This idea has been suggested before, but Fred Grimm's letter in the April 16 edition of the Inter-County Leader, along with Gary King's editorial response, raises the question again: Should we reduce the size of the Polk County Board of Supervisors?
I explored the idea of reducing the size of the Board with several of my constituents during my first election campaign, and received mostly positive comments. Supervisors, on the other hand, were cool toward the idea, pointing out that a supervisor on a smaller board would have to serve on more committees. Mr. King speculates that fewer County Board seats would create more competition for those seats. That may be true, but maybe not, if the workload increases and the pay remains constant at present levels, which is to say "not much". If it's hard to find volunteers to serve now, increasing the workload hardly makes it likely that more qualified candidates will be interested in service on a smaller Board. It may turn out that we will need to pay Supervisors a modest salary and expect competence in return. Mr. King states that U. S. Senators can find the time to meet with constituents in all 72 Counties. The Senate is a full-time job. Senators are paid a handsome salary. It's hard to make meaningful comparisons between the two positions.
Let's face it, if we reduce the County Board from 23 Bozos to 9 Bozos, you still have a roomful of clowns, and you haven't accomplished a thing.
Obviously, we need to do something about the headaches created for our unfortunate department heads who have to deal with Supervisors who have no clue whatsoever what is going on until they serve for a couple of years. Then, just when they become fairly well-acquainted with how the department operates, there is another election, at which time they are defeated (often, ironically, by someone who thinks the Board can cut costs if only they are elected), and process starts over again. The truth is that the Highway Department Facility controversy was caused, at least in part, by lack of continuity in leadership, which resulted in a failure to properly maintain the facility.
If the Board continues to "micro-manage" the departments, we are doomed to repeat our recent history, over and over, without learning anything from our past experience.
I've concluded that Polk County needs a full-time professional administrator along with fewer inexperienced, well-meaning but uninformed, cooks in the County kitchen spoiling the broth. Let's reduce the size of the Board of Supervisors, as suggested by Mr. Grimm. A necessary element of this plan, though, would be to hire a professional administrator to take care of the day-to-day decision-making and bring some measure of continuity to our County government.
Reducing the size of the Board would be a mistake unless the day-to-day administration is also taken over by a professional administrator.
Anyone interested in exploring what has happened in other Wisconsin counties, let me know. We'll set up a meeting to look into the idea more closely.
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3 comments:
Fred Grimm's letter to the editor suggested that reducing the board size to nine would not only save enough money to hire a professional administrator, but would also "reduce the temptation of the supervisors to micromanage". The first point might have some merit, assuming there is some major consolidation of committees so that the nine remaining supervisors don't have to be at meetings every day of the week. But I'm not sure that having fewer supervisors does anything to fix the micromanaging thing -- which I agree is a problem.
We also need to consider that reducing the size of the board to nine or fifteen or whatever would necessitate a costly and likely controversial redistricting plan. Since we'll be getting new population figures in three years anyway, I'm not sure that redistricting makes a lot of sense at this point in time. If we had an even number of districts now, it would be a relatively simple job to simply divide each in two, but if we want to go from 23 to 15, we're going to end up eating up any savings in supervisors' wages with payments to the mapping and consulting firms we'll have to hire to figure out new districts. (Someone should ask Land Information Department head Sara McCurdy whether her employees have the skills and technical expertise to devise a redistricting plan in-house.)
I'm starting to think that all this talk about reducing the size of the county board is more a distraction than an effort at meaningful reform. Yes, we should consider such changes once the 2010 census figures are in, but for now we've got more serious issues to discuss.
Of course I meant it would be a relatively simple job to simply *combine* existing districts, not divide them. I don't want to be accused by anyone of advocating going from 23 supervisors to 46!
This was a major topic about 9 years ago. Yes it will have to be looked at in 2 years since the districts will have to be redrawn anyway. For some reason, Polk County prefers to outsource (at great expense) these things. Elected officials like to hold on to their seats so it is doubtful that without a referendum, any reduction can take place. Last time, they couldn't even reduce to 21 after rejecting 17 and 19. Then Chairman Getchel stated just before the vote, "now just remember, 6 of you will have to run against each other!" Kiss of death for politicians! It's very simple stuff, Supervisor Mark Johnson at the time, drew up the new map himself in a few minutes, and without additional costs.
The biggest problem to diversity and competition, is the insistance of daytime meetings. We tried, you tried, they tried, but department heads and the retired like the status quo. I guess we deserve what we get.
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