We have said before and we'd maintain again that Hamilton County commissioners aren't paid enough.
As with any job, some commissioners work harder than others, but we're familiar with the variety of meetings commissioners attend in an effort to be current with the workings of their district and the amount of research they do to prepare themselves for whatever business is to be discussed at a county commission meeting.
Yes, they knew what they were getting into when they ran for a part-time job that pays a base salary of $22,786, but some commissioners work nearly the equivalent of a full-time job - in addition to any full-time job they already may have.
The issue of commissioner pay has come up publicly and privately among commission members several times in the past two years, with the central question being whether the county body should have the ability to set its own pay. It does not have that ability now since pay is tied to the salary of the county mayor.
Commissioner Joe Graham raised the issue of commissioner pay at Wednesday's county commission meeting, citing phone calls he had received from state legislators. Legislators said commissioners had called them but would not say which ones.
"What we have here," Strother Martin said in the classic 1967 movie "Cool Hand Luke," "is failure to communicate."
Graham, who called the existing pay arrangement "fair, transparent and impartial," said a way for commissioners to change their pay would be to keep it tied to the county mayor's salary but allow voters to decide in a referendum whether they wanted to increase the percentage of the mayor's salary that commissioners would get.
Commissioners Chester Bankston and Greg Beck, though, said they didn't believe the private act that legislators passed tying the mayor's salary with that of the commissioners could be overturned in a referendum.
Instead, we're always going to agree with the approach offered by Commissioner Tim Boyd, who said if commissioner pay needs to be discussed it should be done openly.
If that's what the body wants, he said, "let's get it out there and have guts enough to talk about it."
We believe the commissioners deserve to make more for what they do, but their pay should not be the subject of furtive letters left in commissioners' chambers (as was the case in 2015) or undisclosed phone calls to legislators. If a majority of members believes as we do, let them say so and have a discussion of the pros and cons in public. It's the only way such discussion should occur.