Cost Cutting a Fiscal Responsibility

When local governments are presented with lower revenues due to economic turmoil, the first responsibility should be to cut waste.
Too often we are asked to pay more into programs that are not run efficiently. The first responsibility of a government is to look for savings and to cut waste.
I applaud the City of Dayton for thinking outside the box by purchasing a secondary market ambulance vs. buying a new one and saving close to $75,000 to tax payers. To often government purchasing organizations go to there only know method of purchasing. In today’s world purchasing is your leverage on getting the best for your dollar.
In business today we have goals of cost cutting yearly, our customer expects lower pricing year over year to continue to do business with us and we are expected to find ways to recover that lowered cost and do better on top of that to maintain positive growth for the company. That is just the way business works today. If our local governments could change the culture to more of a business, we may see more for our dollar.