SHIFT AND SHAFT GAME CLOBBERS COUNTIES

COLORADO SPRINGS -- County governments are where the rubber meets the road
in terms of providing social services. It wasn't surprising, therefore, to
find the winter convention of Colorado's county officials here this week
dominated by talk of the worsening budget problems faced by local
governments. Federal and state governments help finance many of the
nation's social-service programs. But counties - including combined
city-counties like Broomfield and Denver - actually deliver them. And
increasingly, counties have to dig into their limited local resources to
cover state and federal cutbacks.

The Colorado Municipal League's Sam Mamet coined the term "shift and shaft"
to describe this process back in the Reagan era, when the feds began
shifting many of their responsibilities to the states - and shafting them
by not also forwarding the money to pay for those programs.

Many states, including Colorado, countered that federal game by simply
shifting those responsibilities on down to city and county governments -
without including anything squalid, like money to pay for them, of course.
But local governments are the end of the line and have no place else to
shift their responsibilities to. They either have to find some way to fund
the orphaned programs laid at their doorstep or take the heat from local
voters for eliminating them.

Federal and state governments also bedevil their local counterparts by
"unfunded mandates." Congress and state legislatures simply order somebody
else - private business or local government - to provide services through
laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. The federal and state
politicians get the credit from the special interests who want the
programs. City and county officials get the shaft when they ask local
taxpayers to pay for those mandates.

This year's Colorado Counties Inc. convention was hosted by El Paso County
- - whose own commissioners gave a vivid demonstration of just how hard it is
to be a responsible local official in the shift-and- shaft environment.

The federal and state governments keep passing more laws that require
putting more people in jail, especially the ever-expanding War Against
People Who Use Drugs. That has prompted the state to add new courts in El
Paso County. But the county has to build facilities for those courts. El
Paso County also needs to expand its jail to adequately house the growing
inmate population or face a lawsuit that would inevitably end in a court
order to build those facilities.

In 1995 and again last Nov. 5, El Paso County commissioners submitted a
jail-expansion plan to the voters.

Both times, voters rejected the idea of increased taxes to pay for those
state and federal mandates.

But the voters' frugality didn't make the mandates go away. There is a
court decision that forever settled the issue of who rules when state or
local governments are at loggerheads against the federal government.

That decision wasn't handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, it
came at a little rural Virginia venue called Appomattox Court House - and
it's known as Grant v. Lee.

El Paso County leaders know they can't defy a federal government that even
Robert E. Lee couldn't dislodge. So last Monday, the commissioners did the
only responsible thing left for them to do: They began trimming
non-essential items from their budgets to finance the mandated jail
expansion at an estimated $2.9 million a year for the next 25 years.

To fund the jail, cuts were made in the county road and bridge fund, parks
and recreation department, health department and bus services. Outraged
advocates of those programs retaliated by Mau-Mauing the commissioners for
hours and threatening to recall them.

But the will of the majority of El Paso County voters is doubly clear -
they don't want new taxes.

Since neither the state nor federal mandates will go away, the county's
only responsible alternative, as Commissioner Duncan Bremer noted, is to
cut back on non-mandated services. This dilemma prompts two Parthian shots:

To those citizens who voted against higher taxes and are now angry at the
ensuing cuts in local services: "Be careful what you vote for. You will get
it."

To the embattled commissioners: Thanks for doing a dirty job that no one
else would touch.

Last week's column on World Vision, which uses your gifts to help
impoverished people become self-supporting, brought a heartening response,
and World Vision reported a deluge of calls from Colorado. If you meant to
join in this life-changing mission but mislaid the address, you can contact
them on the Web at www.worldvision.org. You can call for a catalog at
888-511-6598, or write to World Vision United States, P.O. Box 9716,
Federal Way, WA 98063-9716.

Bob Ewegen is deputy editorial page editor of The Denver Post.