Budget Time

Tomorrow, after Legislative Action Committee, we begin a three day series of meetings to "go over" the budgets for the Tribal governance. Although we have put aside several days to do this, it would not surprise me at all if the whole thing goes beyond that. We've been lucky to pass a final budget before the last week of December. Come to think, I'm not sure if we ever have, least not in my time on Council.

Because this is the only position I've ever worked in where part of my job was to deal with budgets and line-items, our practices never seemed that unusual. Grueling and tedious and distracting? Yes. Odd? No. That is until working with the Mid-Willamette Valley Council of Governments provided a comparison, and I was embarrassed to learn that many of the local governments complete their operating budgets for the following year before the summer. So it is unusual.

Our system consists of large binders several inches thick, with budgets getting so detailed I could tell you what the Gaming Commission spends on magazine subscriptions, and managers and staff sitting in to answer whatever questions arise from nine people going over the complete governance operation. As someone constantly hungry for knowledge, in a weird sort of way I like knowing that kind of stuff, just for the hell of out. What I don't like is the sheer amount of time committed to going over these budgets. My first year in 2004 it went weeks.

In 2006 we tried a different approach, mandating an organizational message of "hold the line", that meant no major increases, and committing a minimal amount of time to the budget. Managers got that. Over the last two years, we've gotten back to the more time-consuming, and in my opinion nitpicky, budget process, one that to me seems geared for those who like to micromanage. That might be the real issue.

I've been reading a lot about how tribes deal with trying to create a free press for their news reporting. They can pass all the resolutions and make all the public statements. When a disagreement happens between the tribal governing body and the tribal media, even though there might be laws or ordinances preventing the councils from interfering with the publication, a loophole exists for passive-aggressive "revenge" if you will through funding. In other words, they suspend, revoke, eliminate, whatever, the budget for the media, citing all sorts of reasons, but the real one being the media somehow offended them, usually through reporting on something they didn't want reported.

I've seen that kind of behavior manifest itself through our budget process too. Whoever went afoul of certain Council members would suddenly find their budgets gutted, new positions they needed disproved, or something like that. You could never get those Council members to admit it, but sometimes ulterior motives are way too obvious to be denied. So I guess this budget period is a chance to see who is mad or dissatisfied with whom.

The additional factor this year is that some of my co-workers are angry about per capita being too low, and thus blaming managers, the casino, etc. I don't think we'll see layoffs, but we'll see cuts for sure. And we'll hear complaints about those cuts too. Because no matter how loud people holler for cuts, in the end you'll get those comments which amount to "we need cuts, but don't cut that".