Who would make a perfect county commissioner?

An open letter to Assemblyman James Settelmeyer:

What is the perfect profile for a county commissioner candidate for Douglas County? A person who is independently wealthy and therefore has lost touch with normal citizens, their needs and desires? A person who has a hidden agenda and is strongly supported covertly by special interests? How about someone who desperately needs a job that will feed a personal ego or perhaps curry favor in personal life? Or a person who is retired with plenty of time, but light on executive experience and/or energy level? Perhaps a person with an axe to grind and one dominant personal hot button to satiate? Oh, and surely we need people with hearing disabilities who just won't listen to the electorate.

Of course, I jest. But the pay level suggests we want to attract only such characters.

In today's world the job is many times greater in terms of hours, complexity, pressures, controversy, and importance.

Based on the commissioners' decisions, millions of dollars are at stake weekly, to say nothing of the quality of life for all of us and subsequent generations. Isn't all that worth paying a fair wage to attract a wide array of great candidates as our top leaders? Anything less is a mockery of our democracy and it actually excludes most citizens from participating.

This is the justification for a fresh look at pay, simply because the job has grown so dramatically. It has nothing to do with "cost of living" or parity with other Nevada counties, or parity in terms of percent increase compared with all other county employees. What other Douglas County positions have seen such a huge increase in workload and gravity of decisions? And as you consider this letter, I urge you to ignore the incumbents and their performance, good or bad. This is about shaping our future rather than rewarding or punishing past behavior.

All the good people I have observed as county commissioners in the past eight years work doggone hard and very long hours. None of them is a slacker and none of them doesn't care. So what do they enjoy for compensation? Well, roughly minimum wage. It's a shocker, isn't it? But you know that already. So why do they do it? You would have to ask each of them but they must do it while casting aside any need to feed their family. Their willingness to do so places them in an extremely small minority and I always thank them for their service, but we are excessively narrowing our field of candidates.

Where is the long line of great candidates from all walks of life? Where is our depth on the bench? The job is getting harder, so the problem gets worse. Countless potential good candidates will simply say no way because they have to support their family. Besides all that, there is the simple concept of a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. This is senior executive work, not flipping burgers.

So, Assemblyman Settelmeyer, will you please work aggressively to get the compensation for Douglas County commissioners immediately tripled? This raise would cost each of us in this county about $10 a year - money well spent to attract a wider spread of our best and brightest. An alternative might be to provide staff assistants to reduce the commissioners' job to its former part time content, thereby allowing commissioners to be simultaneously fully employed in a "real job."

By the way, similar rationale might be just as valid for the state Legislature. It is never popular to press for your own pay raise, so you and your colleagues probably won't do so. The real losers here are the good citizens of Douglas County and the great state of Nevada. We need and deserve the very best politicians to lead us through very turbulent times ahead, so let's pay these jobs as if we believed this.

-- Jim Herd is a Gardnerville resident.