Publication Name: GAZETTE

Publication Date: 01/13/2008

Page: 1A

A full-time job, full of meetings

Professional manager not on the horizon
By Adam Belz
The Gazette

CEDAR RAPIDS — Many Linn County residents may not have fully understood the significance of voters’
decision in November 2006 to go from three to five county supervisors, but the county Compensation
Board’s recommendation not to cut supervisor pay made it clear.

Linn County government is now even more fully invested in the idea that elected supervisors should
work full time as both policymakers and administrators, and that they should be paid well — nearly
$90,000 a year — to do the job.

The county has moved further away from the type of professional management and elected, part-time
oversight that Cedar Rapids voters adopted for their city government in 2005.

To some leaders in the community, the movement is in the wrong direction. Others question the size of
the salary.

But the supervisors say the scope of their job — as budget decision-makers, complaint takers, program
administrators, mediators at the intersection of state and local government and myriad other
responsibilities — is so broad that adding two new members will make no difference in their workload.

The upshot is that they have a growing, scattered set of responsibilities and, if they so choose, can work
constantly. The new members of the supervisors who take office next January, the incumbents say, face
a steep learning curve and may be unprepared.

“The job just has grown,” said James Houser, a county supervisor since 1993. “There are so many things
going on.”

The county Compensation Board — a seven-member volunteer panel appointed by county elected
officials to annually set limits on those officials’ salaries — on Tuesday recommended a raise in
supervisor pay by 6 percent to nearly $90,000, in large part on the argument that getting qualified
candidates to run for the office requires a competitive wage.

While some criticize the proposed salary, Lee Clancey, president of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of
Commerce and former mayor of Cedar Rapids, is more concerned about the structure of county
government.

“We were offered a new structure, but after that, I don’t think people really clearly understood that
they simply wouldn’t have a say in either a salary discussion or in whether or not these folks ought to be
full time, or part time with a full-time administrator,” said Clancey, a champion of the city’s council-
manager government and one who voted against expanding the Board of Supervisors.

Despite what he says are the heavy demands of the job, Houser thinks it’s important that residents
know their elected officials are directly involved in the government that affects their lives.

“What would this community be like if we didn’t have active government leaders?” he asked.

Polk County, Iowa’s most populous county, with the city of Des Moines inside its boundaries, is the only
Iowa county with a full-time manager, and even there, the authority of the position is less than that of
city managers like Cedar Rapids’ Jim Prosser.

Counties have auditors, recorders, sheriffs, treasurers and county attorneys, and they’re all elected.
They administer their departments and are independent, though boards of supervisors set limits on
their budgets.

According to research by the county auditor, Linn County supervisors spent 74 hours in Board of
Supervisor meetings over the past six months — a little under three hours a week.

This is budget time, so supervisors will spend far more time in decision-making meetings over the next
three months, but Supervisor Linda Langston said that regardless of internal meetings, supervisors
spend most of their time outside the office.

They attend meetings of community groups, county departments, regional government organizations
and city councils around the county.

They plan department strategy and try to cooperate with other government entities.

Meanwhile, they have to pay attention to the state Legislature and lobby representatives because
decisions in Des Moines directly influence county programs.

“I think the job is pretty much what you want to make it,” said Dave Machacek, an Alburnett farmer who
led the campaign for the county to add two supervisors and to elect them by district.

Machacek said the goal of the expansion was to make sure rural residents were represented on the
board.

While he doesn’t think people are ready to consider a professional manager until they see how the
expanded board works, he doesn’t rule it out.

“I think it’s entirely possible that Linn County will wind up there,” he said.

Johnson County Supervisor Pat Harney thinks the need for a county administrator is becoming more and
more apparent — at least in his county.
There’s “a lot of duplication sometimes when you have one member working on something and then
someone else gets involved,” he said. “If you had a manager of some type (who) could coordinate that
and bring it all together, it would certainly help matters an awful lot.”

Both Johnson and Linn counties have full-time assistants to the Boards of Supervisors — Mike Sullivan in
Johnson County and Michael E. Goldberg in Linn — but their authority stops short of what a professional
county manager would do.

Langston guesses it will be two or three years before the idea of a professional manager is again
seriously discussed in Linn County. In the meantime, she thinks it’s worth questioning whether county
government is the best way for people to deal with a fastchanging world.

“We have to get government to do things differently than it’s ever done before,” she said. “People need
to be more professional, and more strategically minded, and I’m not sure we’ve taken that step.”