Governance up close

I'm not in office yet, not even officially elected until Tuesday, though I'd have to muck it up by the numbers to fail at this point, as I'm running unopposed.

But although I won't be sworn in as a county commissioner until next January, I've begun easing into my role by spinning up on a few projects that were begun under the current commissioner for my precinct, a neighbor and friend, and will still be in full swing when I take office.  One of these is the paving of a nearby road dedicated to the county but not yet accepted into its construction and maintenance program.

This business of a road's appearing in the plats as a "county road," but not yet accepted by the county, is a potent source of public confusion.  In Texas (and maybe elsewhere) they're called "paper roads."  They may be nothing but sand and an easement.  The dedication by the developer appears in the surveyed and recorded plats, but the effect is a standing offer to the county, which in later years it may or may not accept.  If it does accept, under state law it has no obligation to pay the cost of building the road, though once it accepts it, it does take on the obligation to maintain it unless the road is formally abandoned.  In practice, this county follows the usual path of offering to cover a portion of costs if the homeowners unite in requesting a road to be built.  The usual split here is 2/3 homeowner, 1/3 county.  The process of petitioning the county and taking a homeowner vote and collecting the cost over a period of several years seems quite flexible and humane.

It comes as a shock to many of the homeowners, however, who believe that a plat showing a "county road" means that someone promised them something, and they're not very inclined to be precise about who that was.  The idea that they may have a legitimate quarrel with their seller, or their title company, but not the county, is foreign, nitpicking, abhorrent. They are less fascinated than I by the state law that carefully restricts the county's ability to throw largesse around, a product of many years of experience in the crony deals that would result in taxpayer money being spent to build nice streets for the county judge's brother-in-law.

In the current case, a very short piece of residential street became an urgent problem in this fall's extraordinary rains--over 20 inches in October--and is as much a drainage issue as a paving one.  The county does take on the responsibility of improving drainage, more or less, subject to available resources.  Yesterday's meeting featured mostly homeowners who were fairly content with the message that the county probably could do something to improve the specific drainage problem on their small street in the near future at no cost to themselves.  They also seemed happy to learn that the county could build pave their street next summer at the cost of about $2,200 per lot payable over three years, after which the county would maintain the street more or less in perpetuity.

A few struggled hard with the idea that they should have to pay for any of this.  The county engineer bent the rules a bit some weeks back and dumped some gravel on a specially low and damaged spot, but didn't have enough off-budget material lying around to cover the whole street.  The reaction, as one might have guessed, is that people on the rest of the street felt they'd been given an unalterable right to the same largesse.  They reacted furiously to the notion that they ought to pass the hat and buy a few truckloads of gravel to tide themselves over to next summer.  One fellow argued that the drainage problem stemmed from further up the nearest cross-street and somehow was the county's fault, meaning the county owed him a free solution.  I noticed that the current commissioner and engineer simply heard him out patiently, a good lesson for me.  He wasn't carrying the crowd; no one wanted to hear a rebuttal.  There was talk of how engineers in the Panama Canal Zone solved drainage problems caused by 7 feet of rain, without much consideration given to how unusual conditions have to be before we are well-advised to spend tax dollars hardening against them.  The money comes from us, guys!

Those of us living in the unincorporated area of a small and not very rich county mostly do not assume the county will provide us with any services to speak of.  A few have an abiding faith in their right to demand expensive services from government.  They've elected me after a campaign in which I told anyone who would listen that my first instinct is to limit government's powers, not to ensure government services, but of course I know most weren't listening at all; few even voted.  Clearly a commissioner's job is to do what we can to spend the county's limited resources solving the most urgent problems in the fairest way we can manage.  Part of the job is to help people understand how the government works, given that whatever problem they're bringing to my attention could well be the first time they've tried to get the county government involved in a problem.  Most have never thought much about how it should work, let alone grappled with difficult questions about how to balance freedom, security, and convenience.  My first instinct always is "Why should I have to take your input into account in what I want to accomplish on my own property?"--but often what I hear from neighbors is more like "Why should I have to pay for anything that benefits me?"

It's likely to be an interesting four years.