George Rebane

Dear Reader, I hope that you and your family have survived another hectic holiday season with health, hearth, and hoard more or less intact.  Jo Ann and I wish you all a Happy 2008!

My apologies for being absent from these pages during the last week.  For Christmas we drove to soCal to attend a big family celebration and also spend some dinners with friends and more family.  Since returning I have been busy, literally day and night, with my SESF colleagues in completing the report of a substantial study of unfunded liabilities that currently burden the city and county governments of Nevada County.  Over the past year this research was ably shouldered by SESF’s Executive Director, Mike McDaniel.  There were many meetings reviewing financical data along with input from concerned elected officials for which we are grateful. The results of the study are documented in the technical report TR0712-1: Undfunded Liabilities – Our Community’s Fiscal Time Bombs which can be accessed here.

Unfunded liabilities at all levels of government are usually below the radar of public attention except when a financial catastrophe, like the recent one in Orange County, occurs.  Well folks, the problem has quietly continued to grow until it has now become a monster of more than a TRILLION (that’s a million million) dollars across the land.  Almost all of this non-existent money has been promised to government employees as they retire.  There are only two ways to defuse such time bombs – take more money from the taxpayers and/or renege on the promises made to the employees.  The SESF report details the available data on the major unfunded liabilities of our county. However, even it does not yet paint the complete picture. 

Whether by design or happenstance, the funding of government employees and officials’ benefits packages is a murky matter.  The recent across-the-board raises given in Grass Valley is an example of how little of its total impact was revealed to the city’s taxpayers and the larger community.  Therefore, in its role as a non-profit, non-partisan Nevada County public policy analysis resource, SESF plans to update the current report with later editions and issue supporting information as it becomes available.  In the interval, please visit the SESF website and blog for updates as they develop.

(I am the co-author of the report, and, as most of you know, the SESF Director of Research.)