Does Iowa need 99 counties?

Len Hadley thinks not. But good luck to him on getting it changed.

Hadley, retired CEO of Maytag, has been pushing for county consolidation for years, and met with the Gazette editorial board this morning to once again make the case.

He makes a convincing argument.

Iowa has 99 counties, many of which have fewer than 4,000 property tax-paying households. Each has its own board of supervisors, auditor, treasurer, sheriff, recorder, attorney, and associated staff and department.

The counties are a relic of the days when people drove to town in a horse and buggy. Each county seat was situated within a day's round-trip travel distance from the farthest reaches of the county. Hadley proposes that counties be consolidated so that each county seat is no more than a 45 minute drive from the borders of the county. (Definitely an improvement over horse and buggy days, but not an improvement now.)

He argues that consolidation would save money, and hopes that the current economic crisis will be the catalyst for this issue to get traction at the state legislature -- something it's never gotten.

Hadley takes for instance the four counties in northeast Iowa -- Winneshiek, Allamakee, Fayette and Clayton. Together, the four counties have about the same population as Dubuque County, but the payroll for their elected officials -- the supervisors, auditors, treasurers, county attorneys, sheriffs and recorders -- is $1 million more than the payroll for those elected offices in Dubuque County. That's what Hadley said. It's a little bit of a research project, so I won't get to it today, but I'll take his word for it.

Fayette County, to take one example, has a population of roughly 20,000 and an annual budget of $15.8 million. Typically, about half of a county's budget is paid for with property taxes.

So if you split $1 million in savings four ways, Fayette County would get $250,000 in savings just on elected officials' salaries. That would be about a 3 percent break in property taxes for the landowners of Fayette County. Another research project would be to figure out how much could be saved by combining engineering offices, and sheriff's departments, and planning and zoning and everything else.

Yes, a whole bunch of government jobs would be lost, and yes, the county seats of Decorah, West Union, Waukon and Elkader might not carry the same clout, and we can argue all day long about whether a super-county would serve the public as well as the counties do today, but one thing is true: County consolidation would cut property taxes.