Here’s some important information about county government.
Oops sorry. By definition, there is no important information about county government. If it were important, it would be handled by a real level of government, such as municipal, state or federal. Counties do stuff like register deeds and wills, tasks that could be adequately dispatched by robots or trained squirrels.
Counties also have one other function, which is to operate jails. Please note that in the preceding sentence, the word “operate” is defined as “to mismanage, to bungle, to fail miserably to achieve even mediocre results.” The elected official with responsibility for this boondoggle is the sheriff, usually a semi-retired law enforcement officer looking to fatten up that pension check after an otherwise lackluster career patrolling back roads in a section of the state where fisher cats are legally allowed to vote. This experience means he or she possesses much the same skills for overseeing a complex correctional system as I do in performing brain surgery while blindfolded and drunk.
Am I’m being too harsh on the beleaguered public servants who make up county government? If so, I attribute my disdain to having recently paid my property tax bill, a whopping percentage of which goes to fund the county. In return for my generous annual donation, the deed to my house is duly registered and my will is available for probate in the event I’m strangled to death by unknown assailants who should not be presumed to be county employees.
There’s one other benefit: If I’m ever arrested by sheriff’s deputies on some trumped-up charge (buying liquor at discounted prices in New Hampshire is a possibility), I’ll await trial in a spiffy county jail – if by “spiffy,” I mean “chronically and severely under-funded.”
To be fair, this is not entirely the fault of the counties. Mostly, but not entirely.
Control of county jails has been a complex political issue in Maine for decades. The counties couldn’t really afford to run them, but furiously resisted giving up control to the state, because once they did that, what would be the point of having county government at all. It would make way more sense to transfer the robots and squirrels to some state agency, eliminate elected probate judges and other relics of the Paleolithic era, and sell off all those decaying courthouses to developers eager to turn them into condos – once the squirrel poop had been cleaned up. So it’s no wonder that, in desperate acts of self-preservation, the counties have routinely sabotaged efforts to bring the jail system under professional supervision.
In the most recent of these debacles, the counties continued to operate the jails, but the state decided where inmates would be housed. This made sense in theory, because it allowed overcrowded jails to transfer prisoners to those with beds to spare. But theory is not something county bureaucrats can easily comprehend. Instead of cooperating with each other, there were all sorts of turf battles. This situation was exacerbated by the state’s belief that the new system would save money, which it didn’t, thereby creating budget shortfalls.
Meanwhile, Paul LePage, governor and deep-fried Oreo depository, decided not to appoint any members to the board that was supposed to supervise this setup, thereby rendering it even more inoperable than its own machinations would have otherwise done. As a result, the Legislature abolished the board and returned control of the jails to the counties, which promptly found they couldn’t manage the lockups on the available money. The state provided one infusion of cash earlier this year, but the counties are already claiming they need more.
What they really need is less.
Having proved themselves incapable of playing well with others, the counties should be deprived of control over the jails, which should become state institutions overseen by the Department of Corrections.
That wouldn’t leave county government with much to do. Probate matters could be handled by the court system. Deeds could be registered with the secretary of state. Any leftover robots and squirrels could be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, where incompetence is considered a virtue.
You probably wouldn’t notice the difference – except your property tax bill would be a lot lower.
Squirrelly comments can be robotically emailed to me at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
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