Time to rein in power of appointed boards, give control to elected officials

One of the most memorable stories I covered during my time as editor of the Citizen Voice & Times in Irvine was a controversy over sewer service rates.

In the early 1990s, a sewer system was built to serve portions of Estill County on the south side of the Kentucky River, primarily the West Irvine area. State law required customers to abandon their septic tanks and hook on to the municipal sewage system when it came online, so dozens of Estill County residents and businesses began using the new system.

Customers were shocked when they started receiving bills for the service. Their utility bills went up an average of 150 percent. What had been $40 water bills suddenly became $100 bills for combined water and sewage service. The increases posed real financial problems to many, including those on fixed incomes.

Residents complained to the Estill County Fiscal Court and the county judge-executive, but those elected officials were powerless to do anything about the bills. The water and sewer systems were operated by an entity called the Estill County Water District No. 1; a name I always found amusing, because in all my years of working in Irvine I never heard of there being another water district. Although the water commissioners were appointed by elected officials, the fiscal court had no authority over their actions.

Because there was so much community outrage, the water commissioners were invited – strongly encouraged might be a better term – by the county judge-executive to attend a fiscal court meeting and explain the rates to angered customers. None of the water board members came to the meeting to face the music.

One reason the incident sticks out in my mind is because it’s one of the few times during my newspaper career I quoted someone using profanity in a news story. One of the chief complainants addressed the fiscal court after the board members turned out to be no-shows, saying something along the lines of “I can’t believe we have three water commissioners who don’t give enough of a damn to be here tonight to face the public.”

But another reason is that there’s renewed public anguish over appointed boards and commissions being able to act without any oversight from elected officials.

This has been controversial in a number of counties, where agencies such as extension service boards or library boards have approved tax increases or expenditures for large, and often unneeded, construction projects. Taxpayers are upset because their elected officials have no say about the tax increases. At a time when people’s budgets are already stretched thin and government resources need to be spent wisely, many of these agencies act as if they are flush with cash. These times call for fiscal frugality by public agencies in economically troubled communities, not wasteful spending on unnecessary projects such as new buildings when the existing facilities are just fine.

Fiscal courts have to approve the tax rates set by these special districts, but that’s only so those property taxes can be included on the tax bills. The elected officials cannot veto the tax rates.

There have been a few efforts to change that, and to put the final say over tax rates into the hands of elected officials who are accountable to the voters, but those efforts have been met with resistance. The last time such a law was proposed in the Kentucky General Assembly, the claim was made that giving fiscal courts approval or veto power would, in effect, turn those special district taxes into county taxes, and would hurt counties’ bonding ability. There’s a simple workaround for that. Merely specify in the law that the special district taxes are not to be considered county taxes, and bonding companies or lenders cannot take those rates into consideration when evaluating funding for county projects. Problem solved.

Critics of the proposal to give fiscal courts more oversight of special districts’ actions also say that there is already accountability because the board members are chosen by elected officials. While that’s true, most of those appointments are made in obscurity. Very few people can probably name the members of their local library board. And the average citizen probably doesn’t know when their extension service board meets so they can lobby against tax increases.

A quarter-century ago, that Estill County water board purposefully ignored the concerns of its customers and constituents. The members were eventually replaced, and the way they brushed off citizens’ very real monetary concerns was a key reason. Still, the fiscal court at the time had no ability to step in and address the problems. Similarly, they have no way to act in the voters’ interests when appointed bodies try to increase taxes.

That needs to change. There are ways to bring the actions of rogue or tone-deaf appointed boards under the control of the people’s elected representatives. It’s time that local elected officials were given that power.