Committee members present: County Auditor Tom Slockett, County Recorder Kim Painter, and County Treasurer Tom Kriz. Also present: Recording Secretary Casie Parkins.

Reconvened at 5:10 p.m.

County Recorder Kim Painter: Welcome, Carol, to the interview here this evening. Yes, go ahead and pull that over toward you. We have a certain structure which you're pretty familiar with I guess on how the interview will go. We've made our decision to take turns asking questions and by luck, or lack thereof, I'm the one who will be asking the questions during your interview. As you probably know, we've got a 2 minute opening statement set forth in several sections that we've divided under subject category headings and a closing statement. You can go ahead and start with your opening statement.

Supervisor Applicant Carol Thompson: Thank you. I would like to start by thanking you for allowing me to have this interview. What I can bring to this position is experience. While I don't admit to being any older than 29, I've actually worked not only in Johnson County, but in Washington, Tama, Benton, Iowa, Linn, and Jones Counties as well as for the State and served on a number of boards and commissions, so I understand County Government from a number of viewpoints. I also think that I can bring collaborative leadership. As examples of the things that I've done in my career that I think demonstrate this I would offer the Children's Agenda, which some of you may remember from some years back. Also the system of delivering MH/MR/DD services under managed care was developed here in the 1970s. I sort of invented that program before managed care was a buzzword. Also, we had a system that worked that clients liked and that actually saved a good amount of money for the County; and the School Attendance Task Force, which I'm going to talk about a little bit later. I also have management experience, especially in budgeting and personnel and common sense. I am a master at cost-benefit analysis. My friends claim I do it even at lunch. The only thing I don't do it on is those little dresses I buy for the grandchildren.

Painter: Thank you. Our first section pertains to some specific County Government questions. Our first question is what are County Government's strengths and weaknesses? How would you enhance the strengths and address the weaknesses?

Thompson: I have a number of things I'm really proud about as a resident of Johnson County. I think our financial stability is an important one. I don't know how many counties there are in Iowa that have operated all this time without debt, but I think Johnson County is to be praised for that. I also think that many decisions that have been made by County Government have fostered the economic strength of our community. I like the fact that we have open government and I think we have pretty forward looking government. I like the televised meetings and the night meetings and the expansion in County office hours and all the efforts to make voting easier and register more voters. I also like it... in my job now I work a lot with law enforcement and I like the fact that our County Attorney prosecutes across-the-board. He doesn't pick and choose his cases like they do in some of the counties that I work in. Another thing I'm really proud of is the recent planning efforts in the past few years. The Board has really taken on a planning effort that was very ambitious and we need to do more of that. I would just enhance these things by supporting the efforts that have already been started and continuing them. I'm a strong believer in planning and in managing plans. When you've made the plan you've only done about half the job. You have to then follow the plan and watch what's going on and keep revising. Weaknesses I see in our County are a lack of community consensus on many issues. This is a community where people are often divided. I think we could address that by working towards consensus. One of the things that we're doing, for example, with the Juvenile Crime Task Force is called Asset Building. We try to take problems that exist in our community that cause juvenile delinquency and rephrase those as assets. We're having a meeting on January 20th in fact where we're going to take 5 problems, so called, and rephrase them as assets and then work collaboratively with the community to address those problems. Then as we go on, we'll select some more and keep working on them. But it'll draw people from private business and from the different agencies and law enforcement together to work on a common problem rather than criticizing each other for what isn't being done.

County Auditor Tom Slockett: Could you explain that a little bit more I don't quite follow? Just rephrase the problem as an asset, can you give an example?

Thompson: Did you go to the Search Institute thing that they had last spring maybe? It came out of that. The Search Institute came here and trained people how to do this. One example would be kids don't go to school.

Slockett: How's that going to be an asset?

Thompson: Well, you would say our schools offer an excellent education and children should be helped to take advantage of that. And then you might find people to be mentors for kids so that they could get to school, or make sure they all have winter coats so they feel comfortable going, appropriate clothes and whatever.

Slockett: OK. Getting the idea now.

Thompson: The rephrasing is the talent that they teach you in the training that the community will get.

Slockett: Thanks. I didn't mean to interrupt, but I wasn't following.

