction. The residents love it.

In fact, this model has worked so well that two other Atlanta-area communities adopted it last year, and several others are considering a similar approach. Moreover, communities as far away as West Chester, Ohio, and Castle Pines, Colorado, have announced that they are also considering the Sandy Springs model.

How could Florida's communities follow suit? First, they could take a page from management guru Peter Drucker and require that every "traditional" service or function prove that it's a proper role of government.

Second, they could apply to local government Drucker's famous test for business: "If we weren't doing this yesterday, would we do it today?" Some services may well be discontinued rather than contracted out.

Indeed, certain services that some other cities provide won't necessarily be provided by Sandy Springs - either because they've outgrown their purpose, they're no longer effective, or they're outside the proper scope of government.

Florida's local officials can determine on a case-by-case basis whether it makes more sense for their community to "make" or "buy" public services.

Moreover, criticism of the way Florida's state government handled contracts for the outsourcing of selected government services shouldn't deter local officials from experimenting. At the state level, the problem arguably wasn't in the game plan but in the execution.

While the Sandy Springs model isn't necessarily a good fit for every city, it does teach us an important lesson: that "business as usual" isn't the only operational model for local governments. Moreover, local governments need not adopt the entire model; rather; they can choose some services or entire departments to outsource to achieve savings.

Granted, such a change won't necessarily be easy for local governments. Over the years some have become addicted to spending more and more of your hard earned dollars. The insatiable beast never seems to be satisfied, always wanting more and more. And public employee unions, now the largest component of the labor movement, wield a lot of clout at the local level - especially in several of Florida's largest cities and counties.

Yet with a tax revolt brewing, something needs to be done to shake things up. For too many years local governments have been on auto-pilot when it comes to budgeting. They generally tend to spend more than they did the year before, with little real consideration of how sustainable that spending trend would be over the long term. Moreover, key budgeting decisions are too often based on consuming whatever revenue is available rather than the minimum required to get the job done.

By breaking the mold and encouraging the kind of innovation and creativity that Sandy Springs exemplifies, Florida's local governments could become more efficient and effective. Rooting out waste can also allow the funding of new programs and/or the expansion of existing programs that deserve to be expanded, all without raising taxes.

When local officials make efficient government their goal -- as in Sandy Springs -- and are unwilling to be held hostage by outdated processes, citizens reap the dividends. In Florida, rethinking how local governments operate can be the key to providing real property-tax relief.

Geoffrey F. Segal is an adjunct scholar of The James Madison Institute and the director of government reform at Reason Foundation.