Don't think opt-out was waste of time

Commissioner Bill Brooks was in his element, speaking to the Kootenai County Reagan Republicans about what’s emerging as a favorite hot topic.

Brooks, elected to Kootenai County’s board of commissioners last November, has wasted little time pushing for creating a county manager or administrator position. Brooks has met with stiff early resistance — which, to anyone who knows him, is only encouragement to plow ahead.

Speaking to the Reagan Republicans, Brooks noted that Kootenai County is led by three CEOs. It wasn’t difficult to make the case that running an organization with hundreds of employees and a budget sneaking up on $100 million is challenging enough for one CEO, let alone three who often will see things differently and would tackle problems differently, too. A case in point is last week’s public hearing and subsequent vote to bury the short-lived, opt-out option on building regulations in the county. Brooks and fellow Commissioner Chris Fillios recognize the value of minimal regulation to ensure safety (and some sanity). The other commissioner, Leslie Duncan, disagreed, which is certainly her right but shows how differently three executives can perceive problems — and possible solutions.

This newspaper is on the record for well over a decade encouraging Kootenai County to hire a competent manager who would oversee much of what has mired commissioners in minutiae over the years, leaving high-level decisions like the overall budget and long-range planning for the CEOs to work out. Expenses of mere pennies and urgencies like where to park a snow shovel when it’s not in use should not be matters attended to by CEOs, yet in our county’s government, they have been.

While we believe there’s a better way — one that will smack the “this is the way we’ve always done it” brigade right in the nose — that’s not the point of today’s editorial. Honestly considering if there’s a better approach out there is the point. That’s going to take a kind of discussion that is instantly blown out of the water today, but must change if we’re to meet our potential as a community.

In that sense, the opt-out option had some value. “This is the way we’ve always done it” was tested — and held up quite well.