Thompson: That's OK. I printed in large print type, but I still can't see. Another thing that I think needs to be done is to groom our relationships with other governmental units. It always sort of distresses me when I read in the paper that Iowa City and the County or Coralville and Iowa City are not getting along. We have the Johnson County Council of Governments. It's an old group. It's existed for years and it seems to me that we could make that work better. I believe pretty strongly in team building, both of among county managers internally and also in doing it with our staff and other parts of the community. It has disturbed me lately that we haven't risen to the challenge of managed care in the MH/MR/DD area. It's a challenging thing because I think in many ways it's viewed as counter-productive for clients, but human services is a very important area. People with disabilities deserve to have services that help them take their place as producing members of our community. I think that we need to work on that, possibly by continuing to develop appropriate personnel management over there. The last thing I chose to talk about in this part of the interview was the fact that it seems, maybe it's just where I sit in the work that I've' done my whole life, but it seems to me that not all citizens of our community are able to participate in the benefits that we have here. I would like to work towards that. I'm not just thinking of human services here. It seems to me that as we do economic development, as we build infrastructure, we need to be thinking, will it benefit everyone in the community? I'm very proud of the fact that in the ‘70's we started bringing people back to the community from institutions who were disabled. The City joined in and made curb cuts all over town. The Rec. Department set up special recreation programs for people with disabilities. When you go downtown now you see people in wheelchairs. They vote. I was real proud last year when I was doing a mailing for one of the candidates to see the number of people whose names I recognized on the voting list. We have done a lot in this area, but I think we could do more particularly for people of low income.

Painter: Thank you. Are you in favor of restructuring County Government and/or hiring a County Manager?

Thompson: I've seen a lot of systems come and go in my career. I'm a manager. I put my hands on things and make them work. Whatever the system is, I make it work. I've seen good ones and bad ones. I have seen my share of bad ones. It seems to me that each system has its own set of problems. When you change you just accomplish another set of problems. I don't think there's any perfect system and I think it's misleading to let yourself believe that there is. I also think change is very expensive. Any change that you make is expensive both in terms of who has to move and what the phone has to do and all of that, but also in terms of lost time while employees dither over it. I'm very resistant to change. I always say I think you should approach change like porcupines make love, very carefully. I do believe if careful study reviewed that there was a true benefit to a change in government I would be able to embrace that. But I haven't seen it yet. I also think that the usual reasons that are given for making changes, like we'll save money or something will be better, often don't turn out to be true. 3 years later you look at the change that you made and you say, well, we saved this but it cost us over here. Just off the top of my head, I'm opposed to restructuring and also to hiring a County Manager. I think it just puts one more person between the voters and the elected officials. I know that some of the people in the League of Women Voters are interested in having a Charter Commission. I have read a lot about that, but I would have to say I haven't really formed an opinion. I think if it happens I would be very interested in following the procedure and seeing what comes out of it.

Painter: Thank you. Do you feel the County has additional space needs? If so, how would you address them?

Thompson: Yes, I do think we have space needs. I also think we need to put some attention to maintaining the space that we have. Needs that I have heard discussed recently are the new jail, the Courthouse, this building, the Administration Building, and office space for various County offices. I think space needs are a factor of growth. Growth is a good thing in many ways, but it creates certain problems and needing more space is one of them. I think it should be addressed ongoing. When you ignore space needs for a few years, then you have a lot of space needs and it seems overwhelming. But if you sort of approach it year by year and do one thing at a time, it's less overwhelming. I would favor a plan which includes space and equipment needs in the budget process and make that an ongoing thing. As far as the Jail goes, I would first make sure that we need one. I think that the cost, the justification for needing a new jail, is made by taking the growth in jail population over the past few years and making a projection out of that and assuming that that growth will continue into the future. But we are seeing a decrease in crime. I think as the baby boom generation ages and gets more law abiding, we will see a decrease. We're even seeing now a decrease in juvenile crime, which I didn't think was ever going to happen. I'm just not in favor of building more jail space unless we absolutely have to. But if we did, I think that we should explore federal assistance for that, explore having a regional facility. Ron Corbett was on TV on the weekend talking about the State putting in money to encourage regional jails so that counties would go together to build them or look at like Linn County did where they are getting... they're overbuilding on their jail, then they're going to rent the space out to federal prisoners and other counties' prisoners and get revenue for that. I think it would be possible to build a new jail without debt.

