Government

Budget season always has a certain energy to it, but this year feels different. It is my first cycle without Mary Kuhn who passed away earlier this year, and that absence is felt. Mary had a way of grounding me, tbh our whole caucus, of cutting through the noise and naming what was really going on. Without her, I have been reminded how much the work depends on each of us finding our own footing and stepping into the gaps.

At the same time, I have been hitting walls with Republicans in the legislature. I’ve made it a point to not speak with anyone who I feel like fundamentally opposes me. There are some people on the legislature who will never see the world the way I see it, and I’ve fully given up trying to convince them that we should be helping people. The disagreements go beyond line items on a spreadsheet. They reflect a deeper disconnect in how we understand county government itself.

Too often, we leave enormous community responsibilities to our nonprofits. The growing unhoused population, victims of Domestic Violence, Veterans Services, Resettlement, Elder Care, I can go on and on but these are important issues in our community. We poorly fund them, then we complain that they are “operating poorly.” The truth is, they are being asked to shoulder tasks that the county government either cannot, or does not want to, handle directly. We complain that these are important issues that don’t get addressed, but when we’re given a chance to address them, we’re hyper critical of the organizations doing the work, and we attempt to penalize the organizations, but the folks who really get hurt are the ones they serve.

If we need $6.5 Million for the Aquarium, it’s barely gets an acknowledgement let alone a full committee meeting, but if an organization tries to address homelessness or refugee resettlement, we have to meet before the meeting just to consider giving them $50,000 It’s frustrating at the legislature because we can do so much more to help people, but we simply decline, and then we make all these excuses for why we can’t help the people who are doing the work. We punish those organizations for trying and failing, but those orgs aren’t the ones who suffer, it’s the residents of Van Duyn, it’s the Veterans who come through the airport, it’s us. 

That dynamic frustrates me because I think we should be doing more in-house as a county. Outsourcing does not make the challenges go away. It only distances us from accountability. Until that changes, we will keep circling the same arguments year after year.