BOC owns charter outcome; it might come to regret it

A lot is at stake.

Although this group has no real legal authority, its ultimate recommendations may well determine the future course of Barrow County’s government.

At minimum, the group will determine the public’s perception of the current Barrow County Board of Commissioners. The BOC had a call-to-arms when the local legislative delegation tried to create a charter study group and the BOC demanded that role for itself.

If this group falters in its role, it will be egg on the faces of BOC members. Not only that, but it could empower the legislative delegation to go ahead on its own and plan the future of Barrow County’s government structure.

So the first question next week will be: Is this charter committee up to the task it’s been given?

I’ll admit to being a cynic when it comes to citizens committees. Government officials often use such groups as a political shield to do the dirty work they themselves were elected to do. Rather than wrestle with a controversial subject, throw that bone to a “study group” to take the heat.

All too often, these kinds of groups wind up lacking focus, direction and leadership. While generally populated by good people, citizen groups often lack access to the kind of technical expertise needed to really function. And while most people on these committees have a general idea about the issues, a lot of time is often consumed and wasted just bringing the committee members up to speed on the technical details.

For this group to function effectively, it cannot just show up in Auburn next week for a public hearing and ask citizens who attend what they think.

Think about what?

Before any citizen input can be had, the charter review committee needs to frame the main issues and focus the discussion around some key questions. Only by doing that will citizens be able to give real feedback.

Having been tasked with reviewing Barrow’s governing structure, the committee really only has one of three recommendations it can return to the BOC at the end of this process:

First, the committee can recommend no changes to the current county governing system. That’s often what happens when a committee either can’t agree on what changes to make, or when it believes no changes are possible because of political considerations.

Second, the committee can recommend keeping the current governing structure, but tweaking some of its provisions. For Barrow County, the biggest issues that might get discussed are the veto powers of the BOC chairman and the provision for making a quorum. Currently, a quorum is defined as a super-majority of five members rather than a simple majority of the chairman plus three commissioners. That’s a very odd requirement.

The veto power has been controversial because it requires the same super-majority — five out of seven members — to overrule the chairman’s veto.

The third recommendation this group could take back to the BOC would be to totally overhaul the county’s governing structure. That could be done by weakening the chairman’s position to make it mostly ceremonial and hiring a county administrator to run the county day-to-day, or if the group really wanted change, make the chairman’s position part-time like all other BOC members and move to a county manager form of government with a hired manager to do all the day-to-day management.

It’s impossible now to predict what might ultimately come out of this group, but there are several political considerations.

For one thing, it would be very embarrassing to the BOC for this group to come back and recommend no change or only minor changes to the charter. You don’t set up a citizens committee and schedule a bunch of public meetings if you aren’t serious about making some major changes. That would be a waste of everyone’s time, energy and efforts.

On the other hand, if the committee comes back with some major recommendations for change, but the BOC doesn’t follow through, the board will lose a lot of public support. If you create a high-profile committee to make recommendations, but then you don’t accept those recommendations, citizens will ask, why did you create the committee in the first place?

The final aspect to measure is the level of public involvement this study group brings to the table. Will people really come out to public hearings to give feedback to a group that doesn’t have the power to change anything? Would it have been better for the BOC to do hearings itself so that the public talked to the final decision-makers?

It’s a tough time for public hearings. Schools are in their last weeks and people are distracted with that and other things going on. So far, the committee has not created any level of interest in luring the public to its meetings. And the charter committee has scheduled its upcoming public meetings on some of the same nights as other regular government meetings.

So what happens if the process is a bust? Will the legislative delegation get back involved?

Politically, the BOC would have been better off allowing the legislative delegation to pursue this issue and to have weighed in at the end of that process.

But the BOC created and appointed this group. It will own the outcome, whether it wants to or not.

Mike Buffington is co-publisher of the Barrow Journal. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.