Slockett: We were going to do that when we built our jail, too, and use all that extra space.

Thompson: And you did for a while.

Slockett: For a very short period of time.

Thompson: As far as the Courthouse goes, I feel much differently about that. That's a historic building and I think residents of Johnson County really feel proud of that building. When I go to other counties, I look at their Courthouse and I think our Courthouse is nicer. I'm very proud of the way its been maintained. I think there's been a lot of attention to preserving the historical nature of the building. For that, I'd like to see a blue ribbon committee put together with Historic Preservation people on it from the beginning, so that they would have a chance to give their input. I know that in some counties when renovations to the Courthouse have been proposed, then the historic preservationists kind of sabotage that. I think if they were involved from the beginning, they would feel differently. Really look at that building and see if it's possible to enlarge it, or add on to it, or remodel it so that it's more functional. Then make a decision about whether we can expand it or whether we have to move the Courthouse to a different site and let that be a historic building. I think there might be federal assistance if that project were combined with the jail. I've heard of several renovation of courthouses plus jail building projects lately. I think there's federal money out there to do it so the 2 buildings are connected in some way and there's not the security problem of moving prisoners from one place to the other. That'd be something to look at. Also I think if the 2 projects were done together you could have shared parking; both of those buildings are on narrow spaces and they both need a lot of parking, so that might be a good thing. This Administration Building is another sort of horse of a different color. It's kind of marooned here. There's no easily available space to expand. I really see this as the biggest problem. Short of the Armory deciding to sell the County that space or these businesses across the street deciding to move or something, there's really no space to expand here. As I recall, the building isn't built so it can go up. I really don't know what would happen about that. But it seems to me that if it just gets too tight in this building we would have to work with a private developer to rent space for the length of time that it would take to get the problem solved. As far as office space goes for the Human Services Office, I had good luck when I worked there before, working with the landlord in that building. He was very cooperative. When we needed more space he added 2,500 square feet onto the east end of the building and then billed that back. He assumed the cost of the loan and billed that back into the rent on an amortized basis. I think it might be a good thing to work with that landlord or another private individual who would be willing to develop space for us and rent it back to us. That has the advantage of not being permanent, too, it if something changes in the future. Also, I believe that the MH/MR/DD unit has a lot of its cost reimbursed through Title 19, so if they moved space a lot of the cost of that would come back to the County if they pay rent or bought a building even.

Painter: How would you go about selecting from a pool of applicants to serve on various boards and commissions?

Thompson: First, I know that a lot of the boards and commissions that we have have constituency requirements. Like they have to have 2 men and 3 women or 2 Republicans and 3 Democrats or whatever. So the first thing I'd do is know what the constituency is and then figure out whether we have enough applicants in the pool to make that up. Then I'd review the pool for gender and diversity balance and readvertise if necessary. I think it's a good thing to advertise in nontraditional ways if you can't get gender balance or diversity balance otherwise. Then I'd develop a set of selection criteria inclusively so that it didn't favor one group of people over another and review the applications or interview the applicants in light of the criteria. I don't know if this is how the Code works on selecting various boards and commissions. But sometimes it has seemed to me that it would be a good thing if the Board let the current members of the Board, or other parts of the constituency, help decide who was on the boards and commissions. I'd also like to add that I think that better communication between the County's boards and commissions and the Board of Supervisors would be a good thing to foster.

Slockett: Better communication, did you say, between various boards and commissions?

Thompson: Yes, I know that if a Board member is on a commission, then there's a time in the Board meetings when they report about the meetings that they attended. But I don't think there's a scheduled time for a board and commission that doesn't have a Board Member on it to report to the Board what's going on with them and receive instruction from them. Sometimes I think people who serve on boards and commissions feel like they're sort of rudderless.

Painter: What is your long-range vision for Johnson County?

