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.
