The December meeting of the Madison County Commission was largely uneventful, but there was one conversation that happened that brought out some puzzling information.
County Attorney Jay Bush submitted a $25,000 budget amendment to the Commission’s financial management committee earlier in the month, a usual occurrence on the annual calendar.
This occurs twice a year and has for the known past as the County Attorney has $7,500 budgeted for his work each month.
But sometimes the work the attorney is asked to do by commissioners or anyone else who has the power to cause the attorney to do work requests more work in a calendar month than the budgeted amount can pay for.
Apparently that was the case in the second half of 2022 as six months of budgeted work amounts to $45,000, and Bush asked for more than half of that be added to his total in a budget amendment.
Commissioners Luther Mercer (Democrat-District 1), Aaron Ellison (Independent-District 7) and Tony Black (D-District 2) all asked how Bush would have an addition that large.
Black asking this question is understandable because – as mentioned in another recent column – he’s a rookie on the Commission and logically would have questions pertaining to subtle details of county government.
But Mercer and Ellison have served multiple terms on the Commission, and they both questioned the request as if either they’d never heard a request so large or they were as new to the Commission as Black.
I doubt anyone expects Mercer or Ellison to remember reasonable or typical amounts for routine budget amendment requests that happen annually, but Mercer served on financial management for enough years that it’s reasonable to assume he’d have an idea if whether or not $25,000 is on the larger end of the spectrum of amendment requests.
A look at the past two amendments from the attorney were a little more than $7,000 in June and $6,000 in January. In June of 2021, the final budget request from Bush’s predecessor, Steve Maroney, was for a little more than $11,000. He had a little less than $21,000 in December of 2020.
So the requests from the attorney’s office can go all over the board apparently, judging from a sample size of the last couple years.
But whether the amendment is $5,000 or $50,000, there was another piece of information that was pretty surprising.
There’s not a contract between Madison County and the County Attorney for his or her services.
The $7,500 per month with additional funds in the form of a budget amendment after six months is apparently the way it’s always been done, and no one thought about the fact there could be issues with that until last month.
Or no one spoke up about it.
Is it wrong for Bush or whomever is serving as County Attorney to ask for more money than is budgeted for the office? No. Because the County Commission needs to work with a budget, but the County Attorney and anyone on his or her staff should be paid for the work they do for the County.
In fact, if the budget amendments show that the staff is working more than 50 percent of the budgeted time, then maybe the budgeted amount should be closer to $10,000 per month.
But either way, how is there not a contract between the parties in this situation?
We’ve got an attorney working for a group of officials and department heads spending taxpayer money and a municipality under authority of the state constitution. Even if the County Commission and most of county government is made of members of the Republican Party who are against outlandish lawsuits, a reasonable assumption would be a written agreement that’s legally-binding for both parties between the two to protect both sides of the deal.
But since it’s never been done that way, no one thought until the end of 2022 that maybe it shouldn’t be done that way.
This could be a situation of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” or it’s an instance of a government entity not taking the steps to shield itself from a legally vulnerable situation.
And if they’re taking the “if it ain’t broke …” approach, then they need to prepare for the day it does break. Because everything breaks at some point, and a break here would potentially be very bad for the County.
Brandon Shields is the managing editor of The Jackson Post. Contact him at brandon@jacksonpost.news. Follow him on Twitter @JSEditorBrandon or Instagram @Editorbrandon.
