All it takes is a drive from tiny Sarpy County (241 square miles) across Nebraska to Cherry County (5,961 square miles, slightly larger than Connecticut) to see there's no such thing as one-size-fits-all when it comes to Nebraska's counties.
That doesn't just go for the size of those counties; it goes for the size of their boards, too.
Stand before the county board in Hall, Buffalo or Adams County, and you'll face seven people.
Head east to Hamilton County, and you'll see just three.
That could change next month, when Hamilton County residents vote on whether to increase their board's size to five members.
Jack Payne of Aurora, who initiated the petition to put the issue on the ballot, said his experience on the six-member Aurora City Council led him to believe a larger board would be better.
The council does much of its work in committees, and Payne said that, after those committees have hashed through a proposal's details, it makes for much cleaner, more efficient work in the council's public meetings.
"I don't believe you should wash your dirty laundry in front of the public," Payne said. "At least get the mud out of it first."
The change would be the same one Howard County went through after a 2000 vote.
One member of the three-person county board of commissioners had his re-election bid defeated in a primary and simply stopped showing up to most county board meetings, said Marge Palmberg, Howard County clerk.
That raised the ire of citizens already unhappy with the county's spending power concentrated into the hands of three people, Palmberg said.
"I think people felt two people were making decisions for the whole county," she said.
After the initiative passed, two new board members were appointed by the county clerk, treasurer and attorney, as required by law. Still, there was quite a bit of concern among county employees over the difficulty of finding room for five opinions, rather than just three.
"When you have three people trying to agree or disagree and then you expand it to five, you think, ’Oh, gosh …'" Palmberg said. "But in our case, it's worked out well."
She said the board's expansion has added new perspectives that aren't always in agreement but help enhance the board's understanding of issues.
Still, 53 of the state's 93 counties have three-member boards, and many are quite happy with the arrangement.
Tom Schuele of Cedar Rapids, a member of the three-person Boone County Board of Commissioners since 2006, said that with three board members, there's little room for disagreements over protecting special interests or factions within the county.
"This way, you realize you're working for the good of the whole county," Schuele said. "If you get very territorial, you're going to be a minority of one all the time."
There's also the cost issue. The vast majority of the state's county board members are paid a salary and benefits (a total package valued at about $38,000, in Hamilton County's case), and a larger board means a higher payroll.
Payne acknowledged that concern, but he argues that the Hamilton County board members will likely vote to decrease their salary and benefits packages because the job will entail less work.
Both Schuele and Jerry Hoegh, chairman of the Hamilton County Board of Commissioners, said a larger board would certainly lighten the load for commissioners.
But, they both said, the more people a board has, the more difficult it is to get issues resolved.
Another of the arguments of proponents of large boards is not about what goes on at meetings but what happens outside of them. As soon as two members of the board are together, they risk forming a quorum, putting the state's Open Meetings Act into effect.
Hoegh said the board hasn't had the problem of being tempted to discuss county issues when they run into each other outside of meetings, but the problem still exists in the public's perception.
At most home high school football games, for example, there's a quorum present in the stands.
"We make a point not to sit together," said Hoegh, who said he's neutral on the initiative.
But Payne said it's naive to assume that a three-person board isn't forming quorums outside of meetings, inadvertently or not.
"When you put two people together that have that connection, they're going to talk," he said. "That's human nature to do that."
Most county board sizes are determined by whether a county has a commissioner or supervisor (township) form of government, said Larry Dix, executive director of the Nebraska Association of County Officials.
The state's 27 county boards of supervisors must have seven members, while boards of commissioners can have three, five or, thanks to a recent change in state law, seven members.
Three counties have increased the sizes of their boards in the past 10 years, Dix said. The last county to decrease the size of its board was Sherman County, when it went from seven to three in 1987.
The number of commissioner and supervisor structures has remained about the same since the early 1900s, Dix said, and it's difficult to find correlations between a county's size or situation and the size of its board.
In other words, it's not even a one-size-fits-most.
"It's a very local issue as to what size and style and form of government they want," Dix said.
AREA COUNTIES' BOARDS
Central Nebraska's counties are closely split in their county government structures, but in general, its larger counties have larger boards and supervisor formats.
- County, 2005 population, County board members, Format (C = commissioners, S = supervisors/township)
- Adams 33,070 7 S
- Boone 5,772 3 C
- Buffalo 43,572 7 S
- Custer 11,410 7 S
- Garfield 1.816 3 C
- Greeley 2,512 3 C
- Hall 55,104 7 S
- Hamilton 9,568 3 C
- Howard 6,708 5 C
- Loup 686 3 C
- Merrick 8,066 7 S
- Nance 3,666 7 S
- Polk 5,421 3 C
- Sherman 3,112 3 C
- Valley 4,402 7 S
- Wheeler 820 3 C
Source: U.S. Census data, Nebraska Association of County Officials
