JOSEPHINE COUNTY CHARTER UPDATE
By Dorothy Yetter
The Commission was created on 28 April 2021 by the Board of County Commissioners with Order No. 2021-018. Nine members were appointed and our first meeting was held 9 September 2021. We set ourselves up for business, electing officers and hammering out bylaws, by 1 December 2021.
After a few attempts to wrap our arms around the enormity of the task, we settled on a read- through and ‘mark-up’ of the existing document. Even as we do that, we have discovered that we need to invite experts to provide us with their observations in their areas of expertise such as finance (for instance, what is the actual budget process in use?) or administration (for instance, what recourse do exempt personnel have to political reprisal?)
While that is the meeting-to-meeting activity, we have a few over-arching questions considering if the current structure of county government is adequate to the task. That currently manifests as:
-
How many commissioners? Some advocate our county is small enough and homogeneous enough to be governed by the current 3, elected at large. Others think the county is more diverse and needs more commissioners actually from those diverse communities – either resident in that community or elected specifically by that community.
-
Does the county need a County Executive? It would separate powers, split the administrative (executive) functions from legislative, but is it more overhead than we need?