Freeholders Get More Money To Finish Up

Spokane County freeholders say they need more money to finish their quest for more efficient local government.

County commissioners reluctantly agreed Tuesday to give the group another $10,000. Freeholders, who work without pay, already have spent $200,000.

“In my opinion, we ought to say, ‘Here’s this, but don’t come back for more,”’ said Commissioner Skip Chilberg, a supporter of the freeholder process.

Commissioner Steve Hasson, who has not cooperated with freeholders in their study of local government, said he is “tired of waiting for results.”

Elected in November 1992, freeholders said they thought they could study local government and write a proposed charter - in effect, a local constitution - in less than two years. They expected to spend about $100,000.

“It would be nice to return some of that money to the county,” freeholders’ chairwoman Judi Williams said when commissioners approved that first sum.

But the work has required much more time and money than expected. Freeholders went back to commissioners in July 1994 to ask for their second $100,000.

Much of the freeholders’ money was spent on postage, copies, other office costs and secretarial wages.

Other big expenses include:

$13,000 for research to determine that most county residents had forgotten about the freeholders a year after they had been elected.

$14,600 for a consultant to study the cost of consolidation.

$17,000 for a technical writer to draft the proposed charters.

$53,000 for a Western Washington public relations firm that conducted a series of public meetings and wrote and distributed a tabloid explaining the charter to county voters.

Al Lewis, a member of the freeholders’ finance committee, said the latest allocation by commissioners should be enough to finish the work “unless something comes unglued.”

Lewis said the freeholders’ next meeting, set for May 25, could be the last one. The group could work on the charter all summer and still make its goal of putting it on the November ballot.

Lewis said he doesn’t think the work could have gone any more quickly. The group interviewed hundreds of people, including city and county employees, government experts and taxpayers, before it started writing the charter.

“I think you’d be hard-pressed to criticize the freeholders for not putting enough hours in,” Lewis said, who noted that Indianapolis freeholders spent seven years writing that community’s charter.

Spokane County freeholders are compared more often with those in Thurston County rather than Indiana. Freeholders in that Western Washington county wrote their charter and put it to a public vote in less than a year and spent $149,000.

“Yeah, but it (the Thurston County charter) didn’t pass,” Lewis said.