Now is the right time to maximize county efficiency
The appointment of Kern County Planning Director Ted James as interim chief of the Resource Management Agency, an umbrella organization that includes a half-dozen county government departments, makes sense. James knows the territory as well as any single person.
But it may make even more sense to send James back to his previous (and concurrent) job in the planning department. Why? Because Kern County government might not even need a Resource Management Agency -- perhaps not as it's presently configured, and perhaps not at all.
The recent retirement of RMA director David Price, coupled with a recession-driven (and presumably temporary) decline in the pace of development, presents county government with a logical opportunity to reconsider the RMA's structure and approach to the business of regulation and growth management.
"We've got a number of options," said Kern County Supervisor Mike Maggard, who, along with James and fellow Supervisor Ray Watson, has embarked on the reorganization study. "The RMA could stay the same, it could go away or parts of it could be folded in to something else."
Among the questions they'll ask: Does it makes sense to keep the RMA's various departments -- planning, roads, environmental health, animal control and engineering among them -- under the same roof?
Probably not, at least in some cases. But some of those departments can and should continue to work closely together.
"Take the plans for a road," Maggard said. "One group designs the road, one builds the road, but they don't necessarily work together to inspect the road. Should they? Should we be assigning a (cross-departmental) team to each project, and that team travels with that project? Is that the better model?"
Cost savings will be an important consideration, but efficiency will be just as important, if not more so.
"What if we find a way to increase accountability but it costs a little more?" Maggard said. "What then? That's the conundrum."
The research team will spend time looking at other counties in order to develop a new model. The new RMA -- or more specifically, the development regulatory division of county government -- will undoubtedly be a hybrid of other counties' approaches that is unique to the needs, priorities and resources of Kern County.
Everyone concerned seems fully cognizant of the fact that Sacramento's problems will have impacts on whatever the county decides to do.
"We're watching what's happening at the state level, because they're going to have a shortfall next year and that translates to the county level," said James, who was picked from a pool of five candidates, all of them county department heads. "We've also got new legislation dealing with climate change and future growth that crosses a lot of department lines.
"And now is the best window of opportunity to look at how we can restructure ourselves," James said.
The county's self-imposed deadline is mid-December. Ideas? Write to your county supervisor. We have every right to expect county government to maximum all possible efficiencies. From the sound of it, county government expects it, too.
