Linn County supervisors say they want 2 more colleagues

CEDAR RAPIDS — If it were up to only the three Linn County supervisors, they say they would like to have two more supervisors on the board.

In Linn County, the number of members on the Board of Supervisors has changed twice in the last two decades. It increased from three to five elected board members in 2006, and decreased back down to three in 2016.

Both changes were brought on by voter-led petitions. The first one was driven by the Iowa Farm Bureau and rural residents to make sure rural areas of the county had better representation. The latter was a petition driven by some rural residents who were unhappy with the supervisors’ salaries — which had just crossed the $100,000 a year mark — and sought to send a signal about county government spending by cutting the board down.

Dave Machacek, a retired farmer in Alburnett, was one of the individuals who drove the initial change from three to five.

“We worked really hard to get five supervisors because the rural area always felt like the odd man out,” Machacek said. “Going back to three was a terrible loss to Linn County. Having Louie Zumbach is rural, but he’s still one voice of three.”

The current supervisors — Ben Rogers and Stacey Walker, both Democrats, and Louie Zumbach, a Republican — agree that having two more supervisors would best serve the county of more than a quarter of a million residents.

When Zumbach, a former state lawmaker, ran for election in 2020, he questioned the supervisors’ salaries and work they do. Since being in office, he’s changed his mind.

“I think it was the biggest mistake Linn County voters made, cutting us down to three,” Zumbach said.

Linn County supervisors currently earn $119,198 a year. In Polk County, the state’s largest county, the five supervisors earn $130,214, according to the Iowa Association of Counties. In Johnson County, the state’s fourth largest county, the five supervisors earn $87,168.

All three Linn County supervisors said the biggest issue of having only three board members is they can’t talk about policy outside of supervisor meetings without violating Iowa’s open meeting law — because even a one-on-one conversation would be a quorum, which is prohibited.

On a five-member board, supervisors could chat to each other one-on-one about policy and help each other mold ideas, Rogers said. A quorum for a five-member board would be three.

Rogers, who has been on the board since elected in 2008, was initially on the five-member board, so he has experienced county government both ways.

“Two of us could sit in my office and say help each other understand where we were coming from or pick apart issues and find solutions and discuss it,” Rogers said. “Now sometimes, you start chipping away at a rock, but you don’t know which statue you’re building.”

Zumbach, who previously was a member of the Iowa House, said it’s much harder at the county level to talk with colleagues than it was during his time in the Legislature.

“Everything has to be in the open and nobody is trying to hide anything, but ideas need to be formed and punted around,” Zumbach said. “You might think you have the best idea in the world and maybe you don’t realize that your solution has created four more problems you need to think about.”

The same holds true when talking with other governments. Marion Mayor Nick AbouAssaly said whenever the city has to meet or talk with the county, it usually connects with just the board chair.

Walker, who was elected in 2016, said not being able to talk with his colleagues outside of meetings makes the job extremely challenging at times.

“We deal with detailed policy and I used to be able to talk with colleagues in the office and try to understand where they’re coming from. You obviously can’t do that anymore and we don’t mess around. I’m not trying to be accused of violating open meetings law,” Walker said. “I think there could be the perception that sometimes we are finding our way through the dark and in some respects that’s true. But we do the readings, we meet with our staff.”

All three supervisors said taking on the Coggon Solar project, for instance, over the past few months was challenging with only three members for the reasons they stated. Rogers said that during the 2020 derecho, the supervisors appointed the county’s risk manager as the incident commander to delegate certain decisions since supervisors had to speak to each other to get a handle on response and recovery.

Across the state, many counties’ boards of supervisors also only have three members. But all of them have less than half of Linn County’s population. The other top-five largest counties in the state (Linn is second) have five supervisors: Polk, Scott, Johnson and Black Hawk.

The majority of three-supervisor counties have less than 20,000 residents. Dallas, Dubuque and Story counties still have less than half of Linn’s population, at around 99,000 residents each.

Johnson County Supervisor Jon Green said he couldn’t imagine doing the work of a supervisor with only two other colleagues.

“First of all, there is a hell of a lot of work to do and I feel like we're all pretty busy with there being five of us. We would be struggling with less,” Green said. “I do not envy them for the position they are in in Linn County.”

