Guest Post: Jeff Peterson on Board Size

This is an older comment (from April 18) from former Supervisor Jeff Peterson on the size of the County Board. I wanted to bring this to the "front page" to stimulate discussion:

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.

April 18, 2008 8:54 PM