Montco budget approved, but not without controversy

In a stunning (ok, maybe not stunning. Maybe predictable is a better word) reversal of yesterday's posturing, Montgomery County Commissioners voted 2-1 on a $404 Million budget that, thankfully, avoids a tax increase. Joe Hoeffel, who has been consistent in his inconsistency, voted with Jim Matthews to keep his pet economic development projects alive and continue to fund the paychecks of cronies with tax dollars. Since these were the two conditions to which Mr. Castor objected, he voted against the budget.

Interestingly, Hoeffel, who made such a big "to do" about recusing himself from voting on the D.A.'s budget waiver request last week, citing a conflict of interest due to the fact that he is being investigated by the very same D.A., saw no problem in voting on cutting all departments back by 1%. As usual, the TH's Keith Phucas is on the scene:

When the District Attorney and Court Administration held budget waiver hearings recently, Hoeffel recused himself because he is being investigated by the DA’s office. When Hoeffel prepared to vote for the DA’s and court’s revised budgets, Castor reminded his colleague about the recusal.

“I’m voting on an entire budget with uniform cuts of 1 percent I just talked about,” Hoeffel said. “I think that’s appropriate and doesn’t cause me any problem.”

Castor didn’t agree, given Hoeffel sat out the two departments’ earlier hearings.

“I’m not immediately seeing that. It seems to me the same situation is in place, but obviously the recusal decision is yours,” Castor said. “But the effect of the change that we did in the past few minutes was the District Attorney had its money, a large part of its money taken away, and the courts and the drug court had their money put back in. And now Commissioner Hoeffel feels that it’s all right to vote on that.”

Hoeffel defended his right to vote on a final budget.

“Mr. Castor, it would be a lot more helpful if you’d focus on budgetary proposals rather than your political posturing. You started out by berating me for not being for a tax increase. If you’d like to propose a tax increase, propose it,” he said. “Challenging me on whether or not I’ve honored my decision to recuse myself is not particularly helpful to trying to pass a budget. That’s what we’re here for.”

Castor persisted in pressing his fellow commissioner about the matter.

“When a public official recuses him of herself from making a decision of importance, they are saying that for reasons of their own, they feel cannot be fair in making the decision,” Castor said. “What in fact has happened is, Mr. Hoeffel, you took that principled stance, and I think it was a laudable one to take, and now by another method you will in fact be voting for those very same pieces, putting that money back in in order to pass the budget. That seems like an inconsistent position to me.”

Jim Matthews, who, it should be remembered, has appointed his campaign treasurer to the position of County Solicitor, does not know what the term "conflict of interest" means.

Its worth noting here that the County budget is being balanced by dipping into the fund reserve, the balance of which now stands at $24.5 Million, down from the high of $96 Million a few years ago. This is what has led to the bond rating agency Moody's to issue a warning that the County's Aaa bond rating may be downgraded if the fund continues to dwindle. All of which begs the question: why are we funding non-essential economic development projects (not to mention the paychecks of political cronies) at a time when we are asking the row officers to cut their budgets across the board? Chairman Jim Matthews sees no problem with dipping into principal:

“But all of that having been done to accumulate this surplus ($96 million), we’ve had to catabolize that little by little to support fundamental increases in the cost of government,” he said.

Hmmm. I wonder what that word "catabolize" means? It's not listed in Websters, but my best guess, using my limited knowledge of Latin word origins, would be that the definition includes the most lethal parts of the definitions of the words "cannibalize" and "mestasticize."

How appropriate that this new word was coined by Mr. Matthews to describe exactly what he has done to Montgomery County Government.