When efficiency meets resiliency in Gilbert

Gilbert Town Councilmember Jim Torgeson

Courtesy Town of Gilbert

OPINION — For nearly 20 years, Gilbert had a reputation most communities would envy: we ran lean.

We provided the services of a major American community without building the kind of expensive municipal government found elsewhere. We don't have a primary property tax. We kept staffing lean. We stretched dollars. We built infrastructure while Gilbert grew from a suburban community into a town of nearly 300,000 people.

That model worked remarkably well ... perhaps too well.

Because when you operate efficiently for decades, there isn't necessarily a giant pile of waste waiting to be cut when something goes wrong. And over the past several years, Gilbert didn't have one thing go wrong. We had several extraordinary financial events collide at almost the same time.

Major water infrastructure needs arrived. Wastewater infrastructure demanded enormous investment. The state eliminated Gilbert's residential rental tax, removing millions in recurring revenue. Changes to Arizona's income-tax structure reduced the revenues the state shares with municipalities.

And then there was construction inflation.

Since COVID, the cost of building public infrastructure has exploded. A Phoenix construction cost index increased approximately 48% from 2020 through 2025.

Think about what that means.

A $100 million infrastructure project before COVID could approach $150 million just a few years later without getting another treatment plant, another road, another mile of pipe or another gallon of water-treatment capacity.

You simply pay dramatically more for essentially the same thing.

And Gilbert was particularly exposed because these increases arrived just as some of our largest infrastructure investments became unavoidable.

Could Gilbert have raised utility rates sooner? Could we have accumulated larger reserves?

Those are fair questions. The answer to both may be yes.

Gilbert itself now acknowledges that keeping water rates flat for years was a double-edged sword. Earlier, smaller increases might have reduced the shock residents eventually experienced. Larger reserves could have provided additional cushion.

But reserves aren't magic.

Building substantially larger reserves before COVID would have required collecting substantially more money from residents before COVID in preparation for an extraordinary inflationary event no one knew was coming.

There is also an old fiscal-conservative principle worth remembering: before cutting taxes, first identify and cut the waste.

Eliminating a tax doesn't eliminate the cost of government.

When the state eliminated Gilbert's residential rental tax, it eliminated a revenue source. It didn't eliminate a police officer, firefighter, road, park or other town obligation.

It may have been a tax cut at the State Capitol. It wasn't an expense cut at Gilbert Town Hall.

Today, Gilbert says external state and federal changes have reduced ongoing general fund revenue by approximately $20 million annually.

So when someone says, “Cut spending,” the responsible response is simple:

What, specifically, are we going to cut?

If you can identify $20 million in actual waste, cut it.

But eliminating $20 million of revenue and calling it efficiency doesn't make $20 million of expenses disappear.

Cutting waste makes government more efficient. Cutting the capacity to respond when things go wrong can make government more expensive in the long run.

And that brings us to the distinction Gilbert needs to understand:

Efficiency is eliminating waste. Resilience is having enough capacity left when something goes wrong.

For two decades, Gilbert became exceptionally good at efficiency.

The last several years tested our resilience.

None of this means every decision made by previous councils was correct. Clearly, some weren't. It doesn't mean every future expenditure should be approved. And it certainly doesn't mean government should stop looking for waste.

It means fiscal responsibility requires more than saying no.

It requires doing the math.

For 20 years, Gilbert proved government can do more with less.

But eventually, doing more with less can leave you with less ability to absorb the unexpected.

Gilbert doesn't need to abandon efficiency. We need to preserve it while rebuilding resilience.

Jim Torgeson is a Gilbert Town Council member.

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