06.24.09

Budget officer not just a good idea, it’s the law

Posted in Bad Government Republicans, Commentary, Commissioners Court, County Judge, Cronyism, Had Enough Yet?, Williamson County at 7:40 am by wcnews

Raise your hand if you trust your government. No hands? Anyone? That’s what we thought. There’s a reason our founders created a system of checks and balances. It’s because they knew that without them, people in positions of power would eventually abuse it. That’s why the issue of appointing an independent County Budget Officer (CBO) in Williamson County is important. Everyone in our county’s government and the RRL seem to have missed that lesson, Much ado over the Williamson budget officer, or worse, are hoping we have.

In the private sector, as business improves, the workload increases and new employees are hired. On a larger staff, specialization increases. An employee that once performed many tasks, now concentrates on one specific task. In business, it’s a good problem to have, but growth brings challenges as well. Payroll and budgets increase. Managing staff and avoiding waste become more imperative. That’s a way to think of the budget officer issue in Williamson County.

We’ve written here many times about the growing pains that afflict Williamson County. With the county’s increased size, comes increased responsibility and scrutiny. The county can no longer operate as if it is a small county. Yet, our County Judge has been reluctant to comply with a state law mandating that counties larger than 225,000 citizens create an independent CBO. The official April 2000 United States Census figure for Williamson county is 249,967. The latest population estimates approach 400,000. The lack of a CBO is a problem that has languished for nearly a decade.

What has taken County Judge Dan Gattis, Sr., so long to address this problem? Why did he resist?

To understand why the county has been out of compliance for over 9 years and why our County Judge has resisted efforts to bring us into compliance, we need to look at the CBO’s job function and why Gattis insisted in retaining the title and position for himself.

An effective CBO makes certain the will of the voters as represented by their elected commissioners are most accurately represented in the final budget. Once the budget is approved, auditors ensure that tax money is spent according to budget. The complexity of the budget is proportional to its size, and by any measure our county budget is impressive. The RRL reported that “Williamson County government includes approximately 1,500 employees and a fiscal 2008-09 budget of $191.2 million.” Budgets that size are complex documents, full of accounting detail. Before the budget can be implemented, it must be carefully itemized and annotated. State law mandates that the county employ a CBO because it is the best way to protect our tax dollars from waste and graft.

Citizens of Williamson county have a right to expect that the CBO will serve as a competent accountant and an independent adviser who guards the budget as if it were his or her own money being spent. The best-qualified applicants for CBO would emerge from an open interview process. However, Dan Gattis, Sr., would prefer to promote Assistant Budget Officer Ashlie Koenig to CBO without posting a job description or interviewing any other applicants. That’s why the commissioners’ recent action is so concerning, New boss, same as the old boss.

Even though, after two years of controversy, the Williamson County commissioners court voted on Tuesday morning, (June 9th), to replace Judge Dan Gattis as the county’s budget officer, the action, which took only 20 seconds to complete with no discussion, could still fall short of the checks-and-balances principle which needs to be protected, according to Jeff Maurice, one of the citizens who signed the complaint letter sent to the county attorney about the issue

[…]

In Tuesday’s action, commissioners court, by a unanimous vote, named county employee Ashley Koenig, the county’s budget number-cruncher who works for Gattis, as the budget officer, but what remains very unclear is whether they created a separate budget department and whether they changed any aspect of her position to give her an appropriate level of autonomy in her new duties.

“The big question at this point is whether or not Judge Gattis remains as the gatekeeper for the budget,” Maurice said. “If Gattis can tell Koenig what to do, then it short-circuits her ability to work with all members of the commissioners court, and it doesn’t give her the kind of independence which is at the heart of the state statute,” Maurice said.

A CBO along with a small staff work with the commissioners court, department heads, and the public to prepare a budget for the county. The issue is bigger than Gattis or Koenig, it’s about how to best structure our county government so it operates with proper oversight and transparency. The increased size of Williamson County requires us to move to Subchapter C of the local government code. The Judge in a county of the size of Williamson has enough to do to keep up with running the county, much less also being the County Budget Officer.

The point is to not just give the title to someone other than the County Judge or Auditor, and to appoint someone to that position after completing a proper hiring process. Surely in this economy there would have been many qualified applicants wanting to apply for such a job. (Although with the county’s recent track record hiring national well-qualified applicant only to fire them soon after it’s hard to blame them.) Still, the lack of an open application process does call into question the circumstances under which Koenig got the job.

Creating a budget office, essentially wresting control of the budget from the County Judge, was something Gattis has been reluctant to do. When finally forced to comply, he appoints a person who has demonstrated her loyalty, raising doubts about her independence. We are only left to guess as to why Gattis continues to resist yielding this authority as he is required to do under state law. It also makes one wonder about why the initial request for an opinion from the Attorney General was filed. Was there some friction between one of the commissioners and the judge regarding the budget, that spurred County Attorney Jana Duty to request clarification from the AG?

Without creating a completely separate department that prepares the annual budget, the appropriate level of insulation from the political decision makers in the county does not exist. Allowing the commissioners direct access to the budget officer, without an intermediary, means the process lacks the appropriate “checks and balances” that bring accountability to the budget process. This does not have so much to do with whether those currently in office have broken the law, as County Judge Dan Gattis, Sr., and County Auditor David Flores state in the RRL article. What matters is whether it makes it easy, or easier, for any elected official in our county to break the law. As this issue currently stands it does. And that is why there should be much ado about this very important issue.

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