King County: Big-picture time

King County's huge budget challenges call for big-picture thinking.

It's encouraging to see County Executive Ron Sims, Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, Sheriff Sue Rahr and others talk constructively about meeting the challenges. It will require cooperation and education to push voters to consider options, agencies toward finding new efficiencies and the state toward accepting responsibility for enabling counties to provide good services.

It's depressing to contemplate the devastation to basic criminal justice services from budget cuts in the coming fiscal year and beyond. It's infuriating to contemplate losing or reducing groundbreaking efforts to tie court and social service programs together for better and cheaper (over the long term) outcomes on drugs, mental health and domestic violence. No matter how budget cuts are distributed, it will cause unacceptable consequences.

The state offers counties few revenue options, expects too much from them in financing public safety and health, and fails to force developed areas into the cities that can finance urban levels of services. A December report by the state Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development offered a series of options for helping counties finance efficient services. The report must be expanded for the 2009 Legislature.

The county's budget situation is partly because of its admirable adherence to state growth laws that concentrate commercial development in urban areas. But the county is stuck with many service-intensive suburban and urban residential neighborhoods that ought to be annexed into cities. The Legislature needs to crack heads on annexations, possibly through a new boundary commission.

No option should be excluded. That includes the county asking voters to lift the absurd limits on property tax growth. The real need is for additional alternatives to raise revenue.

Counties are creatures of the state's shaping. And make no mistake: This is a structural crisis. The next Legislature and governor must stop the shrinking of counties into misshapen miniatures and turn toward ensuring that counties are effective instruments of the public good.