Do you support the establishment of a county manager? Why or why not?
I am in favor of hiring a County Manager, and the more I think and read and talk about it, the more convinced I become that this is the direction that the County (and the City) needs to go.
County Reps are all professionals but, for the most part, not in the area of running a municipal government. It's a part-time job in public service, and most do an exceptionally good job: they work hard, learn what they can, and do what they think is right. If I'm elected, I hope the same can be said of me. But we're not professional municipal managers. We're elected by the people, I believe, to guide the County through the longer-term, not to spend time on the shorter-term operational details.
County Reps are currently functioning as county administrators, rather than leading as a County Board. At full meetings and in committee, they spend time on administrative tasks such as approving requests for conference attendance, raising petty cash funds from $25 to $50, and deciding whether to approve Coke or Pepsi machines in the Manor. I do not believe that this is what we elect our leaders to do.
There are urgently important planning and prioritizing issues on which the Board should be focusing most of its energy. We need to establish very clear guidelines regarding what county government should be and what it should do; we need to create long-term goals and visions that will drive our functioning. Then, we need to do the hard work of aligning our planning, our organization and our budgets to those goals and visions. This cannot be done while the County Board is authorizing the purchase of vacuum cleaners.
There is a good deal of talk, from candidates and current Board members, about redistricting (which is a different subject), and the suggestion that the Board be reduced from 14 to perhaps nine members. I think this would be a great mistake without a County Manager. As we know, the urgent tends to trump the important, and with only nine Board members, the administration issues would continue to clamor for the attention of fewer Reps, and long-term prioritization and planning would fade even further into the background. With a County Manager taking responsibility for the day-to-day running of the County, I think that nine Reps could lead from a more global perspective.
Regarding the financing of a County Manager, we could start by eliminating a certain number of Representative Districts – for redistricting purposes, or just because so much of the Board's work has been shifted to the Manager's office. Other County positions could be eliminated (because the work was being done or directed by the Manager), and we would certainly expect the Manager to provide cost savings by cutting waste and improving efficiency – that's one of the reasons we'd be hiring him or her in the first place. There is every reason to believe (or even write into the contract) that the Manager's office would be paying for itself before long.
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