Proposal Brief County Governace Structure Discussion Mar 16 2022 (2)

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KITTITAS COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS PROPOSAL BRIEF DATE: March 16, 2022 POLICY TOPIC: County Governance Structure Discussion BOCC-Administrator Form BACKGROUND Kittitas County has experienced rapid growth in the last 20 years. Commissioner tasks around county executive administration duties, policy development, legislative advocacy, and participation in multiagency forums has grown significantly during the same span. Under the Washington Constitution, our form of county government is considered the “default” structure with independently elected officials administering discrete departments performing duties defined by statute – aka a commission county. Seven counties in Washington have adopted home rule with processes outside of the common commission structure. These counties have separated the powers of the legislative and executive branches into codified elected and appointed positions as well as redistributed the duties of other county officials in commission counties. Of the remaining 32 counties, 15 have county administrators with primary executive authority for county operations and 5 have administrative directors with limited authority mainly over internal and budgetary management. There is no approximation to organization or population size as some similar or smaller counties (e.g., Douglas and Jefferson) have full county administrator positions while much larger counties (e.g., Yakima and Grant) have no central authority structure. MRSC’s article, Your Responsibilities as a County Commissioner (appendix 1), define the major parts of the commissioner job description. Along with those areas highlighted in the first paragraph of this background, Environmental and Land Use Planning is also raised as a key component of the position, and this is especially pivotal in Kittitas County. The article also discusses the executive administration portion of commissioner duties and the many forms it can take. However, it closes with the following, “A commissioner’s executive and administrative responsibilities are very time-consuming; consequently, boards of commissioners should seriously consider hiring professional staff for managing the day-to-day affairs of the county.” As we have come to experience, the majority of our working hours are devoted to managing internal operations which comes at the expense of other critical job requirements that reduce our ability to act strategically in the interests of Kittitas County. But how does this position translate to ultimate benefit for the organization? IBM conducted a study in 2013 among the nation’s 100 largest cities and published the findings in Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: An Operations Efficiency Benchmarking Study of 100 American Cites (appendix 2). In it, researchers worked to determine how efficiency across different cities could be measured by normalizing multiple service delivery points to account for population, geographic size, and other variables independent of administrative control. After analysis, the report concluded that those cities with council- manager forms of government were 10% more efficient than elected strong mayor administrations based on per capita cost of service delivery. The report states,