Thompson: That it's a good place for all of us to live. I'd like for all of the citizens to feel like they belong and have a voice here. I'm a vision person. I wanted to take this part of the interview to describe the School Attendance Task Force, which probably is not the most expensive or the biggest thing that I've done in my career, but it's the one I like the best and also it doesn't cost anything, so I think that's good. When I took my current job I noticed that when I talked to the schools they would say, well, kids don't come to school and it's distressing to us and no one backs us up. But Iowa Code isn't very clear on the subject and we send those cases to the County Attorney and he doesn't do anything with them. Now nobody knows better than a Juvenile Court Officer how important school is to kids, because we deal with the trouble they get into when they're not in school. Then I would talk to police officers who would say, well, nobody makes these kids go to school and then they're downtown all day causing trouble and we have to spend our time dealing with it. I would talk to the County Attorney and he would say the school doesn't do anything with these kids, but then they send them over here to us and they expect us to do something. It occurred to me that we should all talk about this. We sat down with a lot law enforcement, a lot of people from the County Attorney's Office, and our own staff and talked about the problem that this creates for our community as well as for the individual kids. The outcome was that we formed a 28E agreement between our office, the County Attorney, and the schools, which among other things solves our confidentiality problem. It allows each party to the agreement to appoint 6 mediators, and we train them mediation techniques, so that when the school has exhausted all the remedies that they know, they can refer to these mediators to see if that'll solve the problem. One thing that happened, kind of as a serendipity thing, was that the school, once they felt they were being backed up, immediately started beefing up their methods to get kids to school. Things happened like assistant principals going on home visits to kids houses and teachers calling kids up at night to remind them to wash their clothes so they could be ready for school in the morning. I thought that was good. The mediators that we've appointed include Bob Bowlsby and people like that. It's people in the community that a kid would feel proud of knowing and people that a kid wouldn't want to be seen by if they were skipping school and they happened to be downtown. So these 3 mediators, one appointed by each of us, meets with the family, and the question is what'll it take to get this kid to school. Things that we've done... we've gotten school breakfast tickets for kids. We've bought a lot of winter coats. We bought a gross of alarm clocks. The school nurse works with us so that if a child says they're sick and unable to come to school, the nurse works with them to see how they determine whether they're really sick or not and whether they could come. We've also had training for the mediators. We had a doctor from the University who's a specialist in children's ailments come over and talk about how you help a child who's chronically ill decide about going to school. We worked with a program at the Mental Health Center that worked with parents who are mentally ill. A lot of the children who come to the Truancy Task Force have parents who are mentally ill and they don't make good decisions. One of the things we do in our agreements with those parents is take the decision-making away from them. We've been successful with 50 % of the kids that we've worked with over a 4 year period. I would say that they probably were all families whose attendance wouldn't have improved without the intervention of this committee. Everybody volunteers their time, so it hasn't really cost anyone anything. Also I'm proud that none of the mediators have quit, except for Marvin Lynch, who quit to go on the School Board.

Painter: Our next section covers land use and environmental issues. Our first question in that section, number 6, is what criteria would you use in making land use decisions? On what basis would you make decisions concerning road improvements, maintenance, construction, and roadside weed eradication?

Thompson: Now we have a Land Use Plan, so I would first compare the request to the requirements of the Land Use Plan, of the ordinances that follow it. I also like to see a needs analysis on something like development. I'd want to look at the impact it would have on infrastructure that the County has to provide. Because it seems to me that if the increased taxes from our development don't cover the costs, then there should be some negotiation with the developer to see about providing part of that infrastructure. As far as the road building and the roadside management, I have to tell you that I'm a strong believer in natural roadside maintenance, partly because I think it makes a good impression. When I go to another county in Iowa and I see flowers growing along the roadway it always makes me feel good about that county. I'd like to see some of the roadways that we have now in our community. Also, I just think it's important to keep abreast of new ideas and try things out on a small scale. I really like how our County Roads Department did their weed control experiments and I would like to see more of that continued. I think it's important to avoid that "we've always done it this way" mentality. Also, I think it's important to encourage department heads to think outside the box and respect their expertise. I think sometimes they feel not trusted or second guessed. If you hire them and you have enough trust in them to give them the job, then you ought to be able to respect their decisions.

Painter: What do you think should be the County's role in protecting the environment?

Thompson: I care deeply about the environment, but I don't think of myself as an environmentalist. The reason for that is that in my lifetime I have seen the rivers come back so you could fish in them. I saw the fire in Yellowstone when everyone said it would never be the same again and then the next spring wildflowers grew there. I've seen eagles up over the Iowa River. I never thought that I would see eagles again in my lifetime. I've learned to trust the earth. I don't think that the earth is as unforgiving of what man does to it as a lot of people do. But I believe very strongly in stewardship. I think you should manage the environment the same as you manage money and other county resources and think of the future when you do it. I would like to see us have a strong environmental policy for the county and kind of look at that when we make these decisions. I also think it's really important to avoid reacting to single issues.

