County budget plan would save park land

The Gazette has a story today about how the cash-strapped county government, which needs to come up with about $10 million, is no longer talking about selling park land to scrounge up the cash. Instead, they have devised an across the board series of cuts to various social services. A citizen's group also plans to pen a ballot initiative that would increase the sales tax rate by 1 percentage point. That would bring in roughly $70 million in the first year, which the county would use to restore some of the cuts and chip away at a backlog of hundreds of millions of dollars in other needs.