Trego's Mountain Ear

In the first two articles on this topic we’ve looked at geography – the community cut in two by Libby Dam and Lake Koocanusa – and the tax structure that has left the county split into the county seat and the unrepresented tax slaves of the north.  Unfortunately there is a certain pale resemblance to The Hunger Games.

In this article, I’ll be describing the challenges of hiring managers for a rural county.  We started with an elective process – hiring county commissioners, the county treasurer, the judge, the county clerk through an elective process.

We have a strong tendency to vote for people we like.  The fact that I like someone doesn’t mean that he or she is a competent manager.  We’ve had over a century of voting for likable people, then voting them out when the problems show up.  Our county commissioners tend to serve for a single term, while our other county offices tend to be run by lifers.  When the institutional memory isn’t so available to the commissioners as to their subordinates, function tends to be degraded.

In his first term, Trump ran up against the problem of having government employees who knew more about how to screw him up than he did about getting them to change their behavior.  It’s the same here – there’s a whole lot more experience among the hired staff than the elected management. 

 In some cases, notably the road departments, county commissioners and county employees work well together.  Historically, they have worked together.  Law enforcement is blessed with standardized Peace Officer training, and a belief that the laws are to be followed.

We’re blessed with Lincoln County’s health department providing an example of how that department operates the green boxes.  Now it’s important to realize that the health department has been making all the decisions on refuse for a long time.  The problems grew from their earlier decisions – and their solutions have grown from their departmental tendency to view the public that pays their salaries as the problem.  There’s something wrong when the commissioners have to ask the people who screwed garbage up to solve the problem.  If solving the problem was within their departmental skill set, there wouldn’t be a problem.

A glance at the tax bill shows that I pay $150 per year for refuse for my house and another $150 per year for the old (uninhabited) service station.  So if we take $300, and divide it by 12, we arrive at the county collecting $25 per month from me for refuse.  The Hoop’s schedule shows that I’ll have the green box site open for 3 days/week.  I guess I should consider myself lucky to get so much return.

The problem is, the county, advised by the health department, chose to solve an earlier refuse problem by locating the major landfill just outside of Libby, when EPA regulations forced closure of the landfill by Black Lake.  Long-term thinking is not something we can expect from midwits (see The Coining of the Term: Midwit – Vox Popoli for explanation) .  

Few people can come up with a solution that makes daylight savings time look as brilliant as this schedule does.  Anyway, so long as the commissioners keep expecting the people who created the problem to solve it, and as long as those people regard the citizens they supposedly serve as the problem, county government won’t work.  It’s not that the health department people are stupid – they’re just not as bright as they think they are.  The task has proven to be beyond them.

I looked at the census, and found that it recognizes 11,027 housing units in Lincoln County.  Josh Letcher said that number looked about right, and then supplied this budget that gives a better view of how our tax dollars are spent, along with this explanation:

“It all started going south(figuratively and literally) when the EPA regulations in the early 90s forced the closure of the county landfill on Black Lake Rd.

The county commissioners since then have been trying to make the decisions that are best at the time, but over time those decisions have been upended as well.

Contracting was a huge money savings until Evergreen bought up all its competition.”

Now there’s legislation that makes it somewhere between hard and impossible to start a new garbage hauling business when someone else is established in the area – somehow our health department folks ignored that fact as they advised those long-ago commissioners.  Midwits – above average intelligence, but not so far above as they think they are.

 Part – or maybe all of the problem – is that our county health department employees are accustomed to directing people.  They rule by law and taxation, and outlast any elected official who tries to limit their power and authority.  Even a six-year term for county commissioners doesn’t compete with this local version of the deep state.  When I started to write this series on why Lincoln County Government doesn’t work, can’t work, I didn’t expect them to give me such an outstanding example. 

I’d like to see local government work – but I’ve watched Lincoln County for too long to ignore the structural weaknesses that condemn us to non-functional county government.  The next, and final article, will discuss generalities of disfunction in elected officials and government employees – none of whom are necessarily bad people, most of whom I actually like.