I'm sure many county employees are suffering. My point goes a bit deeper. I'm not sure how many know of the unfunded liability of the taxpayers of the county for county employee health and retirement benefits. Do you? It's presently a very large number, over and above the ongoing expenses being paid now from current revenues. Are you aware that the county has a $39,000,000 bank loan in addition to its bonded indebtedness? Small change compared to what's needed.
County employees receive benefits in health and retirement that are significantly greater than those usually found in the private sector for equivalent positions. The unfortunate reality is that your counterparts outside government do not receive, as a usual practice, anything approaching the employer contributions for family health premiums that you enjoy, for example. I think it likely that county employees have a defined benefit retirement plan which allows for retirement at a young age and which pays a guaranteed amount without regard to the actuarial soundness of the underlying plan. That is increasingly rare outside government. If the stock and bond markets devastate private retirement plans, the beneficiaries of those plans are hurt, badly of late. Not so for beneficiaries of government plans. Market crashes mean only that our taxes, our childrens taxes, our grandchildrens taxes must be increased to make up the difference.
Both your health and retirement benefits are at the expense of all of us, most disturbingly including children not yet born whose incomes are already pledged to paying these benefits to you for the rest of your life. Your employer, the county, has made deposits to your account from a significantly overdrawn checkbook. This is not unique to Walton County. The headlines are full of examples farther down the path than we here. Greece, Hungary, Spain, California, New York, the United States.
The time is now for all of us to recognize that governments pretty much everywhere have made promises that cannot be kept. And among the most extravagant and expensive of those are the promises made to you. Were this sustainable and even remotely fair, I'd be happy to pay my taxes and keep my mouth shut. It is neither sustainable nor fair.
A gentleman from north of the bay told me 2 days ago that he lives in a 4 bedroom, 2 bath house, over 3000 square feet, on 32 acres for a couple of decades. When he contemplates moving, he reminds himself that his property tax bill from Walton County is less than $300 a year. When a more typical bill for properties on or near the beach is 10, 20, 30, or more times that, and that for almost no land at all and usually a fraction of the living space, a reasonable person might conclude this to be inequitable.
Where the pigeons will come home to roost will be county-wide if the current housing crisis is significantly exacerbated by the oil spill. Most of the owners of the beachfront and near-beachfront property bought those properties as investments and depend on rentals and the business spun off by those tourists to make their mortgages and pay their fees. A lot of those folks have defaulted on condo fees and bank loans, and a lot of businesses have closed. We may have seen only a part of the iceberg, and if this worsens significantly, we'll see a lot more condos go under and businesses fail.
When that happens, the decline in county revenues today will seem like the good old days. Who will be left to pay the unfunded liability for your health and retirement benefits? Who will be left to pay for current government operations? The policymakers of the County Commission have spent improvidently for the better part of the boom times, expanding facilities, personnel and budgets extraordinarily, rather than prudently setting aside for the inevitable rainy days. While many county employees are no doubt honorable, hard-working, well-meaning people, and I presume that to be most all of them, the county has operated with blinders typical of governments, and the bill has come due.
Those of us who fund most of the county operations understand that there is going to be shared sacrifice, and we hope to convince each and every county employee that the status quo is over, one way or another. Greece has public employee riots in resistance to inevitable givebacks by public employees. That is neither desirable nor acceptable here, and county employees need to understand that the rest of us have suffered to a greater extent than they. Our employers can't just raise taxes to maintain our expected pay and benefits.
I take no delight in passing these thoughts along. I'm an older man who wishes this were a more perfect world and who wishes to pass to his daughter and his grandchildren the blessings of America as he has been lucky enough to experience. I wish that for you and your children and grandchildren as well. If we row the boat together, we're more likely to achieve that.
