The Marin County Civil Grand Jury is doing its job pointing out ways local government can operate better and more efficiently when it comes to taxpayer cost.
It comes as no surprise that the 2017-18 grand jury focused on Marin’s many local sanitary districts and called for regional consolidations.
That same recommendation has been raised, studied, recommended and rejected before; most recently in 2013, when Southern Marin voters rejected a proposal to consolidate sanitary districts that serve the area.
But the grand jury raised the issue to echo the state Little Hoover Commission’s findings that California has too many special districts and many operate with little public oversight or participation.
The districts are mostly protected by the political rallying cry of local control, that the best government is small and closer to the people it serves.
It was that argument that submarined the ballot measure to consolidate Southern Marin’s sewer districts. Board members — often longtime incumbents whose re-election has rarely gone challenged — campaigned against the proposed reform.
Local officials wouldn’t risk their political capital to actually campaign for consolidation. It showed that winning voter approval of consolidation would take more than a bunch of bureaucratic studies and a measure on the ballot.
A proposal that several sewer districts — Ross Valley, San Rafael, Larkspur, Corte Madera, Murray Park and San Quentin Village — reorganize as a single entity with the Central Marin Sanitation Agency, which runs the sewer plant that the local lines run to, has been studied at length before, generating lawsuits and political power struggles, but no consolidation.
The 2013 measure would have merged the Alto, Almonte, Homestead Valley, Richardson Bay and Mill Valley sewer systems into a single agency. The directors of the small agencies campaigned against the measure and prevailed.
So, where will this grand jury’s recommendation go?
The grand jury is recommending that the county bolster its funding of the Marin Local Agency Formation Commission, a little-known agency that is supposed to focus on redrawing jurisdictional lines in ways that make sense in today’s geography and budgets.
LAFCO has studied this issue before and come up with the same recommendations.
Better funding of LAFCO could improve the odds that its recommendations could become reality, the grand jury says.
Increased staffing of an agency isn’t going to build the political will and mettle needed to make consolidations happen.
Maybe members of the grand jury, upon the end of their terms, should stay involved in the issue. Public involvement is the best way to build political will and alter the history of previous recommendations.
Until then, spending public time and money on proposals that make sense, but lack local leadership, will just add to the piles of consultant studies and staff reports that have already been devoted to this issue.
April 26, 2018
Marin Independent Journal
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