Painter: Describe your approach to balancing economic and business interests with interests in the health and well being of citizens and environmental concerns.

Thompson: Here's another area where I don't think these issues are necessarily adversarial. I would try to look for synergy and for opportunities to have a win-win relationship between the factions. I think we could have a lot more consensus from these various parts of our community than we do. People thrive where there's a healthy environment and healthy economy. Again, I think you should avoid single issue decision-making and try to keep a balance among the various factions. If you have a plan, I think you should follow it and not go off in different directions all the time. Examples would be: I think it's really important to pursue clean industry that needs an educated workforce like Iowa City can provide and that pays a living wage. We could build on testing and healthcare and the strength of our community to attract that kind of development to the county. I also think that we should develop housing that's diverse and affordable out in the county, as well as in town. We should groom our excellent services to promote the health and well-being of our community. I think that's an attraction to industry that would want to come here. I was very proud of the fact... Neal Berlin used to be the City Manager in Iowa City. He used some of the services that we provided in the mental health unit. He got a much better job in Denver and they bought a lovely home there and about a year later he called me back and he said, Carol, a lot of the time we wish we never had left Iowa City because the services there are so much better than what we get in Denver.

Painter: What is your opinion of the Johnson County Comprehensive Land Use Plan?

Thompson: I'm very glad to have it. I followed that Land Use Plan since the ‘70's, when the first North Corridor Plan was built, because I live in the North Corridor. So I have an interest in this. I think it's extremely important to have a land use plan and follow it. I was somewhat distressed with the latest version of the plan because it didn't seem very specific to me. But people told me that can be addressed in the ordinances that are written to follow it. I can tell you that if I were selected, I would have that time line for ordinances on my desk and would know the reason why if it wasn't followed.

Painter: On to taxes and budget. What do you know about and what is your opinion regarding the impact and incidence of Johnson County taxes?

Thompson: This turned out to be a very good question once I realized what it meant, because I had not realized how restricted the County is in how... really the only wiggle room that the County has is to raise the levy. The Board has no direct control of the assessments, doesn't control the rollbacks, doesn't control what's taken out of the taxbase like the University property and utility property. There's just no control over the revenue and I felt like it's really hard to manage a budget if you don't have that. I also think it's hard to manage a budget when you have several sources of income, but one of them is by far the largest, in this case that's property tax, which is pretty regressive, because low income people pay a higher proportion of their rent, or a higher proportion of their income for housing costs. But also I think because sometimes if there's a $3 increase in the taxes the landlords raise the rent by $5. Probably renters get the brunt of the property tax increases. Also they don't get homes that are veterans' exemptions. I don't think the rollback applies to commercial property, so it may not be as regressive as a sales tax, but it's pretty regressive. I think it would be better if the County had access to more than one major source of income and they had different degrees of regressivity or regressiveness or whatever that word is. So that as you have the need to collect more money you could select the more appropriate source of income. I'm also concerned that all those years of capped increases... I think there were 6 years or maybe even 7 years of that law that will cause a feeling this year that we have to make up and there'll be a huge blip in the budget this year. I don't think that would be a good thing either.

Painter: How do you weigh requests for spending which require tax dollars versus increasing taxes?

Thompson: I believe in living within your income. But I'm not going to sit here and say read my lips, no new taxes. I get really tired of the comparison of government with big business and they make the government look slip shod. I've worked in government all my life and during that time I've also helped my husband run a small business. I've bought rental property. I've renovated rental property. I've built a house. I've remodeled that house a number of times. I've dealt directly with private industry and I think that government is held to a much higher standard of ethics, integrity and accountability than any private business I've worked with, except possibly for banks. I would like to get more credit for being a good manager than you get when you work for government. I don't think there's the same relationship. Well, I can talk about that on another... Let's just say if I were going to raise taxes here's what I'd have to know before I would feel comfortable doing it. I'd want to make sure that the new item was extremely important. I'd want to look at the current budget to get out anything that you could call waste before I started raising new money. I'd want to make sure that there wasn't any other source of funds, like private funds or federal funds or state assistance. Then I'd want to make a set of priorities and eliminate things that were less important than the thing I was trying to add. I'd also want to know that the new thing was needed immediately and couldn't be saved up for. I'd prefer to see an open decision-making process where constituents had a chance to give input into the choice about raising taxes and also, of course, a good cost spin for the analysis. Right now when interest rates are so low I also wouldn't rule out the possibility of debt. I think responsible use of debt is not a bad word. I would have to say in most of my career after I ran through this process I've usually been able to find another way besides asking for more money.

