CURRENT AFFAIRS
By Eric Coleman
Oakland County Commissioner
National Association of Counties 2nd Vice President

Unfunded mandates. You’ve heard county officials and other elected officials use the term. It sounds like one of those government bureaucratic terms that cause you to stop listening when you hear it.

But you should listen and you should care because it affects the amount of property taxes that you pay.

Unfunded mandates are laws passed by the federal or state governments creating programs for counties and other local governments to carry out – but without any funds to pay for the programs. This means that the county must not only make the program work, but it also must find the money to support it.

The problem is that counties have limited means of raising revenue. Property taxes are the primary source of revenue for county governments. To pay for unfunded mandates, the county must work them into its budget. If that budget is tight, the county is faced with two choices: raise taxes or cut services. Either way, you and I bear the burden.

I believe the federal or state governments should pay for the programs it creates because the federal and state governments have a greater ability to raise revenue.

County officials thought that this problem had been solved when Congress adopted the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act in the early 1990s. The legislation was designed to stop the federal government from creating unfunded mandates. The federal government had to provide the funding or not create the program. Unfortunately, it has not worked.

A recent survey of 30 counties by the National Association of Counties showed that the three-year total cost of an average of six mandates was $1.5 billion. If all federal mandates on all counties were included, the nationwide unfunded mandate figure would reach in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Don’t get me wrong. Many of these programs are worthy and, in fact, are necessary. They include the Clean Air Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Clean Water Act, the Help America Vote Act and health care for the uninsured. Yet, to comply with the Clean Water Act, Oakland County’s Drain Commissioner is increasingly required to monitor and treat runoff from construction sites, car washes, and other sources of groundwater pollution. Counties also face new regulatory mandates under the Clean Air Act. Last year, new ozone and fine particle standards have increased the burden on counties, thru SEMCOG, for monitoring air quality and addressing sources of pollution. All of these federal requirements have become more strict and expensive to implement, with no recourse from the federal government.

Another example of a mandate is the enormous costs borne by counties for incarceration of criminal illegal aliens. Although counties bear the expense of incarcerating and prosecuting those who commit violations of state or local law, counties have no authority to deport criminal illegal aliens. The Constitution of the United States specifies that the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over immigration law. We have no option but to warehouse these individuals at county expense while they await deportation or other federal immigration action.

The most expensive mandate for many counties is health care for the uninsured. Counties have an ethical and moral obligation to take care of the sick and the injured within our communities. In that respect, providing health care to our citizens is not a mandate imposed on us by the federal government. However, when a patient enters the hospital, the federal government dictates many of the decisions that will be made about his treatment, the services his doctor will perform and the products his pharmacist will supply. The federal government has not only failed to step forward and take responsibility for the plight of the uninsured, it has persisted in shifting the costs to counties. The answer to spiraling costs of health care at the federal government is not to make arbitrary cuts – at the expense of shifting them onto counties and other local governments – but to engage with us in a process of identifying changes that we can all make, together, to improve the nation’s health care delivery system.

These programs address significant problems and have identified important goals for us to achieve. It is my belief, however, that it is the federal government’s responsibility to provide the funds to accomplish these goals and not put the burden on local property taxpayers.