By Mike Morrissey
Valley City, N.D.

Well, the fellas and gals at CCI have done it again. They have caused me to crawl out from under my rock where I have been content to contemplate the coming of spring. I require a critical mass of stupidity before I am sufficiently motivated to respond to their bloviation.
    CCI’s stance on the city administrator position and their petition reaches that critical mass. Apparently these folks (no name/s attached to their now-occasional Friday viewpoint column) have minimal understanding of how elected boards, commissions, committees and other such public policy-making entities function. Duly elected groups, whether they be school boards, city commissions, state boards, hospital boards, library boards, or university boards and the like are elected to make policy, not be in charge of the day to day operation of the organization. That function belongs to the hired administrator…one who has both professional training and some practical experience.
    The notion that someone who is elected to a board or a commission suddenly becomes, by “vote anointment,” capable of making operational decisions is fatuous. In fact, the best board members/commissioners are the ones who study the options, contribute their input, and vote at the calendar meetings and then leave the operation, administration, and evaluation of employees to the salaried professional.
    But the CCI wizards see the professional administrator as getting in their way. They want no one in particular to be in charge…the easier to harass, challenge, and obfuscate. (i.e. the recent charges that a city commissioner had caused storm sewer districts to be gerrymandered around his property to avoid assessment…and then the profuse apology from the accuser that followed, regrettably not available to home TV viewers.)
    Also with no one in charge there would have been no discovery by a professional of the absurdly inequitable property assessment situation that Mr. Johnson inherited in Valley City when he was hired. And no opportunity to correct it. (Remember folks, this noise is all about the Vangard assessment and the end of the free lunch for some folks whose property values had not been raised in years.)
    Of course the Chief of Police didn’t respond to email concerning police matters. He passed on the information to the city’s executive officer, the guy responsible for making sure that all facets of city government work properly. That is the person employees and department heads report to, and are evaluated by, or at least that is the way it ought to be. And when the mayor, or other of the city commissioners get concerns, comments, or questions about matters of city government, they should thank the inquiring citizen and pass the information on to the administrator for study and possibly action. That is how professionals do it.
    CCI liked it the old way, when assessments were out of whack, when Public Works, under a former director, lacked accountability, and when it was difficult to get a straight answer out of employees at city hall. In those good old days, there was little enforcement of building codes, and anything, as they say, went.
    The use of the petition process to put an initiative as senseless as the one described in the CCI article is a perversion of the process. It is analogous to the State Board of Higher Education operating without a chancellor, Mercy Hospital eliminating its CEO, the Valley City Public School Board deciding to eliminate the superintendent’s position, or the Cass County Fair Board operating without an executive. Oh, and yeah, VCSU doesn’t need a president…let’s let the department heads get together for lunch monthly and run the operation. It’s just plain dumb.         But it certainly would serve the lofty goals of CCI. Let’s see now…these guys are for community progress….Aren’t they? By the way, I didn’t see any signature on that letter. Was that letter written by their CEO? Or by a dysfunctional board? And did the Times-Record change its policy on requiring the signature of letter writers? Oh well, back under my rock; spring isn’t quite here yet.

Editor’s note: Indeed, the Times-Record does have a policy requiring the names of letter-writers. Authorship of CCI’s opinion column is credited to the group’s media contact, Keith Colville of Valley City. His name was inadvertently omitted from the tagline that followed the April 11 column.