Technocrats

The progressive movement of the late 19th century and early 20th century was rightly concerned about corruption in technocratic governmental positions. They came up with several widely adopted response to this problem, some of which were good solutions, and some of which were at best only marginally improved and at worst, exacerbated the problem.

One solution, which largely worked, was the establishment of civil service systems which hire based upon merit and adjudicate promotions and employment terminations for employees in the civil service system. This is how the lion's share of employees in federal, state and local governments with significant numbers of employees are selected. It insulates government agencies from Jacksonian and machine politics style political patronage in lower level positions.

A modest variation on the civil service system, the Missouri Plan for selecting and removing judges which is used in Colorado, has similarly been quite successful.

Another approach which has been far less successful and arguably made things worse, is to have multiple state and county level elected executive branch officials.

For example, in Colorado, we elect not just a Governor and Lieutenant Governor ticket, but also a Secretary of State, a state Treasurer, an Attorney-General, a state school board which in turn elects a state superintendent of schools, and CU-Regents who in turn select a chancellor for the University of Colorado public university system. Most counties, in turn, elect not just county commissioners (who have a dual legislative-executive role collectively), but also a sheriff, a coroner, a treasurer, an assessor, a county surveyor, and a clerk and recorder. Between the county level and the state level, there are elected District Attorneys.

The trouble is that some of these positions should involve ministerial, technocratic execution of laws in a manner that provides a neutral broker between competing political factions or simply because a job needs to be done, and a partisan elected official is arguably the worst kind of person to fill such a post.

At a minimum, the technocratic label should apply to the secretary of state, the state treasurer, coroners, the county treasurer, the county assessor, the county surveyor, and the clerk and recorder's office. For example, a partisan secretary of state and clerk and recorder, as chief election officers, is a recipe for bias in a post that needs to be unbiased.

Moreover, these down ticket races are hard for the public and the media to meaningfully supervise and monitor.

One possible solution would be to give both the Governor and the runner up for that office a statewide elected office. The Governor would appoint the Attorney-General and judges pursuant to the existing plan. The runner up would lead an "Accountability Council" of that runner up's appointees that would include the secretary of state, the state treasurer, a state independent counsel's office, the state auditor, the state water engineer, and the public defender's office, and would appoint for each county coroners, treasurers, surveyors and a clerk and recorder, possibly subject to veto by a unanimous county commission.

Another possible solution might be to have a Council of Technocrats made up of the State House Parliamentary, the State Senate Parliamentarian, the Clerk of the state Supreme Court, the Lieutenant Governor, and the runner up candidate for Lieutenant Governor. Or, the Colorado General Assembly could send a representative of the speaker/President of each body and a representative of the ranking minority member in each body. This body might make up the Accountability Council that would also appoint some or all of the technocratic posts and handle as much as possible of the redistricting process and the process of approving initiatives and recall petitions. I like the idea of not using the top person in each house of the general assembly and lieutenant governor candidates rather than governor candidates, to tame the egos involved.

But, the basic idea is that some posts should be technocrats appointed on a bipartisan basis.

For what its worth, economies of scale in the state like Colorado with many very low population counties, would be better served by locating the office of coroner at the judicial district or state level, rather than at the county level.