You know you are losing all sense of local public governance when the ground zero core of service – law enforcement, our courts and district attorney – become decimated in counties and cities.

Regardless of how one feels about the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department or the district attorney, they are the first responders when it comes to social stability.

As a Gold River resident, I feel every bit as strongly about the devastating cuts to our health care clinics, parks and recreation, and social welfare programs. These are reductions that in the long term will eat at the social fabric of our diverse communities.

But at the heart of Sacramento County's social compact are the immediate services communities need to prevent street chaos.

I recently joined with key community leaders to meet with all five members of the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors. They recognize that public safety is primary in the providing of county public services.

Yet what is paradoxical is that few people come out in support for public safety. Part of the reason is that people expect those services will always be there. A more significant explanation is a political climate that for too long has denied the imperative of responsive governance.

For the affluent among us, mandated social services are not relevant and we have found some degree of safety in suburban havens, such as Gold River, with privatized law enforcement or gated communities away from Sacramento's impoverished urban decay.

But we can only drink so much of the ideological Kool-Aid that deludes us into seeing county and city government scut work as a problem – not a solution to our social ills. It is a denial that has hurt even the upwardly mobile in terms of lost wages, pensions and diminished infrastructures such as transportation, public education and health care. If President Barack Obama is at all right, more than 90 percent of us are in the same boat. Yet we are in self-denial when it comes to the public interest.

We have grown accustomed to a criminal justice system that is revenue-short on due process and revenue-driven on imprisonment. It's far easier to lock people up than mitigate the plague of criminal behavior through inherently inefficient and messy democratic preventive measures that address our social needs. We now see the results in zero-sum spending increases for prison construction at the expense of higher education degrees required for a knowledge-based economy.

We are reaping what we sowed from tax cuts for the extremely wealthy, addictions to irresponsible personal and public debts, and unregulated markets that have snowballed into an unprecedented financial collapse. This has all cascaded down to bite local governments in the public's rear end. The revenue shrinkage from what leading economists call the Great Recession has diminished tax revenues to a level destructive of public life.

The tone-deaf talk about "wasteful" government-is-the-problem solutions has run its course. Increasingly, public discourse mixes a circle-the-wagons approach with political pandering. Being "for public safety" is beginning sound as empty as being against drunken drivers. The governor's recent defense of public expenditures for undocumented immigrants is a noble example of how local elected local officials need to transcend the public impulse to blame this crisis on others in a more diverse Sacramento.

We are approaching that threshold where local services are losing their sense of civility and moral high ground. For example, Sacramento County Sheriff John McGinness and District Attorney Jan Scully have diligently sought to diversify their work forces in the face of the county's demographic changes. All that will be lost and their departments will be relegated to a time when it reflected a more homogenous Sacramento over a generation ago.

What we privately do with both our personal financial resources and decisions has always had a public consequence. It is time to rise above the destructive fray that preys on our fears and uncertainties over a changing Sacramento. We need to come together as citizens and provide financial enhancements and reforms to address these needs.

John Dewey once wrote that democracy begins with a conversation. We need to have that conversation.

Ralph C. Carmona is a University of California regent emeritus, an adjunct professor at American River College and a member of the board of directors of the Sacramento Black Chamber of Commerce.