“At the end of the day, it’s a balanced budget,” Snohomish County Council Chairman Dave Somers said after the council passed the county’s budget for 2015.
That’s about all you can say for it: It’s balanced. It’s certainly not fair, not to young mothers and children who depend upon the Snohomish Health District’s First Steps program. As Herald Writer Noah Haglund reported Tuesday, the council, in passing the budget with a 3-2 vote, cut funding for the program in half, to $450,000 from $900,000.
First Steps and its clinics, part of the district’s Women, Infants and Children program, connects young mothers — particularly those in low-income families, the homeless or those with addictions or mental health issues — with public health nurses who advise women on prenatal care, diet and nutrition, parenting skills, the child’s health and development needs and the resources available to them.
Previously, Snohomish Health District Director Gary Goldbaum said, the program has been funded through a federal grant meant to address mental health treatment and illness prevention, and First Steps fit under the grant’s rules. The grant funding ended, but County Executive John Lovick, in his budget, sought to keep the health district’s budget unchanged from last year and to continue First Steps using the county’s general fund.
Goldbaum said he expected some cuts to his budget, but didn’t count on First Steps being halved. Goldbaum will recommend to the district’s Board of Health, which includes all five county council members, that it use its own reserve funds to keep the program going for one more year until another source of funding can be found; if it can be found.
The program could have continued to receive funding had the County Council elected to take even half of the 1 percent increase in property taxes it is allowed to levy each year. A full 1 percent increase would have added $2.53 to the annual property tax bill of a homeowner of a house valued at $244,600, the county average.
Earlier this year we criticized the Port of Everett for taking the 1 percent increase because we didn’t see the need for the port to do so. Here, there is a need. In the short term, the county’s taxpayers save a couple of bucks on their property tax bills. In the long term, imagine the costs to taxpayers and to the general goodwill if some number of young mothers are unable to get the assistance they need to raise healthy children.
The county executive has two choices: Accept the budget as passed by the council or veto it and negotiate a budget with the council that restores full funding for First Steps.
A balanced budget is good. A fair and balanced budget is what we all deserve.
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