Stewart bears critics
Opposition to county commissioer's dual roles continues
By Jason Gewirtz
The move came with little warning to outside observers.
One moment, County Commissioner Ron Stewart sat where he usually sits, conducting business at a commissioners' meeting. The next, he was sitting in the audience, having given up the gavel, watching his two colleagues appoint him director of the powerful Parks and Open Space Department.
The move thrust Boulder County government into an unprecedented circumstance in which an elected county commissioner would also serve as a department head, reporting directly to the remaining commissioners. County officials praised the move as a cost-saving measure and said the long-serving Stewart was the perfect person for the high-profile open space job.
But nearly a month after Stewart took on his additional role, the move is still not setting well with some county residents.
At their most modest, critics question why there was not more public input before the move. At their most skeptical, they question the structure of county government and ask if the move wasn't done to secure Stewart a permanent county government job for his post-commissioner days.
While some continue to raise questions, Stewart and the commissioners continue to defend the appointment, which he says is working out as well as anyone expected.
"It's a significant job, and we said from the start it's a unique situation," he said.
Stewart has been a commissioner since 1984. In accepting the parks and open space post May 25, he opted to keep his $50,000 commissioner salary without receiving the roughly $80,000 salary as a department head.
His predecessor in the open space position was Carolyn Holmberg, who led the department for 15 years. Holmberg, who died in September, was credited with steering Parks and Open Space into one of the largest land agencies on the Front Range.
Taking over
Since beginning the open space job June 1, Stewart has been focusing his time on transitional tasks such as budget preparation. He also plans an outreach effort to several local open space interest groups such as the Sierra Club, the Boulder Off-Road Alliance and the Boulder County Nature Association.
When he was appointed, Stewart said he would recuse himself from commissioners' votes that might favor Parks and Open Space over any other county department, particularly on budget issues. Last week, for instance, he sat out of a vote on several budget-related items in a Tuesday meeting, returning to a voting role on other matters immediately afterward.
"I think it's going exactly as expected," he said of the dual role.
The most vocal opponents to Stewart's appointment have been members of the Land Use Coalition, a group of property owners that formed after a recent proposal to impose county restrictions on development of mountain slopes. The Stewart appointment is a focus of the Land Use Coalition's Web page, and after the announcement, the group's members implied they would start a recall effort against the commissioners.
Since then, the group has toned down its recall talk. But members are still raising questions about the arrangement of one person serving as both commissioner and department head. Particularly, they point to the time needed to manage the department's 100 full-time and seasonal employees, to oversee an $11 million budget and to monitor more than 50,000 acres in land holdings.
AJ Chamberlin, a Land Use Coalition founder, said members support open space acquisitions but don't understand why Stewart's appointment was not first the focus of a public hearing.
"The secrecy is scaring people," she said.
Stewart said department-head selections are typically not made in public because the positions involve the implementation and not the crafting of public policy. Unlike the recent process in the city of Boulder — where public interviews were held last year for city manager finalists — the county opts not to interview candidates in the public eye.
"It's not a public process," Stewart said. "The public process in Boulder County is elections that are held."
Ann Mygatt, a Boulder attorney and Land Use Coalition member, said many members are also concerned about the structure of county government. If one person is willing to be both commissioner and open space chief, why did Boulder County for years pay two people to perform the jobs, they ask.
"It raises all kinds of questions, like, do we need a separate open space director if we have a commissioner to do that job?" Mygatt said.
Commissioners Paul Danish and Jana Mendez said the situation with Stewart is fortunate for county residents because Stewart is the first sitting commissioner who has offered to perform both jobs. More important, they said, was that Stewart's knowledge of open space acquisitions and territories made him their top choice for the job and spared taxpayers a lengthy and expensive candidate-search.
Danish and Mendez said they are willing to take the time to see how effective the set-up works before assuming that it won't. They also question the extent to which residents are upset about the appointment.
"I think that you have to recognize if you take a look at the criticism, there's a strong political component to it, and that's people who have their own land-use agendas," Danish said.
Unique set-up
Observers of county governments say that having the same person serving as commissioner and open space director is unusual.
In many counties, commissioners will have an emphasis on certain areas such as finance, public safety or administration, said Jacqueline Byers, research director for Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Counties. But, it's rarer for them to run the day-to-day operations in any given department.
"I don't ever remember seeing an elected county commissioner acting as an administrative department head," Byers said.
While having an elected commissioner serve in both roles is unusual, simply having an open space department also bucks the trend, Byers said. She said states in the West are more likely to have separate departments funded in large part by money from a sales tax, as is the case in Boulder County.
In neighboring Jefferson County, an 85-employee Parks and Open Space Department maintains about 30,000 acres of open space. The department's budget comes in large part through an open space sales tax similar to Boulder County's tax.
Patricia Holloway, a Jefferson County Commissioner, said she was surprised when she learned of Stewart's appointment as open space director.
"I thought that probably it was a conflict of interest," she said. "When you're a three-member board, and it takes two members of the board to make a decision and one is already open space director, are you going to have a fair representation?"
Holloway said most counties do not have the luxury of an open space department, but she has not heard of a similar dual-role arrangement elsewhere.
"To me, with an open space department the size of ours, it's a huge undertaking," Holloway said. "It requires a full-time director to oversee that department."
Stewart, a Democrat, can run for a final term in 2000, but he has said he will not decide until next year whether he will compete.
His critics openly speculate that he could resign his commissioner post either before or shortly after the November 2000 election. Such a move would allow the Democratic Party to appoint a successor, who could garner name recognition before the next election, and potentially allow Stewart to remain as open-space chief.
"He's using this as a way to further his power and not have to deal with the elections," Chamberlin said.
But Stewart insisted he is not looking that far into the future. And he said that despite the criticism, he is not factoring elections into his new role as commissioner and department head.
"I'm not really looking at it in any of those terms," Stewart said. "I intend to do this as long as I feel I can do it and as long as my colleagues feel I can do it."
June 21, 1999
Copyright © 1999 The Daily Camera.
Reprinted with permission.
For more information contact the Land Use Coalition at info@landusecoalition.org or call 303-666-7903.
Last updated June 04, 2001.
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