The elected office of Douglas County public administrator lay fallow for 60 years from 1914 to 1974.
According to a 1975 story appearing in The Record-Courier, there wasn’t a public administrator for much of that time, with the clerk-treasurer or the district attorney filling in over the years.
That changed when Kingsbury General Improvement District Manager Carl Bostrom was appointed public administrator on April 7, 1975.
In his first nine months in the office, Bostrom reported “no fees or compensation of any nature or kind have been proffered to or accepted by the undersigned Public Administrator for any service or cause whatever,” according to the newspaper.
That might have had something to do with Bostrom not filing for the office in 1976.
It had been so long since anyone actually filed for the office, that in 1978 The Record-Courier declared that Joseph Liebherr was the first person to seek election, ever. That wasn’t true, but the previous contested election was in 1908, well beyond the memory of most folks.
On Monday, Douglas County commissioners accepted Public Administrator Steve Walsh’s resignation, decided they wanted an appointed public administrator in the future and approved putting Community Services Director Brook Adie in charge while they sort all that out.
The public administrator deals with estates of anyone who dies without leaving a will and without next of kin able to serve as an executor. There’s no pay associated with the job, but the public administrator charges estates a fee. The office’s relative obscurity is a key issue. Voters provide the only oversight, and without the vetting process of a contested election, it’s difficult for them to recognize an issue. In seven Nevada counties, some other office works as the ex officio administrator, similarly to how Douglas County handled it for six decades in the 20th Century.
Seven counties have elected public administrators and three have dispensed with the office altogether, Assistant County Manager Wendy Lang said on Thursday.
It will take a minimum of 45 days to write up, introduce and approve an ordinance eliminating the position from the ballot if county staff goes at full speed.