Painter: What, if anything, should be done about the nature of County tax options?

Thompson: Immediately, I think, we should be working the legislature to encourage them, and I think this is the Democratic plan, to encourage them as they do tax cuts to put that against the property tax rather than against the income tax, which is more progressive. I think that would be of more benefit to low income taxpayers and the people who have the most young families and the people who have the most trouble paying their taxes.

Slockett: Are you saying to put it against income tax rather than property taxes?

Thompson: No. Give us relief on property tax rather than cutting income tax, which seems to be what the current plan is.

Slockett: OK. I didn't understand that.

Thompson: There's a number of things they do. They could partially fund schools, they could do something like revenue sharing where they gave us money that could supplant property tax. Another thing that I've always been interested in is the earned income tax credit. It's kind of a reverse income tax. It's more important at the federal level because it's reimbursable. But it's been a wonderful welfare program. I've known many people who are able to get off welfare using the earned income tax credit. It has no stigma to it. It's a way to support people's income without degradation. I would really like to see that increased at both the federal and state level and made refundable.

Painter: Are you in favor of implementing a local option sales tax? If so, for what use?

Thompson: I'm not in favor of it. I'm not convinced we need it. My evidence for that is first we talk about having it, then we talk about what we're going to do with it. I would feel a lot more comfortable if we had a pressing need and then decided to raise the tax. The most pressing need perhaps is the Iowa City Library. But I'm not sure we need to have a sales tax to get that. Also, I'm not comfortable with the idea of using a lot of it to go against property tax because, unlike the income tax, sales tax is really regressive and I don't think it's good to use a regressive tax to lower a less regressive one.

Painter: You've answered this in a way, but I'll go ahead and ask and see if you have new items that you wish to talk about. Do you any experience putting budgets together? How do you feel about performance based budgeting?

Thompson: I have a lot of experience with budgets. 2 examples that I'm proud of are: When I was on the Free Medical Board we were so far in the red when I went on the Board that we had to have a meeting where we talked about how we would scratch up enough money to pay off the staff if we had to close the agency. When I left the Board after my 2 years as chair, we had a good surplus. We had 3 months operating expenses in the bank. I felt very good about that. In my current job, I manage 1.4 million dollars of money that has given me really good experience on budgeting and I'd just like to describe that a little bit. I get the money in several categories and then I have to go out and leverage more money like from Decat or from, I don't think we've used private money, but we've gotten County money and various other kinds of money. I move that around to get it into the categories that I need to provide the services that I want. I make the budget. I defend the budget to a board. I make the negotiations with the agencies we're going to buy the services from, work with my officers to develop services that we think are going to work. I do everything but write the checks to pay the bills. Then as we go through the year, I work with my officers to make sure we're getting the services that we want and I monitor the contracts. So I've had a chance to actually get my hands on the performance. I think that's given me really good insight into the use of budgeting as a performance tool. Now when you say performance based budgeting, I've seen these things come and go. I think I came in when management by objectives was in. They are usually borrowed from business and the analogy is that government should operate like a business. By that, I think they mean accountable. I have nothing against accountability, but I think government is very different from private industry. When I give $20,000 to General Motors to buy a car I expect to get a good car. I don't expect to have a say in how General Motors is run. Even if I give them $20,000 and buy stock in their company, I don't expect to really have a say in how they run the company. When I give my $2,000 to the County, I not only expect a good road in front of my house, but I expect the government to be responsive to me. Also, I'm trapped. There's no other road to use if my road has potholes in it. If I need the ambulance in the middle of the night, there's no other ambulance service to call. I think that the contract between taxpayers and government is a great deal different than the contract between a business and its customers. Also, if I don't like the car that GM tries to sell me, I don't have to buy it. Then they can put a 20 year old thin person in the car and put a picture of it in a magazine and try to convince me that if I buy it I'll look like her. But when government does that, we call that slippery politics. I just don't think the analogy is there at all. I think what's important is that you see the budget as a planning tool and that you use it through the year, that it's not just we do the budget now and we look at it in the spring to see if we spent all the money or whatever. I think a budget process should answer 2 questions. Are we getting value for our money and what are we saving up for? What future plan do we have that we need to accommodate in the budget. I don't necessarily think any particular tool is a good one, but I think a good tool should provide training for managers in how to use it. I think a lot of times there's resistance by managers to starting a new budget process. It's normal to be resistant to change. But if you get good training, then they're able to accommodate it. I think it should allow managers to evaluate and seek input from their staff on what works and what doesn't. It should start enough ahead of time that they have time to do that. It should enable managers to try another way. If something isn't working, they should have a chance themselves to say we're going to do it differently. Some things that I think you always need to be looking at are things like bulk purchasing, copy centers. Well, even between the Mental Health Center and the Human Services Office: Does the County buy enough drugs that we would need to do bulk purchasing of drugs? You have to look at those things all of the time. So then I would encourage managers to do things collaboratively, so that one manager could see, if they went in with another manager, if it would save some money. I also think it's important to encourage managers to delete the dogs. Often the budget can be used as the excuse for that. If you want something more, then you'll often delete what isn't working. I also think that a budget process should allow managers to look forward and set future goals. I like the method they use in Linn County, which I participate in for that office up there. The budget papers ask me to project out into the future about 5 years what my staff is going to be, what space needs we're going to have, and what equipment needs we're going to have. In my case, the County doesn't provide our equipment but I have told them now, 3 years in a row, that we're going to be needing more space. I noticed that I am now included in the space plan. They are looking far into the future. I think it's a workable thing that we could probably copy here.

