No good options exist for covering deficits

It isn’t the current Worcester County Commissioners’ fault that they inherited a hodgepodge of independent sanitary districts of various sizes and purposes, or that past accounting of each district’s theoretically separate enterprise fund drew money from one to balance the budget of another.

Although it is somewhat ironic that the subsequent multi-million-dollar error caused by this fund swapping might have been discovered sooner if the commissioners had paid as much attention to those line item budgets as it did to the school board’s, that is beside the point.

Regardless of how or why the error occurred, the commissioners face the uncomfortable business of finding the least aggravating way out of this mess.

That will be close to impossible, since the main arguments against the various solutions offered are more about matters of principle than they are about money.

Obviously, Ocean Pines residents don’t feel they should have to cover losses they didn’t create or pick up the financial slack for other districts that don’t have the population to do it themselves. And then, there is the law, which requires each of these water/wastewater districts to be self-sustaining.

Regardless of blame or fault, if this mistake was made by a private business, the public would demand that it hold its customers harmless and take care of the problem itself.

County government obviously can’t do that, just as it can’t extricate itself from this problem without penalizing some or all ratepayers for mistakes they didn’t make. Clearly, calling on Ocean Pines to shoulder a sizable chunk of the financial burden isn’t fair to its ratepayers, but neither can the commissioners wallop ratepayers in small districts with fees they can’t pay.

Unfortunately, there is no elegant solution that we know of that won’t make some segment of the ratepaying or taxpaying public very unhappy.