In addition to their board meetings, supervisors sit on various other boards and committees, like the Solid Waste Agency and the Public Health Board. In Linn County, supervisors split up around 30 various committee assignments between the three of them. Johnson County splits over 50 assignments between five supervisors. In both cases, that comes to an average of 10 assignments per supervisor.

Looking at some of the larger assignments’ attendance records, all three Linn County supervisors rarely missed committee meetings. Rogers and Zumbach missed only a couple Solid Waste Agency meetings in 2021 and had similar attendance as their city colleagues on the same board, and Walker didn’t miss a public health meeting in the past year.

Former Linn County Supervisors Linda Langston and Brent Oleson also echoed their former supervisor colleagues on the difficulties of the job with three board members.

“With three, all you ever need is one other person, so if two people are similar, you’ll be able to get done anything you want,” Oleson said. “Without a doubt, there needs to be five.”

“There’s only so many hours in a day. It gets demoralizing when you go home everyday and you look at your list of things you didn’t get done,” Langston said. “When you’re on a three-member board, there’s too much. That being said, I think the guys who went out and moved us back to three, I would tell you they are idiots.”

Salaries part of the issue

Rogers and Walker argue that to bring in qualified talent that is willing to put in the hours to do the job, there has to be a competitive salary with similar roles in the private sector.

Zumbach, on the other hand, said he would be willing to take a pay cut to have more supervisors on the board.

“You want people who are serious about the job and are serious about leading, governing and managing here and leave their private sector jobs,” Rogers said. “Our salaries are a fraction of a fraction of our $150 million budget. … I also think being so public requires a salary where people would be willing to give up their privacy to do this.”

Added Zumbach: “But now I would say no doubt that having five supervisors is more important than the pay they receive and I wouldn’t have said that before being elected.”

The petition to bring the number of supervisors down to three was driven by voters from the Coggon area. Kevin Kula, who lived in Coggon but has since moved to Arkansas, led the petition, standing outside of the Jean Oxley Building and gathering signatures for months on end.

“People would ask me why I was doing it because my plan was always to retire and move down to Arkansas, but I wanted to save county money,” Kula said. “I started it and I was going to finish it. There’s such a waste in government all over the country, but nobody wants to do anything about it I guess.”

Kula said it took them over a year to gather the thousands of signatures needed.

“It took us a while. It was pretty interesting because a lot of people didn't realize how much supervisors were actually making,” Kula said.

Marion business owner Tim Gull ran for Linn supervisor in 2016, making part of his platform a concern the supervisors were making too much money and had no accountability for time they spent on the job.

“I wanted to save taxpayers by reducing the amount of supervisors from five to three,” Gull said. “I didn’t get elected, but the supervisors were reduced. So I lost the battle but won the war.”

Rogers said that more rural representation would have helped concerned rural residents during the Coggon Solar project process that went through the county over the last few months.

“The irony of all ironies was that people from Coggon started the petition drive and it just so happens that a company wanted to place a 750-acre solar farm in Coggon,” Rogers said. “It was never brought up during the solar meetings, but you get the government you elect and if you’re a rural resident, you want five members. You get an additional seat at the table that way.”

Changing the board

There are multiple ways a county could change the number of supervisors. A voter-led petition could be used to increase the number, but to do that the number of signatures needed must be equal to at least 10 percent of the votes cast in the county for president or governor in the preceding general election.

In 2020, the number of votes cast in Linn County for the presidential race was 127,458, so the signatures required to get the question on the ballot would be almost 13,000.

Another way to change the number of supervisors in any county is for the Iowa Legislature to do it. There have been some talk of mandating supervisor boards to have five members in counties with populations over 60,000. Currently, the only bill in the Legislature regarding county governments would require establishing districts instead of at-large seats for counties of that size.

Lastly, the supervisors themselves could place a question to change the board’s number to the ballot.

Rogers said he would prefer any changes to come from voters.

“If the community wants five again, I do think that’s the sweet spot,” Rogers said. “There has been talk of the Legislature requiring five members, but I think that goes around the will of the people. It’s a community decision. If you want three, you get the government you elect and we adapt as an organization.”

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