Painter: OK. Appointment versus election. We have a series of questions here that pertain to this whole process that we're going through and possibly eventualities and outcomes of that. If you are appointed and an election is called, a special election is called, will you seek your party's nomination?

Thompson: Yes.

Painter: Will you run for election if you are appointed?

Peters: You mean in 2 years?

Painter: In other words, in 2 years.

Thompson: Yes, that's my intention.

Painter: If you are not appointed, would you petition or would you run as the nominee in an election that was petitioned for?

Thompson: I wouldn't petition. I'm not sure about trying for the nomination. I really believe in playing by the rules. I haven't worked out in my head yet how that would work. I'd have to see how the circumstances fill out.

Painter: OK. How long would you anticipate remaining in the job or do you have a time frame that you would intend to serve?

Thompson: I'd like to serve at least one 4 year term after this 2 year.

Painter: When would you be able to start if you were the appointee?

Thompson: Well, I could see after I looked at this process that they didn't anticipate anyone who was employed to even apply. The judges have been really good to me and I would need to give 2 weeks notice. I would ask that if you appointed me, you would make it effective 2 weeks after the date of the appointment.

Painter: Do you have any questions for us? No? OK. It's time to do a 2 minute closing statement then.

Thompson: OK, thank you. I feel that I am the best all-around candidate for this job. I have the most hands on experience in county government. I have excellent management skills to bring to the job. I don't have any particular issue to further. While my experience is in Human Services- I think sometimes I'm seen as an advocate for Human Services- I can tell you that no one knows better than someone who's worked in Human Services that the best thing for consumers of Human Services is to live in a healthy community. A robust economy beats most welfare programs I can think of. I'm able to formulate a vision, make a plan with a voice for all the stakeholders, and provide leadership for carrying out that plan. I think I've demonstrated that in my past career. As I thought about the answer to these questions, I think sometimes in these interviews they ask you what's the one quality about you that most people would mention. I think that most people would say that I'm fair. People that have worked with me and for me in the past, I think, would say that I'm fair. That's my case. I thank you for the interview.

Kriz: Thank you.

Painter: I want to thank you very much. We have had a number of fine candidates and we have more coming up, but I want to thank you for a great interview.

Thompson: Thanks.

Slockett: I would echo that. It was a superb interview and let me know if you decide to run for Governor or the Senate because...

Painter: Likewise...

Thompson: (Inaudible).

Painter: Likewise...

Kriz: Thank you.

Recessed at 5:54 p.m.

Continued: Vic Edwards