Trigger warning – if you don’t like reading numbers, you may want to skip this budget story!
Our story Tuesday about the galloping growth of local government budgets prompted James City County Administrator Scott Stevens to suggest we should not have added capital spending plans to the governments’ operating budget growth figures.
Our approach to the budget story was to add the two components of every year’s budget – the operating fund and the capital improvements plan – as a single figure, since both consume taxpayer money.
Stevens told us the capital plan should not have been included because not all of that money is spent in a given year.
But we also wanted to show how the localities’ debt is increasing because, like credit cards in a family budget, the debt eventually has to be repaid. And if revenue is curtailed because of economic conditions – such as the recession economists predict could result from the Trump Administration’s helter-skelter tariff plans – it can force cuts in othe…