Debate on need for county administrator position continues among commissioners
By CLEON RICKEL, Herald Senior Writer
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If you want to end the county administrator’s position, you’ll have to draw up the petitions to get it on the ballot this fall.
Commissioner Don Hay’s call to have an election on the issue got stuffed by other commissioners Monday before it got to the ballot box.
“This is what the people want,” Hay said. “... I think it should be done away with.”
“They should get petitions and get it on the ballot,” Commissioner Ed Taylor replied.
Taylor said he’s heard from voters who support the administrator position.
“The people I talk to say the county is a business and that we should run it like a business,” he said.
“I don’t have a problem with putting it on the ballot,” Commission Chairwoman Sue Farrell said.
However, the county should prepare for the consequences if voters decide to end the position, she said.
The county would have to figure out what office would get the duties now done by the administrator, she said.
“That would be important to me,” Farrell said. “Got any idea?”
“Yeah,” Hay said. “It would all go back to the clerk.”
Shari Perry’s office handled many of the duties before and she would be able to handle them again, Hay said.
“Would the clerk be willing to do that?” Farrell asked.
However, Perry, who attended the study session made no comment.
Gene Hirt, Williamsburg and potential commission candidate, said Anderson County doesn’t have an administrator.
The county commission merely determines policy for the county and allows its department heads to run the county functions, he said.
“You’d be saving $100,000 a year,” Hirt said.
Commissioner Don Stottlemire said he originally was against having an administrator.
“But my district voted for it and I stand behind the people of my district,” Stottlemire said.
Commissioner Roy Dunn said he wouldn’t support putting the matter on the ballot.
Herschel Poor, Wellsville, said he’s voted against having an administrator twice.
“But you get a lot of people coming in and ranting and raving (against an administrator) and they’re assuming certain things that they don’t have any proof of,” Poor said.
Lisa Johnson, interim county administrator, said it wouldn’t be illegal to abolish the office.
“But I don’t think it’s ever been done before,” she said.
Normally, county commissioners decide they’ll hire an administrator and don’t put the issue on the ballots.
Franklin County Commissioners tried to do that the first time, but a petition put the matter on the ballot eight years and voters overwhelmingly defeated it.
The second time, more than four years ago, after voters started another petition drive but ran out of time, the commission went ahead and put the issue on the ballot.
They didn’t however, act on another petition that also ran out of time and would have had an election on dropping the number of commissioners from five back to three.
Voters reversed themselves and overwhelmingly approved hiring an administrator — the only time, at least in Kansas, in which voters approved hiring an administrator before the fact.
However, the county has had trouble keeping an administrator. The longest serving administrator, Jay Newton, was a temporary administrator who served more than a year after the county fired its first administrator after six months.
Johnson has been interim administrator since the second full-time administrator, Doug Harris, quit in late October after a little more than eight months on the job.
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