The County Commission’s clear distaste for open public interviews of candidates and applicants for the seat being vacated Jan. 11 by Hamilton County Mayor Claude Ramsey would be laughable if it were not so ludicrous and insensitive to the public’s right to know. As it is, their clear desire, expressed in last Thursday’s County Commission meeting, to have private interviews with the candidates — and possibly private promises, pledges and conditions for support — is absolutely appalling.
The nine county commissioners owe voters here absolute openness in the process to select an interim county mayor to serve until the next countywide election in 2012. They are, after all, standing in as surrogates for voters under the law, not displacing them. They should affirm their responsibility to keep voters as fully informed as voters would be if the candidates were conducting a public campaign.
Yet it’s surprisingly and odiously obvious that commissioners do not respect the interests of the county’s voters. They sat on their public dais and arrogantly proclaimed their distaste for the state’s open meetings and records act, and casually affirmed their wish for a secret process and private meetings with individual candidates in order to select the county’s next chief executive. That is simply beyond the pall.
The county mayor’s office belongs to the people — to voters and taxpayers. It is their interest that the next county mayor will represent. It is their taxpayer dollars that the mayor will seek to allocate. And it is the voters’ right to know precisely the views of the applicants, their priorities and the breadth or narrowness of their vision for their future.
Alas, it’s not surprising that county commissioners are so disrespectful of their public responsibility to keep their constituents fully informed and to conduct all their public business openly. It’s been that way in county government here since the days when it was run by the County Council, whose five members were elected at large, through the days since state government was required, in 1978, to establish a district-based county commission that would fairly represent minorities. Under both forms of government, council and commission members have operated as if the public’s business was their private deal-making concern; and that their chief responsibility was mainly, or perhaps just, to people who live in the unincorporated areas outside the county’s municipalities.
The commission responsibility is far broader than that. County government collects the same countywide property tax from every county resident. It is responsible to all of this county’s taxpayers, whether or not the commissioners act like it is. That makes the county’s chief executive the single most important office for all taxpayers in this county.
And sad to say, the County Commission has absolutely no regard for the tax equity it owes every single county taxpayer, whether they are also residents of Chattanooga or the towns of Red Bank, East Ridge, Collegedale, Signal Mountain, Lookout Mountain, Ridgeside, Soddy-Daisy, Walden or Lakesite. All county residents pay the same countywide property tax into the county’s general fund, school fund and district road fund. They all deserve a fair portion of what their taxes purchase.
They all deserve to know what vision and plans the new county executive will hold or seek with regard to consolidation of services, support for county schools, economic development, parks and recreation, land-use zoning, health clinics and support for civic agencies that work in the public interests.
The chief, but most casually disregarded issue, is the tax equity that county government owes to the county’s use of countywide taxpayer funds for services — policing, road maintenance and support for sewer bonds and fire departments — that it provides just in the unincorporated areas of the county. Residents of municipalities pay for those services through their local city and town taxes, and they pay again for the same services that go just to residents of unincorporated areas. Small wonder the 30 percent of county residents whose municipal services are chiefly financed by the 70 percent of residents who pay double cherish and want to keep their sweetheart deal and avoid annexation.
But they are not paying their fair share for the services they receive from county government; they are paying too little. And the residents of municipalities are paying double to support services that they do not receive from the county.
The next county mayor should address that issue head-on, and dig more deeply into the rigged figures that county commissioners now use to blow that off.
Mike Carter, Ramsey’s chief assistant and a candidate for Ramsey’s job, has already made known his opposition to consolidating duplicative public services and improving tax equity. The public doesn’t know enough about the other potential candidates to make informed judgments, but it is their right to acquire that knowledge and express their preferences.
The only way the public can begin to discern the views and positions of candidates for the county mayor’s seat is for the commission to hold open public interviews of the candidates, and for commissioners to avoid seeking private conversations with the candidates. In fact, each candidate should be asked in open public meetings if they have had such conversations with county commissioners, and if they did, what transpired.
County commissioners should fully respect a fair and open process. It is their duty, and it is the public’s right to know that is at stake.