County reform

There are plenty of questions to ask about a plan to fix county government, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical.

But there is no question something is broken and needs fixing, and the plan, though still a work in progress, has a lot of merit. It deserves a fair hearing.

The proposal now making the rounds of public meetings is the product of a governor’s task force made up of municipal, county and state officials and is based on one virtually indisputable premise: the middle layer of Maine’s three-tier governmental cake is being squeezed flat between increasingly irate local taxpayers and increasingly expensive state demands.

The problem is that county government essentially is an administrative subdivision of the state, charged with carrying out duties on behalf of the state — rural law enforcement, local corrections, deeds, probate, emergency management — and then left on its own to collect from property owners.

The result is that, instead of being an effective tool for regional cooperation and the coordination of essential services, county government too often is seen as archaic, as a tax sponge worthy only of disdain. It is the government everybody loves to hate. The mistrust municipalities have for counties is a major barricade to the consolidation of services; it is a fundamental cause of wasteful duplicated services; it is evidence, as State Planning Office Director Evan Richert puts it, of the “poison in the system.”

The proposal seeks to provide an antidote first by having the state pick up its fair share of the cost of the services counties provide for the state’s benefit, to the tune of roughly $37 million. The resulting cut in the property taxes towns pay to their counties would average 62 percent, and, if passed along to property owners, would make the folks at home feel a lot better about the folks at the courthouse.

With those better feelings should come the opportunity, and the willingness, for towns to use their counties as the coordinator for joint services, a good, thrifty idea all too often wrecked by turf battles. With counties in a new role as a wholesale provider of services for their municipal customers, the possibilities extend far beyond the typical recycling programs and emergency dispatching centers to a wide range of efficiencies : code enforcement, payroll services, supplies, even, with electricity deregulation coming, as the aggregate buyer of discount power.

For this to work, the plan says it will be necessary for counties to de-politicize — let the elected commissioners hire a professional administrator (full or part-time) and let the new boss appoint a county treasurer, so there is a clear chain of command. In other words, for counties to work like business, they must become more businesslike.

And there, not unexpectedly, is where the trouble starts. Already, at the first two presentations in Kennebec and Penobscot counties, the task force has heard the tired refrain of local control from a choir largely of county and municipal job holders with jobs to protect. The public might well ask what is being controlled locally that is worth ruinously high tax bills.

The task force has tried to address a lot of legitimate concerns beforehand — the state’s $37 million comes off the top of income and sales tax revenues to ensure the obligation is met; growth in county budgets is controlled to make certain the saving is passed along to the taxpayers; the revenue-sharing program is voluntary, as are any regional-service agreements — but the question remains as to whether the proposal will be given a chance to work or just picked apart.

This is one of those situations in which doing nothing is not an option. In its current role as property-tax villain, county government is in trouble. Those who would abolish it are growing in number and speaking louder. Municipalities, with no trusted regional entity to turn to, have a dreadful record in consolidating services, and the taxpayers are paying the price. Local control is a convenient slogan, but $37 million is something you can take to the bank.