Free advice is far from free in Montgomery County.
The citizen volunteers serving on 86 boards and commissions that advise county officials on issues ranging from noise control to agriculture actually cost taxpayers $1.4 million a year.
Given the expense, the Organizational Reform Commission, which was appointed by the county board to root out inefficiencies and find potential savings in county operations, has recommended that the county consolidate or get rid of some of its commissions, a proposal the county council’s Government Operations and Fiscal Policy Committee will consider Monday.
“There’s a commission on rural roads. There’s a commission on signs. There’s a commission on everything you can imagine,” said Susan Heltemes, who headed the Organizational Reform Commission’s working group on the subject. “Within the Department of Health and Human Services, there might be 17 commissions alone.”
The county has so many boards and commissions that officials created another committee just to oversee all the other committees. The Committee Evaluation and Review Board meets once a decade.
“It sounds like something out of Kafka,” said Montgomery County Taxpayers League President Joan Fidler, who also sits on the ORC.
Most of the $1.4 million cost of operating the volunteer committees goes toward paying county employees who work with the 86 boards, according to Chief Administrative Officer Tim Firestine. The rest pays for things like board members’ travel expenses ($10 per meeting) and any day care costs they incur ($30 per meeting). Of the 1,000 volunteers who serve on county advisory commissions, about 130 are eligible for such reimbursement.
Many of the committees are duplicative and could be consolidated, said Heltemes. For example, all of the committees advising on development in and around Silver Spring — of which there are at least four — could be consolidated into one.
The ORC recommended that the Committee Evaluation and Review Board, the committee that oversees all other committees, pick which boards should be combined. However, that Evaluation and Review Board does not have any members right now.
It’s unclear whether the county will ultimately eliminate any of the advisory board despite the million-dollar price tag. Councilman George Leventhal, D-at large, said he tried to make similar changes to the boards two years ago only to have the council reject them.
If cutting 10 percent of the boards’ administrative costs means saving only about $140,000 a year — pocket change to a county council that oversees a $4.4 billion annual budget — it might not be worth the cost of angering all the residents whose boards would be eliminated or consolidated groups, said Leventhal.
Government operations committee Chairwoman Nancy Navarro, D-Eastern County, did not return requests for comment.
