The Job of County Commissioner: the Photo

Everyone got a laugh. Even me.

Sweet are the uses of adversity.

The photo captured the discussion during a perennial question and problem for County Commissioners. If the Commissioners hire good, competent staff, why have paid commissioners?

Photo in the Ashland Daily Tidings

The photo was the entire top half of the front page of the Ashland Daily Tidings. The photo got photocopied and circulated. Five years afterwards I saw a clipping of this photo displayed on the office door of a journalism professor at the local university. That is me, speaking on the left. In the middle is Jon Deason. On the right is Don Schofield.

The photo lent itself to the caption with three monkeys, "Speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil."  It was so perfect, people asked me if it were posed, what with the placement of the flag behind me as I talked with hand over my heart, Jon Deason looking exasperated with my foolishness, Don Schofield holding his eyes and head in dismay. 

I got lots of these sent to me.

It wasn't posed. It was real.

The photo came in a tense moment in a Jackson County Commissioner meeting. All discussions, tense or routine, take place in public, and there were reporters there. One of them, from the Ashland paper, snapped the photo.  

The Jackson County Commissioners were discussing the relationship between the County Administrator and the Commissioners. It's an issue faced by every commissioner in counties large enough to have a single professional manager as the direct supervisor of the various departments and functions of the county. Who is really in charge? 

Jackson County's commissioners had just used our Home Rule power to reorganize reporting relationships so Department Heads reported to the Manager, not directly to the Commissioners. There was lots of rumbling in the citizenry and among county employees that he had too much power, that he was making changes on his own. We expected this, but I thought the dissent was getting out of hand. What I was saying at the moment the photo was snapped, was one familiar to the readers of this blog, that we had a perception and messaging problem. Some of it, I said, was as simple as the layout of this dais. We were sending a dangerous message, that the new Manager was a principal, not staff, to the Commissioners.

The newspaper photo was cropped. There were five people on the dais. In fact, Schofield was the Board Chairman, sitting in the middle, and on the dais to the side out of the frame of the photo, was the County Manager and County Counsel. I said we were communicating that the Manager and Counsel were co-principals, not key staff.

We had to fix that, I was saying. 

Otherwise--and this was the statement caught by the camera--I predicted the future would prove that while my colleagues may not believe me, actually I am the Manager's best ally on the Board, because my proposed changes will allow the position to survive. If we don't change things, I said, you will both be replaced at the next election by people who will run on a successful platform of firing the County Manager.  

Both Deason and Schofield were in fact replaced by people who ran on a platform of firing the County Manager.

When the 1981-1982 timber harvest collapsed, and the county lost 70% of its general fund income. I was in political trouble. I was Board Chairman at a time of crisis, but I survived in part because the photo. It helped shape a memorable brand, as a populist who endured humiliation for saying I wanted to reduce the power of the County manager. 

What happened to the County Manager? The position survived. 

How? 

I urged my two new replacement colleagues to give it six months and I said we can change perceptions. We did.

1. We re-arranged the seating, Specifically we put the Manager and Counsel at a table below the Commissioners.They were staff. They reported to the Commissioners.

2. We changed the job title. There is no real difference between "County Manager" and "County Administrator," but we publicly "demoted" the job to "Administrator," not "Manager." I was thrilled that some civic leaders criticized us for this. We needed the criticism to make the point that the title change was real, not just cosmetic. 

3. We publicly cut his salary from some $45,000 a year to $39,900 a year--the inflation equivalent of a cut from about $165,000 to $150,000 now. I was thrilled to get public criticism here, too, including from newspaper editorials saying we were making a big mistake. We needed the criticism to communicate that this, too, was consequential. In practical fact, we compensated for the salary cut by adding the single word "orthodontia" to his paid medical benefit, then increased things like his paid vacation and auto allowance formula. He was happy-enough. He got a net increase in a tax efficient way. His children were scheduled for braces, and he himself came to work the next month with braces on his teeth as well.

4. We told him to talk less to the media.  Duck your head, we suggested. Let the commissioners do the talking from now on. 

The Job of County Commissioner take-aways:

1. The seating chart matters. The people elevated and in front are in charge. People understand relationships and status by physical body language, not words.

2. Criticism demonstrates that a local leader made a decision of consequence. No pain, no gain--on credibility for standing firm.

3. The real compensation of employees comes in the benefit package, not the top line published salary. Watch the benefits. That's where the devils are.

4. The person who presents the information is the person accountable as the "owner" of it. If you want to be perceived as responsible for the budget, then present the budget.