King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn has a guest column in yesterday’s Seattle Times, in which he proposes the formation of a new “Priority Commission” to address the county’s ongoing budget woes… because, I guess, nothing screams “budget priority” like spending scarce taxpayer dollars on funding yet another commission. But before I get to fisking Dunn’s proposal, I thought it first might be useful to question the wisdom of accepting budget advice from a guy who clearly doesn’t know how to read a budget.
The video clip above is from an October 6, 2010 briefing on King County’s proposed 2011 budget, conducted before the council’s Law and Justice Panel, a committee Dunn chairs, but whose meetings he apparently can’t bother to get to until after they start. And what is particularly amusing/disturbing about this clip is that it shows budget-priority-champion Dunn totally confused by the standard accounting convention of using parentheses to designate negative numbers.
Really.
DUNN: On the numbers, I’m seeing on some of the staff reports, when we go percent changed, it’s in the positive, and I… then I also see here it’s one point five… it’s negative one point five, right?
STAFFER: That’s correct, so that’s the net impact for the total…
DUNN: Negative one point five, okay, I just want to make sure… I think we should put, just so we’re clear, moving forward, we should be consistent amongst staff reports to put if it’s positive we’ll leave it in the positive, if it’s negative, can we say negative before it? I’m sorry, ’cause I’m just scanning here….
STAFFER: Again, using parentheses is one of the ways of showing negative…
DUNN: Is that how you’re doing it? Okay, if it’s in parentheses, then it’s negative, is that correct?
Uh-huh.
Now, to be fair to Dunn, if you’ve never seen a staff report before (or a profit/loss statement, a balance sheet or even, you know, a budget), you might not be familiar with the standard accounting nomenclature of using parentheses to designate negative numbers. But to be fair to taxpayers, Dunn has been on the county council since February of 2005. Over five and a half years later, you’d think he might have come across a budget before, and wondered “What do all these parentheses mean, and why aren’t there ever any negative numbers?”
Perhaps that explains Dunn’s sudden apoplexy at cuts to the criminal justice budget: up until this exchange a couple months ago, he had no idea the county’s budget was in the red in the parentheses. Hmm. Who knew our budget’s biggest deficit was in the attention of one of the guys putatively tasked with writing it?
I’ve heard folks describe Dunn as lazy, but honestly Reagan, more than half a decade into your tenure, you should probably already know how to read a budget.
(Sigh.)
Wasn’t that just the most awful op-ed? And the little photo of him they ran with it made one wish to jar loose his row of chiclet teeth. Thanks for poking at him so well.
Oh, God. Another post from this insufferable windbag.
Maybe that’s the source of his budgetary confusion; he’s never seen a negative number in all the budgets he’s ever seen. The county is flush with money as far as he’s concerned, so there’s no reason to raise a tax or defund the police force.
Zing! Dunn is stupid. I knew what parentheses meant in a budget column when I was 20.
I came here to say exactly what @3 already said. Thanks for taking care of that.
Ever heard him give a speech? I have been unfortunate enough to have heard him on more than one occasion. Let’s just say that isn’t the brightest porch light on the block.
He wants Sheriff Hairspray’s chair…and his mommy wants it for him too.
Make the Silverlight stop!
If Seattle just stopped subsidizing the inefficient suburbs, we’d have a budget surplus.
Period.
Tell Dunn to stop spending like a fish on wastrel suburbanites who live beyond their means.
In his District.
#8, absolutely. No silverlight!
Ignorant, lazy and stupid. 8th District meet your new House Rep.
What the fuck is Silverlight and why does it want to install itself on my computer?
why are u using a technology which limits users from other systems – older Macs using PowerPC processors (of which there are still a gazillion users) cannot install this product – are you deliberately trying to lose readers or make information inaccessible. Why are you not using HTML 5? Why are you using proprietary systems at all.
@13: Microsoft’s version of Flash, more or less. Works great, but nobody with any sense is going to make the mistake of letting one of Microsoft’s proprietary also-rans become the web standard for anything. Follow your instincts.
Why is it that when people see “Microsoft” they have a little conniption but when it’s Adobe (or Apple)’s even more bloated and spammy stuff that does the same thing they’re all “durr, otay, I click here”?
@15: Reason #1 for me: IE6. I’ll spare you reasons #2 through #46.
RE: Silverlight. That’s the format the county uses to stream its video. Complain to Dunn and the rest of the council.
@16, so you’re cool with Adobe’s repeated attempts to install the competely stupid Yahoo toolbar with their software? Or the fact that 90% of the code in Acrobat Reader is marketing and spyware?
@18 no. that sucks too. Have to turn it off in options every time.
Dunn also said the County’s general fund property tax revenues have declined over the past few years, when in fact they have increased from $250 million in 2007 to $258 million in 2008 and $266 million in 2009. The man is a fucking moron.
@18: If I say that I’m not cool with those things will I be forced (by logic!) to start using Silverlight, thus helping to bring MS one step closer to owning a web standard technology which users and developers will have to work around for the next five to ten years?
Couldn’t this Silverlight whatnot at least go behind a jump? I’m getting an install message every time I reload Slog.
@21, see, what I’m getting at is, why is it worse for web developers etc. to be forced to work around X from Microsoft than to be forced to work around Y from Adobe? Especially when the Adobe stuff is noticeably worse, AND scuzzier?
It’s just a web plugin like all the others.
@23: Because they’re already working around Adobe, and will have to continue to do so regardless (at least until HTML 5 proves to be the Flash killer it’s being hyped as.)
And because Adobe doesn’t have enough market share to attempt an “embrace and extend” campaign, like Microsoft has done time and time again.
Fact is, as far as I can tell Silverlight is a perfectly fine product that does more or less what an existing product was already doing, and since it was made with the benefit of hindsight, it may even represent a slight improvement. Hey, I’m sure Zune was a fine product too.
OK, I’ve changed my mind. Silverlight is a dick. It’s asking me to install it AGAIN.
Both Microsoft and Apple have made the move to html5. The county is just behind the curve. TVW.org is Microsoft sponsored, and has moved on the html5.
It is great to know that this legislative session I will be able to stream live committee meetings on my iPhone while I am trapped at work making TPS reports.
Reagan Dunn is a piece if shit. His amendments to the county budget on 11/15 during final passage, attempting to take budget from people that gave up COLAs so he could give it to sherif deputies made me really fucking angry, I wanted to kick my fuck tv in, or reach righ through the screen and give that motherfucker a beating.
Reagan Dunn is a fucking idiot. Feel free to quote me on that.