Val Torrens wrote about governmental accountability, effectiveness and efficiency and the local residents’ enthusiasm in pursuing this matter in a column appearing in the Dec. 5 issue of the CK Reporter. In order to have a meaningful discussion on this subject, Kitsap County’s current commission form of government must be changed to a council/manager type of government, otherwise, any effort to accomplish anything will be an exercise in futility.

A commission form of government is where commissioners play a dual role as legislators and executives of the departments assigned to them. They are supposed to implement the very same policies they have formulated and nothing could be more self-serving. Checks and balances are inapplicable in this arrangement. Commissioners are politicians and do not possess the professional qualifications to manage the department they are assigned to be the heads of. In order to keep their jobs, department heads at times are compelled to subordinate their professional judgments to the whims and caprices of these commissioners. For example, unless the commissioner is a qualified engineer himself, the county engineer must sacrifice sound engineering judgments to please the commissioner designated to head the engineering department. Apply this condition to all the other departments and you have an idea of the quality of services rendered to the public.

The commission form of government may have worked well during the “horse and buggy days” but Kitsap County has grown to the point where the model for effective and efficient governance is the corporation where you have a board of directors that formulate policies and a CEO responsible for its implementation, which is what the council/manager form of government does. Department heads are solely accountable to the CEO and concentrate on doing a good job without the political interference that could affect their job performance. The CEO, in turn, is answerable to the board of directors (or council) for the performance of the department heads under him.

These observations are the results of having spent the first half of a six-year career as city engineer of a city in New Jersey four times the size of Bremerton under a commission form and the latter half under the council/manager form of government. The local residents have been educated enough to recognize the need to change the commission to council/manager form by referendum if the government is to be more responsive to their needs.

One clear measurement of a government’s effectiveness is its efficiency in responding to citizens’ complaints or concerns that affect their safety and quality of life. During a public session of the Central Kitsap Community Council, of which I was a member in 2001, a resident along Tracyton Boulevard complained that his concerns on traffic safety in his neighborhood remained unheeded for months. In response, I submitted a set of recommendations outlining a procedure on a proper response to citizens’ complaints. This was patterned after the same method applied in the municipality I retired from as city engineer and has proved to be successful, resulting in public satisfaction and leading the award to the city manager as the Most Outstanding City Manager for the State of New Jersey. Among the salient features of these recommendations are

• Citizen complaints and response status to be a boiler-plate item in the agenda for regular scheduled meetings of the board of commissioners.

• Department heads’ performance evaluation to include efficiency in responses to public complaints to be expressed in a ratio of complaints resolved to complaints received.

On the basis of the foregoing, the commissioners are to evaluate themselves on their performance on the standards they themselves set. Realistically, this will not happen and this explains why my recommendations remain languishing in the commissioners’ files.

Yes, the need to change Kitsap County’s current commission form of government to the council/manager type is long overdue and unless county residents are informed and educated enough to see through the fog of special interests with hidden agendas, all efforts and discussions on government reform will be an exercise in futility.

NOEL C. SIM, PE

Bremerton