Give him time

Joni Balter calls for King County Executive Dow Constantine to accomplish his stated task of reforming King County’s government. [“Crunch time for King County,” Opinion, June 17]. It has been a mere six months since Constantine assumed his role as executive, but Americans want things done immediately if not sooner.

Balter thinks that salary reduction of King County employees is one solution given the current economic crisis and revenue shortfall. Constantine has voluntarily chosen to reduce his salary by 10 percent, and Metropolitan King County Council members have made similar decisions. The expectation is that all county employees should share in the current economic downturn by taking salary reductions. In response, Constantine has reduced the number of county employees as well as the number of hours worked by King County employees with required unpaid days off, thus reducing salaries and resulting in low levels of services.

The current economic crisis is due to our individual choices, such as decisions of folks to buy houses they could not affordand bankers acting so irresponsibly in issuing mortgages that one of them destroyed a local banking institution. Somehow government, which had limited regulatory control over this complex disaster and may even have encouraged folks to engage in these behaviors because it brought in revenues, is now supposed to respond quickly to problems that took 20 years to become apparent. This is hardly realistic.

Reforming government at any level means changing its structure and functions. Governmental functions and complexity have changed over time in response to changes in the physical environment which individuals have caused by their personal choices, and to increased population size, rate of growth and density. Government has become more regulatory and reactive in response to the aggregated impact of our individual choices and this is costly. But Americans are highly resistant to paying for governmental services and functions even while demanding that government do more to solve the problems we have caused. I find this an unreasonable expectation.

— Virginia M. Paulsen, Seattle