The Party Line

Catering to Our Invisible Government

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person The Rejection Letter I Wish I Could Send If we had to make up a story for why you might be interested in our position, then interviewing you was too risky. Peer Review Hirings and Firings The new law school at the University of California at Irvine gets some high-profile hires ... and other appointment news. Ms. Mentor Does This Make Me Look Old? Advice on how best to dress, and act, when you look as young as your students. Career News Gone, and Being Forgotten Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines? Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Peter Onear

Everyone in the president's office is on high alert.

Food service has delivered coffee and breakfast rolls. University administrators involved in the meeting -- including me as vice president for government relations, the assistant to the president for economic development, and the vice president for research -- have arrived early, and are in the outer office going over notes. The president comes out of his office to remind his secretary to hold his calls. The receptionist finds her stamp to validate the visitors' parking tickets.

All of us, including the president, put our cell phones on vibrate.

Who are these important guests? Are they major donors? U.S. senators? The governor and his chief of staff?

None of the above. They are our three county commissioners.

Huh? You mean those faceless and nameless bureaucrats who run the amorphous shadow government that functions behind the scenes of our city government with its flashy mayor and raucous city council?

Yes, exactly.

The most powerful politicians in America are county commissioners who can call up university presidents and request to see them as soon as possible. More than likely, the president will agree.

I would bet the salary of a county commissioner (which isn't very much) that not one in 100 readers could name all of their own county commissioners. Even I, as a government-relations professional, cannot name all the commissioners in the county where I live. However, rest assured that I am on a first-name basis with every commissioner in the county where I work.

So, why are county commissioners important, especially for higher education?

There are a number of one-word answers: Money. Services. Location.

First, a short civics lesson. We usually think about contemporary politics in terms of taxes, elections, wars, the economy, Social Security, and, of course, NIH grants. However, the history of politics inevitably goes back to land -- who owns it, who builds and farms on it, who divides it up and taxes it.

Inside every state, most land is divided into counties. Alaska calls its counties boroughs, and Louisiana calls them parishes. Most of the roughly 3,000 counties in America have their own system of government run by elected commissioners and managed by an appointed (sometimes elected) administrator or executive.

Consider this example of the financial clout of counties: If you are a sports fan, you know that some professional teams play in huge stadiums with the word "county" in their name. This was before corporate naming rights became fashionable and profitable. The Braves baseball team, for example, played in Milwaukee County Stadium before moving to Atlanta to play in Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. The word county appears in the names because county governments have the ability to put together major land-oriented projects like stadiums, hospitals, and airports.

Universities and colleges also occupy lots of land and are subject to such things as local zoning rules and infrastructure restrictions -- most often controlled by county commissioners.

That means a mostly invisible governmental unit has a great deal of influence on your campus. Because counties are all-inclusive, they are used as mechanisms to finance state and federal programs. For example, work-force development funding, which universities like to tap into, is often funneled through county agencies. Or counties may have access to infrastructure dollars that universities can use for roads and sewers.

Counties, in some places, are utility providers, or they partner with other government units to provide utilities at lesser rates. Utility costs, of course, are crucial to any university's bottom line.

And then we have county economic-incentive plans. Every county is likely to have at least one such plan, and every county that has a university within its borders wants campus input and participation. Let me tell you, county-commissioner meetings are more boring than a departmental meeting on promotion and tenure. Nevertheless, roads, utilities, and zoning issues aside, there's often money on the table.

And that brings us back to our high-stakes breakfast meeting in the president's office.

The commissioners arrive -- two men and a woman, all from the same political party (which makes it both easier and harder). They validate their parking tickets and joke that maybe the county should build the university a new parking lot to help alleviate our notorious reputation for a lack of parking. There's nervous laughter since that's exactly what we'd like the county to do.

However, on this day, the commissioners have their thoughts on a different matter. One of the county's economic-development agencies has a hot lead on a biotech industry that would mean a couple of hundred jobs and lots of money for the area. But the company needs a connection to university research, including offices and at least two laboratories.

"If the university funded a couple of lab techs, that would be helpful as well," a commissioner suggests.

Hiring lab technicians and giving up research space makes the president pale. Our vice president for research looks positively sick. Negotiations begin, and we discover that the company is projecting $500,000 to $1-million in research investment to the university.

Our provost is called into the meeting. The commissioners bring in the head of the economic-development agency. Our receptionist is told to order sandwiches for lunch. In the end, a compromise is reached. We promise a couple of offices, a lab, and a lab technician in a building that is currently being renovated, which won't be done for another six months, but that's about the time the new company will be relocating.

Finally the commissioners leave. There are handshakes all around and more jokes about parking. I make a silent vow to hit them up for that parking lot at the next commissioners' meeting. They owe us.

So the next time you vote, don't just pass over the names of the county commissioners. The fact is, those faceless politicians will probably affect you and your university more than presidential candidates and other prominent politicians ever will.