Davis Merritt: Scaring off best county manager candidates

As Sedgwick County Commissioners Richard Ranzau and Karl Peterjohn keep talking about their determination to hire a businessperson rather than an experienced professional as county manager, they increase the possibility that it will happen.

That’s because their expressed disdain for professional governmental managers – and even for the very government they head – will ensure a paucity of high-level, experienced applicants.

What desirable person in his or her right mind would opt into a volatile political situation in which the normal stresses of running a $420 million, 3,000-employee organization are intensified by a governing board determined to change the organization’s culture and shrink its processes?

Who wants to inherit the solid, nationally respected and consumer-oriented operation that retiring County Manager William Buchanan has built over 24 years knowing they will be directed by their bosses to preside over its dismantling? Not the sort of smart, experienced person with the educational background and hands-on experience that residents are accustomed to and deserve.

But Ranzau and Peterjohn apparently are willing to forgo that obvious advantage in order to scratch their ideological itch. Or perhaps they are simply playing to what they think is “the base” and don’t actually intend to be so foolhardy.

Their public statements, however, make it awkward for them to vote to hire anyone with an appropriate background. So even if the three other commissioners did the right thing, the new manager would start the job with two political strikes, only one vote away from dismissal.

Ranzau, as usual, was unambiguous: “I think having experience running inefficient government operations is not a plus in the candidate as far as I’m concerned. I want someone who can compete in the private sector.”

Certainly accomplished business-people can succeed in government management positions. Many have. As have ex-military officers with no other government experience. But at least as many others have tried and failed, sometimes catastrophically, because they could not adapt to a radically different culture.

Government and business share many characteristics, and effective management skills are necessary in both, but the Dallas Cowboys wouldn’t hire Gregg Marshall as their football coach. And you wouldn’t turn over your brain surgery to an orthopedist, no matter how skilled. Like government and business, football and basketball or brain surgery and knee replacement differ in fundamental ways.

For one, they exist for totally different purposes.

Businesses exist to make a profit. Governments exist to produce public goods: things such as justice, safety, public health, help for the unfortunate and helpless, equality of opportunity. The most successful people in each have a laser focus on their segment’s reason for being. Businesses that don’t make a profit are failures and ultimately disappear. Governments that do not produce public goods are failures and ultimately will destroy the society they failed.

For another, despite the implications of Ranzau’s and Peterjohn’s comments, the skills required to maintain a profit are not of a higher order than those required to provide public goods; they are simply different skills applied for different reasons in distinct environments.

Sedgwick County needs the best professional management available. Being forced to choose from a pool shallowed by pinched thinking and dominated by semi-successful businesspeople who need a $180,000 salary – or, worse, by political hacks – would be tragic, dangerous and wasteful.

This story was originally published May 4, 2015 at 7:01 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: Scaring off best county manager candidates."