It’s a case of letting someone else fix your boat. It wasn’t exactly what you were wanting but necessary nonetheless.
Certain members of the Jefferson County Quorum Court have been at odds with the county judge for the past two years and that situation has created an impasse as the full Quorum Court tried and failed, five times now, to pass a budget for 2025, stopping paychecks to close to 400 county workers. Because of this, the state has had to step in.
It is a total embarrassment for the county in general, eliciting the head-shaking, eye-rolling question from around the state of “What in the world is going on over there in Jefferson County?”
One could point blame — we certainly have in this space — but when elected leaders allowed the very backbone of their organization, their personnel, to go without pay for what is now more than a month, they have all failed. They failed to get their heads together for the greater good as they headbutted each other until everyone had a headache.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
So even though 74 other county governments in the state figure out each year how to get along long enough to pass a procedure ordinance and a budget, allowing the county structure to pay employees and bills, and grade the county’s roads, and assess and tax property, and on and on, all the boring but necessary things a county does, these folks have created a constitutional crisis to the extent that their brothers and sisters at the state legislature have to fix their boat, i.e., take care of the problems they should have handled themselves.
And now the fix could result in its own problems.
Some local lawmakers pulled together a bill for the House of Representatives that simply required a county to use last year’s budget for the next year if a county was unable to pass a budget for the new year. That would have kept the wheels turning, no matter how many chairs were thrown at a quorum court meeting.
But then the Senate got ahold of the idea and added some punitive measures to the bill, and it’s that measure that is likely headed to the governor’s desk on Monday. As a slap to elected county officials in those places, like Jefferson County, where they couldn’t pass a budget, the county judge would lose his pay until a new budget was passed and the justices of the peace — the ones who make up the quorum court — would lose their per diem pay.
The message from the Senate was if you folks can’t get it together, we’re going to make it hurt. We get the sentiment, but the details could work against what they were intended to fix.
For one, the punitive measures are not equal. Being a county judge is an occupation with a substantial paycheck. A justice of the peace is a side gig. One assumes JPs have day jobs and don’t live off per diem checks, which are basically reimbursements for expenses of filling the position like mileage and meals and such.
So in Jefferson County’s case, those JPs in the majority, the ones who would like to see the county judge gone, all they have to do to starve the county judge is to continue voting down his proposal for a budget. They lose a little; he loses a lot. And anything that happens in Jefferson County could be replicated anywhere else in the state. Instead of an avenue for making the two sides come together, the bill could be an avenue for keeping them apart.
At its core, the bill also co-mingles, in an unhealthy way, the jobs of the administrative branch, the county judge, with that of the legislative branch, the JPs. Suddenly, instead of a county judge doing what he thinks is right for the county, he also will now have to consider how his actions will affect the JPs. Will they approve his budget next year or withhold their approval and deny him a paycheck? That is too much power in the hands of those individuals.
It is perhaps too late to rethink such aspects of the life-preserver bill being tossed out to the flailing government in Jefferson County. The best route would have been for Jefferson County’s elected officials to have been better elected officials. The fix will be a fix, but it might not, in the end, be just the right fix. Time will tell.