Hat Man: Democracy makes hiring a challenge

Dana Nichols

Calaveras Enterprise Tuesday, October 14, 2014

CCWD board scheduled to hire soon, before a new board is seated

When a job becomes unpleasant enough, it’s hard to get anyone to do it.

That happened in the late Roman Empire, when members of the patrician class found it was no longer lucrative to be a city administrator. In fact, if such administrators failed to meet their tax collection goals, they had to make up the difference from their personal wealth. Rather than go bankrupt, some left their posts.

The emperors Diocletian and Constantine solved this lack-of-leadership problem by enacting various reforms that made such jobs hereditary. A city administrator who fled his duties could be hunted down, captured and returned like a slave to resume bean counting and tax collecting.

We currently don’t expect our administrators to reach into their own pockets to make up shortfalls in the budgets for our cities, counties and states. But in some ways, the larger forces that make their jobs increasingly difficult are the same.

An empire or civilization that is no longer expanding and bringing in new resources will inevitably see its wealth dwindle. Whether the basic fuel of the civilization is the wheat harvest of Egypt or the oil production in Arabia, Alaska and Siberia, limits are painful.

Locally, we see the squeeze playing out as revenues – whether taxes or rates paid by utility customers – fail to keep up with the rising costs to maintain water pipes, roads and social infrastructure, such as the criminal justice system.

In a free market economy, in theory, we are all free to leave a job when it is no longer worth performing for the pay we get. Making jobs lifelong and hereditary is one obvious solution. The Romans did not just use this strategy with city administrators. They also applied it, at times, to lower-status job titles, such as bakers. Bakers were crucial to keeping peace in Roman cities because they provided the life-giving bread that was due city residents.

Right now, Calaveras County has difficulty retaining sheriff deputies who often get better offers from agencies elsewhere. Imagine if the county could make the post lifelong and hereditary and force a deputy to come back and resume working should he or she try to leave.

I’m thinking about this right now because of the departure of Calaveras Coun-ty Administrative Officer Lori Norton. She was here for about a year and a half and performed admirably, according to the reports by elected Board of Supervisors members, before deciding she didn’t want to work here any longer.

Top offices in county government, and at the Calaveras County Water District, have tended to turn over fairly rapidly in recent years. The same is true for a variety of top administrative positions, such as directors for the county’s Public Works and Planning departments. Sometimes they get fired. Sometimes they just decide it isn’t worth it to stay.

It happens the top posts for both the county and CCWD are open at the moment. Mitch Dion, the CCWD general manager, got fired. Norton left voluntarily. Both agencies would benefit from stable, long-term leadership. So what should they do?

In a democracy, one challenge for top administrators is that they work for elected boards. Those boards change over time. The Calaveras County Board of Supervisors is acting wisely, at the moment, by waiting until January to consider finding a permanent replacement for Norton.

At least one, if not two, members of the Board of Supervisors will be new to the board at that time. The new administrator should at least know who he or she will work for in the coming years.

CCWD directors, in contrast, appear to be planning to hire a new director before a new board is seated there in January. And the CCWD board could see as many as four new faces. Yet the CCWD board is scheduled Wednesday to interview at least one job candidate, according to an agenda the agency issued last week.