Former DougCo Commissioners: Douglas County should increase number of commissioners
Selected excerpts from the full article.
As three former Douglas County commissioners, we endorse the citizen-led initiative to expand Douglas County’s Board of County Commissioners from three members to five. Three ballot questions on the Douglas County ballot address the board’s expansion.
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Our terms as Douglas County commissioners spanned most of the past 30 years. We have all lived in Douglas County for decades and have watched the county grow and change rapidly during that time. When former Commissioner James Clark Huff took office in 1987, the population of Douglas County was about 45,000 residents. Today the county is nearly 10 times that size at 400,000 residents.
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Over time, the number of committees and boards the county commissioners cover has increased to more than 60. The current board is stretched so thin by those responsibilities that their absences have caused at least two meetings to be canceled for lack of a quorum in the past few months — one for the Douglas County Board of Health (two commissioners sit on that board) and another for the Board of County Commissioners itself.
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As the county has grown, so has its budget. The total budget for the county has grown from $346 million in 2016 to $768 million in 2026. With three commissioners on the board, it takes only two votes to make decisions about how to allocate all the county’s tax dollars.
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Despite the questionable behavior of the three current commissioners, we want to emphasize the time has come for this structural change to Douglas County’s government no matter who is sitting in those seats currently. Douglas County has grown, and like other large counties before us, our local government structure should change to reflect the greater complexity inherent in the governance of a county whose next growth milestones are a half-million population and a $1 billion budget.
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