San Benito County has had a clerk/registrar/auditor since 1874,
the year it was carved out of Monterey County. Times have changed.
County government, at least in this respect, has not.
John Hodges, the occupant of that office since 1982, thinks it’s
time to split the job into at least two parts, with the auditor job
being separate.
San Benito County has had a clerk/registrar/auditor since 1874, the year it was carved out of Monterey County. Times have changed. County government, at least in this respect, has not.
John Hodges, the occupant of that office since 1982, thinks it’s time to split the job into at least two parts, with the auditor job being separate.
He may be right.
In some ways reality overtook the job long ago. Hodges, by his own admission, is not a qualified auditor, and those duties have largely been handled by Finance Director Dan Vrtis.
According to the California State Association of Counties, there are about as many ways to organize these jobs as there are counties. That’s to be expected. Why would Los Angeles and San Benito counties do things the same way, given the vast differences in their demographics?
One organizational scheme that seems to pop up often in counties similar in size and character to San Benito is to separate jobs of auditor/controller from clerk/registrar, as Hodges is suggesting.
Yolo County, to which we are often compared because of our rural characteristics and proximity to a larger population, does it this way. A clerk’s responsibilities for documents like marriage licenses and birth and death certificates seem to fit with registering voters.
But in a small county like San Benito, whether the duties of those jobs are demanding enough to constitute full-time separate jobs is a question without an obvious answer.
Hodges gets credit for asking that question, and maybe it should have been posed a long time ago. But the answer can surely only be arrived at through a careful analysis – especially if it is a question that will only be taken up every 130 years.
Separately, there is the question of which, if any, of these positions should be elected and which appointed. Some officials, no doubt as a result of problems in the Elections Office having to do with accusations of double voting, allowing people to cast absentee ballots for others and a failure to comply with federal standards to accommodate non-English speaking voters, want to have an appointed registrar of voters.
Since no one really knows what will work best, we encourage the county administrative officer Susan Thompson to conduct a management audit and make a recommendation on the optimum division of labor, staffing and salary levels. They should look at the experience of other counties for clues as to what would work best here. And, of course, they should look at what combination of work will be the most fiscally prudent and effective for San Benito County.
This is a worthy study for a growing county that hasn’t changed this position in more than a century.
