The Clark County Charter—a Quest for Utopia or Inevitable Fiasco?

(This article was originally published on the Freedom Foundation blog on October 8, 2014, written by Glen Morgan, while he was the Property Rights Director at the Freedom Foundation.  The original article posting was deleted by the Freedom Foundation in 2017.  It has been reposted here exactly as it was originally written)
“Unfortunately, the charter option for counties is rarely the solution that original supporters desire it to become. The grass is not always greener on the other side.”

Utopia does not exist anywhere on earth. However, the quest for perfection in government will never end.

One path towards “better” local government is for a county to create a charter to restructure local operations differently from the original county commission model outlined in the Washington State Constitution (Article XI). The voters in Clark County have an opportunity to decide this November if they want to go down the well-trod Home Rule Charter County path (Amendment 21—approved November 2, 1948).

Of the 39 counties in Washington State, six have chosen to experience the county charter process. These include King, Snohomish, Pierce, Whatcom, San Juan, and Clallam counties. Several others, including Clark (three times before), Jefferson, Spokane and Thurston have explored but rejected the process in the past.
A variety of justifications are used to create charter counties, and they can be summarized as follows:

  • “Our county is just too big and complex to be run by three full-time commissioners and the other elected officials. We need a larger number of elected officials to be involved.”
  • “Our county always elect (fill in blank with political party you don’t like). If we expand the number of council members, some of our party-supported politicians can be elected.”
  • “If only we restructured our government, the government would start to function more efficiently, with less debt.”
  • Another rarely stated justification, but a motivator for key supporters of most charter efforts, is, “If we turn our county into a charter county it will make it easier for me to be elected, or have a job in a newly structured government.”

First, let’s look at the Clark County Charter as it has been proposed here. You can see the supporters’ website here, and the opponents’ website here. There are several problems with the Clark County charter, but generally they are not new to anyone who has looked at other charter counties in Washington State.

Here are some obvious issues to consider first.

  •  Anyone who claims a charter county will become more efficient or incur less debt isn’t paying attention to what’s happened elsewhere in Washington. With the one exception of Clallam County, every charter county has more debt than ever before, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any observer who claims any of these charter counties are freer. See our “Freedom in 39 Counties” reports here to see how four of these six counties fail miserably on property rights, and how two of the three counties that get a failing grade in our “Budget and Taxes Report” are charter counties. Clallam County bucked this trend, but the other five counties achieved more debt, higher taxes and even more regulation.
  •  One key glaring problem with the Clark County charter as it was drafted is the shift of power almost exclusively to an unelected bureaucracy in a very dramatic fashion. This has been a growing problem in government at all levels, but the problem would be made much worse under the proposed changes to Clark County. Turning over the power of government to an unelected county executive with almost zero effective oversight by the part-time elected officials is not a recipe for more responsive government. It’s just the opposite. On the other hand, for people who believe in the unending purity and good intentions of unaccountable bureaucracies, this is probably a positive. For everyone else, it is a major red flag.
  • The Clark County charter assumes elected council members work only part-time, which also means they’re less likely to have their full attention on their jobs as elected officials. It’s easy enough for elected officials on school boards and city councils to become rubber stamps of the bureaucracy already. At the county level, this guarantees a negative result for voter accountability. Clark County is a large enough county to justify full-time elected officials who could theoretically attempt to rein in bureaucracy. As rare as this may happen, at least it could be possible. In the charter structure proposed, it is far less possible or likely.
  • The Clark County charter promises to bring local initiatives to Clark County. However, as we’ve written about this subject here, this has proven to be a false promise. There is no reason to believe that a future Clark County Council will be any friendlier towards local voters who bring local initiatives to them than any other elected officials in Washington State.

    If the Charter Passes, Clark County may need to remove the paddle from their logo

There’s no doubt supporters of the proposed charter are inspired by the hope that a new structure to local government will usher in a new, positive era in Clark County. However, the experiences of other counties around the state that have gone down this road should cause some supporters to rethink their positions.

However, based on these same observations, some people may still support the Clark County charter, and these reasons might include the following:

  • A desire for a bigger, less responsive bureaucracy.
  • A desire for more taxes, more fees, more regulation, and probably increasing public debt.
  • A desire for more politicians who are figureheads, but who can use this “experience” to justify running for the Legislature or higher offices in the future.
  • Anger at existing Clark County commissioners and a desire to “show them.”

Otherwise, if you generally oppose these things, you may not wish to support the Clark County charter. Irrespective of the choice voters make in November, the desire to achieve political Utopia in our time will always be with us, and it is a good exercise to review why we have the local government structure that already exists.

For example, San Juan County was the most recent county to travel the Home Rule Charter path. Residents there created a six-county council member structure (the only county we could find with an even number of elected officials—how do you break a tie?). The supporters of the charter in San Juan County made many of the same promises being made by current charter supporters in Clark County.

So, San Juan County recently changed its charter and went back to three county council members. San Juan County debt skyrocketed since the charter was implemented, regulations have exploded and taxes/fees have generally trended higher far out of proportion to their population growth. The promises of the original charter supporters were never realized.

At the end of the day, if you don’t like how your local government is functioning, it’s best to get involved in the political process, support the candidates you think will do the best job and maintain contact with them once they’re in office so you can give them feedback.

It’s only when we fail to do this, or when this process appears too daunting, that we look for easier paths to fix local problems. Unfortunately, the charter option is rarely the solution that original supporters desire it to become. The grass is not always greener on the other side when you get there. Sometimes it is best to just fix the problems you think you have in your local government first.

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