The Job of County Commissioner: Peter Sage reports

What does a county commissioner do?

Another in a series of reflections by former Jackson County Commissioners.

I won anyway.

I was elected Jackson County Commissioner in November of 1980, notwithstanding the Reagan landslide in Jackson County. I served one term, then decided that politics was interesting and important work, but a bad career. I figured that the opportunities for advancement were blocked, and that my prospects for a long stay as commissioner were unlikely. I left the political world for the financial world.

How did a poverty-stricken 31 year old melon farmer win election against a sixty year old well-respected Republican attorney, who had statewide recognition as an expert on the laws regarding special districts, a man of prominence who had been president of the Chamber of Commerce?  He had TV ads from labor union and Chamber of Commerce spokesmen saying he was their choice. I ran ads saying I was staying clear of the special interests. I got lucky. He thought the issue was experience and credibility with influential people. I made the election about which of us was in the swamp. 

Commissioner Workday. It was a full time job for me. The job of a commissioner is to get people to work together toward consensus. It works better and faster when you are in the room.  

What did I do every day?  I went to meetings. 

I would listen to what was going on, explain or represent the county's interests. I would prepare for the meetings by reading board packets of staff reports and evidence. Then, at Commissioner meetings, we would talk, find agreement, and vote our decisions.

During my term of office I worked about 40-45 hours a week, working daytimes, but then there were one or two night meetings every week, plus occasionally things on weekends. The hours are flexible, and the meetings are in the courthouse and out of the office. Breakfast meetings. Lunch meetings. Night meetings. To do the job correctly meant attending the various advisory committee meetings of citizens who were involved with libraries, with planning issues, with the Historical Society, the Health Department, the Airport and every other department, and then the 13 cities in the county. There were three or four meetings every day. 

Meetings generated the need for more meetings. "Peter, I need you to talk with _______."

The Board chairman had additional duties sitting as a member of the Board of Equalization and I was chairman in 1982 and the first half of 1983. The Board of Equalization reviews appeals to your tax assessment. (If the Assessment and Taxation Department said your house was worth $100,000--a very nice house back in the early 1980s--but you thought it should only be assessed at $85,000, a taxpayer has a right to show evidence why $85,000 was more accurate than $100,000. The citizen taxpayer gets his "day in court." We needed to be polite and attentive and give honest consideration to the evidence they supplied. This isn't "efficient" government, but it is responsive, responsible government. We thought the taxpayer had the right to look the top elected official in the eye. I heard fifty or so appeals a day for about twenty days, on top of the other Commissioner duties. Those were long, long days.

A high energy person could be an active, involved County Commissioner plus have something else going. A farm. A business. A medical practice. But it means doing less, attending fewer meetings, delegating more. My obversaiton at the time was that the public needed more Commissioner interaction, not less.  I exhausted myself going to meetings.

Anyhow, that is how I did it.

Issues. 

Land Use. We downzoned the rural lands. Lots of people were unhappy. The great issue facing the county was that the county was "out of compliance" with the state land use planning directive to protect the forest and agricultural resource. Rural land in Jackson County had widespread areas zoned available to be divided into 5 acre parcels. The State of Oregon said no. They stopped all land divisions and building permits, pending creation of a new zoning map, one which preserved "resource land", in large enough blocks that they could be used as commercial farmland, not just suburban homesites. 

The resolution we adopted in the omnibus land use ordinance of 1982 was large forest and and farm minimum lot sizes. The county ordinance essentially stopped allowing farm land to be divided, and made it difficult for new dwellings to be built. This reduced the value of the property dramatically, plus it complicated estate planning for homeowners who had planned to divide their property between their children. I got lots of nasty letters and threats of recall. 

Table Rock area farmland

Some public meetings were brutal. Don't you know what you are doing to the value of my land, they asked?

We did, but the state policy directive was clear: we had to protect the land, not its market value.

At the time we realized we were protecting as "farm land" bare hillsides with thin soils that had never been farmed--poison oak and star thistle and maybe some occasional grazing of cattle in the spring. The county's position seemed indefensible. Those bare hillsides are farmland? The soil tests said yes, but past practice said no. Now, 35 years later, it turns out that that land does have farm value, as vineyards. Who knew?


Air quality. Back then cars polluted more than they do now. Today, with computerized fuel systems the cars won't run at all unless they are pretty efficient, but back then badly tuned cars were a real problem. Our summer air was worse than Los Angeles', with ozone pollution. Medford was famous for its bad air. In the winter we had pollution from the local mills mixing with the fog. People living near mills on the edge of town would scrape off a quarter inch of soggy ash from their cars every morning. The commissioners were required to facilitate the state setting up the auto inspection station, now on Biddle Road. The commissioners had multiple meetings explaining the health risks of pollution, the economic development problems, the reputation problems, but the public did not want the bother. We held an advisory vote and it lost three to one. The State lost patience with us and did it on their own.

Meanwhile, the mills said that the cost of putting scrubbers on their emissions would put them out of business. Those are jobs you smell.

Bottom line: I left office with the air as bad as when I arrived.

Financial Crisis and layoffs. The county got its general fund money from its share of the proceeds of the sale of federal timberlands on BLM and Forest Service lands. In 1980-1983 the Federal Reserve under both Presidents Carter and Reagan pushed interest rates up to 20%. The economy collapsed, but so did inflation expectations, so the policy worked, but at a cost. New homebuilding stopped. No one harvested trees. The Jackson County receipts fell from some $20 million down to $6 million.  We had just over 1,000 employees in 1981 but laid off over half of them, and had 490 in 1983. The only programs that stayed intact were the ones that had their own fees for income, for example the Clerk's office fee for recording deeds. New fees were unpopular and visible.

It used to be free. 

Until then parking at the airport was free. We established fees for parking. That was visible and unpopular. We put new fees on dog licenses and talked about fees for cats, but decided it was impossible. We planned to put fees on hikers who got lost and required expensive Search and Rescue teams to find them, but relented when the S&R people said that it would cause people to delay calling them, thus making the search harder and more dangerous.

If we could put a fee on it, we did. All that was unpopular. 

We had 6 sheriff deputies for the entire county--and remember they are a 24-7 operation, which meant we had one deputy on duty at any one time. The commissioners advanced an emergency tax levy to fill the gap, with a little funding for every department. It failed. The sheriff deputies responded by sponsoring an emergency tax levy plan of their own, with all the money to go for deputy sheriffs, with a campaign built around the slogan "let's show those stupid commissioners that what the public really wants are more deputies and nothing else." It failed, too.

By 1984 we were coming out of the homebuilding recession and people began cutting timber again, and timber receipts improved and we began slowly re-hiring. The crisis was unexpected and deep, but the county lived through it.

Summary: Unexpected change, unexpected consequences. The commissioners will face problems that may barely be imagined during their campaigns, because the problems will jump up out of apparent nowhere. A change in federal or state law may change all assumptions. An earthquake, a giant fire, a big accident on the viaduct that damages it, new laws regarding marijuana, a grape vine virus, a recession, a return of inflation, a public health emergency, a change in labor laws, a rebellion by voters over something, a court case decision regarding zoning--any of those could dramatically change what is on the plate of the county commissioners.

And, of course, the decisions they make have long consequences. The county established a defined pension program during my term of office. The county kept plugging away at developing the Greenway, which is both a boon and a source of problems. The zoning decisions have consequences for generations. The jail, once built, is there for decades.