Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 3, 1991                   TAG: 9104030504
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SHERIFF BARBER/ NO SURPLUS OF HIS TYPE IN GOVERNMENT

Yes, massive revenue shortfalls have left Virginia governments reeling. Gov. Douglas Wilder has responded mostly with quick fixes: local-aid cutbacks, accounting maneuvers, college-tuition increases, a virtual halt to capital spending, state employee layoffs.

Yes, the governor's resistance to tax increases has threatened progress in higher education, delayed an urgently needed response to inequities in school funding, and largely precluded more serious efforts to fight urban decline within the state.

Yes, the governor can be criticized for failing adequately to recognize or act upon distinctions between self-paying investments in future prosperity and all other sorts of state spending.

Yes, local governments are stuck with rising demands and mandates for services and diminishing resources for funding them. And they enjoy neither the revenue-raising flexibility that state and federal governments have, nor the ability to save money by cutting aid to lower-level governments.

So where's the silver lining? As Wilder has often observed, with fiscal austerity come opportunities for reorganization and streamlining.

Hard times offer political cover for a helpful search for economies. They afford the chance to re-examine priorities, to question entrenched spending items, to thin the overgrown underbrush of bureaucracy that thickens and spreads in good times.

Still, we may concede too much by calling for economizing in hard times. Why should frugality be limited to fiscal-crunch periods? Can the search for creative economies be sustained after good times resume? The answer is that it can - given enough leadership and initiative.

And more public servants like Louis Barber.

Barber is sheriff of Montgomery County. He was recognized the other day - out of a crowd of 1,200 - as the person who made best use last year of the state's surplus-property program.

When Barber went to the surplus distribution center in Wytheville to accept his reward, he and a road crew supervisor drove a large truck. They wanted to carry back some conduit for use in Montgomery.

"We'll buy enough to do us for a year or two at a dollar a joint as opposed to $3 or $4 or $5," said Barber.

When the county jail was remodeled in 1988, the contractor wanted $15,000 to install jail beds. Barber bought 30 from the surplus property program and modified them, at a cost of $1,700. With steel and other materials bought from the state warehouses, the sheriff's staff also built 10 double bunks for a total cost of less than $300.

Barber recalls that, in a joint project with Blacksburg, he used surplus material on a communications tower to do $76,000 worth of work for less than $20,000. He has been recycling the state's waste.

Barber is a somewhat rare fish in government. But he exemplifies a larger point: By all indications, he didn't wait for hard times to seek ways to save taxpayers' money. The way he sees it, it's just part of the job of public service.

That sort of attitude could well serve Virginia governments at all levels, even in times when tax revenues flow more freely than they do now.