EDITORIAL: Special districts could use more transparency, but not new bosses

Posted 10/20/16

Beyond the Legislature, Park County government, Powell City Council, school district, Powell Valley Hospital and Northwest College lie a slew of lesser known special districts. The Powell area, for example, is served by a fire, cemetery, weed and …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

E-mail
Password
Log in

EDITORIAL: Special districts could use more transparency, but not new bosses

Posted

For even the most ambitious citizens and media outlets, it’s nearly impossible to keep tabs on every single arm of local government.

Beyond the Legislature, Park County government, Powell City Council, school district, Powell Valley Hospital and Northwest College lie a slew of lesser known special districts. The Powell area, for example, is served by a fire, cemetery, weed and pest and conservation district.

They’re all governed by volunteers that you elect every four years — and they all collect varying amounts of taxes from you.

A task force set up by the Wyoming Legislature has spent this year looking at ways those districts might be made a little more transparent and accountable.

We understand why lawmakers — apparently prodded by concerns from county commissioners around the state — are taking a closer look at special districts.

Most district leaders are doing commendable and thankless jobs, but the fact is that no one is really watching many of these tax-collecting entities. District leaders generally conduct their business at meetings attended only by themselves and their staff — assuming they even have any staff — and their records aren’t always readily available to the public.

Lawmakers made a great decision a couple years ago to require special districts’ budgets to be posted on their county’s website. You can inspect every district’s spending by visiting Park County’s site or punching www.tinyurl.com/PCSpecialDistricts into your

browser.

The task force has been exploring the idea of going a little further — considering a draft bill that would require districts to have their minutes and other basic documents available for either a certain number of hours per week or available at the county clerk’s office.

We like that concept, but lawmakers must be cautious not to overburden special districts — which are, again, generally powered by selfless volunteers — with extra regulations.

Several years ago, Park County commissioners asked the Wyoming Attorney General if they could cut the budgets of certain special districts that they believed were spending or saving up too much money; commissioners said they’d heard some complaints from

citizens.

The attorney general explained that, while commissioners are required to give a rubber stamp to the districts’ budgets, they can’t really say no under the state’s current laws. That helped restart this discussion about whether the rules should be tweaked.

Giving commissioners more oversight of districts’ budgets was one of the ideas batted around by the task force; one proposal would have allowed commissioners to call in any district for a “prehearing” before their budget could be approved.

However, we don’t see the sense in trying to set up county commissioners as some kind of “super officials” with the power to override the decisions of a special district. Let’s remember that those districts are led by citizens elected by voters — the same voters who elect county commissioners.

It is worth looking at possible changes, but the best and most effective way to keep special districts transparent and accountable is a public that’s paying

attention.

If you don’t like something about a district, you should take your complaint to their elected board. If you don’t like how your representatives handle your complaint, maybe you should consider running for office.

In the end, special districts don’t need a new set of overseers, but the public could use some more tools to help take on that role.

Comments