Taylor County needs to formalize staff leadership

Last week’s explosive meeting of the Veterans Service Committee exposed the shortcomings of Taylor County’s lack of formal day-to-day staff leadership.

On February 16, a contingent of angry veterans was mobilized to attend the meeting to stand in highly vocal, and, at times, profanity-laden support of the current veterans service officer. The veterans service officer threatened the committee members with legal action for having the audacity to interfere with how she wanted to run the office. Committee members, who are the ones tasked with overseeing the department’s operations, were shouted down.

Meanwhile other county employees who had been given the task of enforcing established county policies have been attacked and accused of overstepping their authority.

Simply put, the meeting was a disaster. It would be easy to think of this as an isolated and unfortunate situation or to buy into the conspiracy theory dujour of who has it in for whom. Doing so would miss the underlying leadership crisis facing county operations.

By design, Taylor County has a decentralized government. The organizational chart has the county board, led by Chairman Jim Metz, at the top and the departmental workers on the bottom. In between are department heads who are all nominally co-equal. When things operate smoothly, the department heads cooperate and work as a team to move the county as a whole forward and get maximum value from taxpayer resources.

When things fall apart, there is bickering, animosity and waste as county departments fight over resources and make decisions without taking into account the consequences it will have on the county as a whole.

In between are oversight committees which meet every month or two and make decisions that are filtered to them by the department heads. While charged with holding department heads accountable, over time they take on the role of being advocates for their departments.

The county board works best as a legislative body providing oversight and making the tough decisions with setting the approximately $30 million annual budget. In recent years, the county has worked smoothly because of the relationships and mutual respect of longtime department heads. With turnover in departments, those relationships have broken down as new individuals have taken departmental leadership roles and have their own ideas about how the county should operate.

As the saying goes, you can’t steer a ship by committee. And just as every work crew needs a foreman to solve problems and ensure the job gets done, there needs to be someone in the county with the specific task of ensuring county departments continue to recognize that they are all ultimately serving on the same team.

Taylor County needs a point person to serve as the board’s voice in day to day departmental interactions while also establishing a clear chain of command to ensure the smooth and efficient functioning of the county as a whole.

Beyond that the county needs a clear organizational chart so that anyone selected to execute the board’s directives can do so without needing to go through 12 different committees.