CHC 1979-02-20 - Laserfiche WebLink

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who made the budget and how it evolved. By custom in those days the county auditor made the budget. Now remember that at that time we had an elected county auditor, we had an elected county treasurer, we had an elected county clerk, we had an elected county attorney and we had the elected officials of the board of supervisors. The county auditor used to take the previous year' s budget and assemble it., He'd go and ask the various departments I guess for a wish list and then he took last year ' s budget and put it together and that was presented to the county board of supervisors and it was up for grabs from there on out. The mayor really didn 't have any control over anything except after the board of supervisors as a body had gone ahead and implemented. All department heads at that time had to be approved by the board of supervisors. We had a situation there at that time where we had just come off of a lot of controversy concerning the approval of certain department heads that the chairman wanted to appoint but the rest of the board of supervisors were not in accord with. As a result the chairman could hardly get a viable administration going. You might say that there were certain department heads forced on him whether he wanted it or not. This is not con- ducive to very good administration. So, we had just seen all of this happen. We had seen individualsupervisorsvho assumed the very dominant position in government. Notethat we may not have similarities from time to time even under any other system. But neverthe- less we had just seen that and most people did not feel that this was a desirable system. We studied the various forms that were available. The weak mayor, the strongmayor, the commission form, the county manager form. There were a number of commissioners at least by the time we got around to the third Charter Commission who I think felt philosophically that a county manager would be the best way to go. The usual analogy of business versus government and the county manager form is more closely allied to the business form of running things. However, even those that were philosophically in favor of the county manager I think came to the realization that in the political climate that existed at that time it wouldn ' t sell. There was no way we were going to get it through. As a result the strong mayor form became in effect the next best thing. I don ' t think that there was ever a majority of the Charter Commission that was in favor of county manager but there was a pretty fair faction there that really would have liked county manager but they didn ' t feel they could sell it. So there wasn ' t much point in coming out with it and as a result we ended up with a strong mayor system. Now, did we go too far overboard? Well , maybe we did. I don ' t know. One thing that I was going to hold for closing remarks and maybe I ' ll say it now and say it -13-