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Opinion piece by San Juan County Commissioner Rhea Miller

Monarchy, Oligarchy, Dictatorship??
No, just county management.

posted 01/04/02
My proposal for a county manager, first introduced in 1998 and reiterated below, was never about changing our form of government or upsetting the current balance of power among elected officials. It was a simple, pragmatic approach to looking at the reality of the legislative and day-today administrative functions of the county commissioners.

The Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) are the legislative and executive body for the county, responsible for setting county policy, adopting a budget, hiring and firing department heads, and generally administering county-wide functions.

The pressures the commissioners face to keep up with the demands of our growing citizenry including the complicated and often contentious policy debates (GMA, shoreline development, Hotel/Motel tax, jet skis, cell towers, recycling programs, road projects, ferries, etc., etc.), quasi-judicial land-use hearings, fiscal management and capital facility planning, as well as our community outreach duties leaves little time for dealing with the daily operations of the county.

Yet our public rightly expects that we will run their business in the most open, cost effective, innovative, customer-service oriented approach possible given the constitutional confines of our so-called "messy democracy." This cannot be achieved without coordinated, conscientious, professional management efforts outside of political debates.

The volume of our legislative work in the county, in Olympia, and at the federal level combined with our budget, committee, and community liaison responsibilities takes up most of our time and is of foremost concern to our constituents. Our administrative function is minimal because of this legislative volume; because citizen elected commissioners bring varied backgrounds and expertise to the position; and because we each have different interpretations of an issue and potential solutions. This situation is not wrong; it is simply part of a balanced diverse democratic system.

Now add to all this, the geographic challenge of a county made up of islands with all three commissioners rarely in the county seat in Friday Harbor on a daily basis and the problem becomes evident. The county has no office or department head responsible for the daily management of running this large and complicated organization. The commissioners need an effective professional internal administrator to assist in the day-to-day operations of managing a public organization with over 200 employees and a large physical plant subdivided by islands. Such a professional would work directly for the commissioners providing general management oversight, as-needed BOCC project work, and skilled policy and fiscal analysis.

Under state law, the BOCC can employ a county administrator to provide them with professional assistance in managing the diverse functions and daily operations of local government. Such a position would have no authority over the other elected officials and authority for other functions would be assigned at the discretion of the commissioners. Reorganizing the existing county administrative services department and hiring a county administrator does not require going through a board of freeholders' process or a change in our form of government.

Far from creating a new bureaucracy, having a skilled, professional administrator to clean-up and manage the existing bureaucracy allows the commissioners to concentrate more fully on constituent concerns and the legislative work the electorate expects of them.

Darcie Nielsen
San Juan County Commissioner
San Juan Island